In The Garden

Many cultures on this green earth have this notion that humans have some glitch, some failing that makes them less than divine, a reason for being relegated to the backwater of some failed world. It expresses itself in a number of ways, but it comes up, in all truth, as a self loathing  behavior.  Gurus will express how this place is a backwater spiritually, and priests and priestesses will espouse how this is a less than enlightened world or place.  Others will speak of how we tripped ourselves up by eating some fruit we were told not to do.  Then we felt shame as a result of our nakedness.  We are a fallen species, somehow coming up short in the eyes of our deities.  This sense of falling short crops up from time to time in various traditions, and we need stories to help explain the feeling we have, and we project outward our own sense of failing.  I don't think we ever fell short.  We simply felt a disconnect between our individuality and our undivedness, unable to tap the larger sea of awareness that is inside of us. So we made a God or Goddess responsible for creating a standard which in truth we ourselves could not reach.  The glitch, all along, has been in perception, in awareness.  The sea of feeling has been there all along, we just have missed it, and in missing it, have believed it was somehow taken from us, or that we did something that made it go away. 

While the stories help to explain the feeling, its a projection of what we think is wrong, and while the thinking is correct in the sense that something has been wrong, but what has been wrong is not some great failing in our character, but our inability to tap our larger sense of belonging.  All that ever happened was we felt separate through our focus on individuality, and through an over emphasis on ego, which is a natural result of over identifying with ego.  We lost that connection to the divine that we lived in all the time by not being able to balance our two modes of awareness and expression.  Its not something that we lose like we lose a ring or a note or a shoe.  We simply forgot where it existed.  Having forgotten, we began to think it lay outside of ourselves.  This has been the fatal flaw, if there ever was one, and while it sounds serious, its simple to get back to because its inside us.  Its always been with us.  We just forgot where it was.  We forgot how to feel. We have spun all kinds of stories that make sense to us for why we might have lost it, but the answer has always resided within waiting for us to realize where the glitch was.  Its so simple a thing that we have spent lifetimes trying to find it.  Its like the absent minded person looking all over for their keys when their keys are right in front of them.  We think someone took them, that some vast conspiracy intervened.  We merely forgot. 

Its interesting that when you feel bad, guilt, or shame, the force behind kundalini will go down.  It can even stop completely.  The shame or guilt causes a disruption in the divine flow for those who do have kundalini.  Giving in and letting the bad feelings go restores the garden of bliss within.  You are again at one-ness with the divine.  It is a tantric experience, this connection, and because we have issues in feeling this good, we have sought to make such a feeling taboo.  Different cultures go about it differently, but the result is always the same it seems.  Its no surprise that we have connected our brokeness with our sexuality also because its our sexuality that is a gateway to bliss and wonder and joy, one of the very gateways to this sea of feeling, our touchstone to the infinite.  Having blocked our passage in this way, we have erected hurdles that we have felt were insurmountable.  Its true that we do need the divine to help us out of this, but the divine has never been something standing outside of us.  When a species has lost its way to its most central form of unity, its not unusual for all kinds of problems to arise as a result of the repression that comes with not knowing how to deal with it.

The truth as I have seen and felt it  is that finding the garden within is merely a breathe of fire away.  Breaking the seal, the fire spreads all through you as you feel the bliss pour through your body, is one important way to reach back to a place of deep feeling, of bliss and joy.  When we realized we were separate, we immediately felt put out of the garden where it didn't matter that we were naked.  It was, however,  a pretty crappy feeling, so it had to have some pretty dramatic events surrounding it in order to justify all the bad feelings involved. We have convinced ourselves since that God didn't want us, that we were put out for not doing as instructed.  All that we did was we did not continue to keep our earthly awareness on God.  Its that simple.  And God, Goddess, All That Is, doesn't hold any grudges.  Whatever God we conceived of back in the day has more to do with our own preconceptions of what a God is than what God is. If you want a clue into the love of the deity, consider the love a parent has for a child.  No matter what that child does, the love of that parent remains.  Its unconditional.  And we, as imperfect as we are, are able to taste what the love of a god might be.  But even that gets messed up and distorted with ideas of how we can never truly know the love of a god because we are such simple and broken beings.  The deeper truth is that we are born of this deity and have its truth swimming all through us.  Our individuality, though, can serve to block awareness of this higher range of perception.  We have to want to surrender to what this love is, the simplest and most fundamental force in the universe.  It is this force which I was shown years ago that holds the entire universe together.  It is literally coded into every particle in the universe.  This is why Adam and Eve are so important.  They are the archetypes of our own inner masculine and feminine.  When you can bring these two fields of energy into a unity within, you will feel the pulse of the universe.  Every atom, every electron, every life form, every cell, is ordered around the yin and yang. All along every form, every particle, every person simply wants deep down to be drawn into entanglement, into unity.  Our individuality, though, seems to keep them apart.  Separation is the death of our bliss.

The entire universe is held together, glued as it were, with this force of attraction.  The entanglement of photons is the same entanglement of souls, and when our physicists examine what entangled photons do, we can see the exact same result in people who have themselves become entangled within the world of the quantum field of the infinite mind or divine awareness.  We all are brought into relationship through this force.  It also brings mere matter into a complex relationship with itself that can bring forth life.  None of this is chance.  Its part of an integrating principle of being, of all existence.  When enough entanglement can happen, given the right set of circumstances, life blooms out of what some would say is a simple merging of all the right compounds entirely by chance, except its not by chance, but by design. Life is itself another expression of creativity.  It is the result of simpler forms uniting to create something still larger, grander.

When we can heal the separation within, we are more available to this larger field of awareness and being.  This is not a destination, but a process of becoming that has no end.  If you seek an end-game, you wont find it.  Life is a  journey, and if there were some end point, the universe would stagger under the eventual force of stagnation, which would be an eventual result of such an end-game.  There are still larger and larger dimensions, all without end, infinite in scope, of becoming, a still larger scope of feeling through realization.  As we realize our connectedness, we reach into still larger realms, still larger dimensions of connection to ourselves as infinite beings. As we spread out into that vast web of awareness, we begin to realize it is a thread with no end as we seek to further integrate still larger aggregations of being and awareness, realizing in still larger scopes of reality.  We are simply growing into what we already have been, always were, but always with a growing awareness which brings growing perception and fulfillment.  There is truth, though, that through our individuality and through some basic limits to our physiological mirroring of the infinite, that we bump up against a sense of being individual, but we mistake that individuality as separate. 

I think the truth to all of this is that we feel shame and sadness over our imperfection.  This "gentle" loathing leads to some rather punishing behavior.  It leads to hellish experiences as a result of feeling so cut off from everything.  The thing is, though,  if you knew the love of the divine, you would realize it was all a silly misunderstanding.  We are unconditionally loved, cherished, by that which is our broader being, the Source of all Life, whatever form that might take.  I think understanding your true relationship with the divine is important in understanding just how close the divine is to you.  In this moment, in each breath.  It is always You who have sought to set yourself apart from the Source, for the love of Source is so grand and perfect, it would never seek to put you outside the realm of its love and affections.

I think in all truth, our perception of time messes us up here.  It give us a feeling of seperataness in events.  This grows into still larger things, or feelings of the distinctness of everything.  Its an easy step into separation and sadness from there.  And shame and all the other things that go along with this.  If you have had a transcendent experience, you very likely felt like time was a bit irrelevant in a sense.  INSIDE of time, it seems, is a still larger truth about time, which is that it expands outward in an infinite way, what many who have had a near death experience describe as an expanding present, or an infinite present, or simply a feeling of the infinite.  Outside of our physical perceptions, I think that there IS no time, or time becomes less and less important as a way to experience reality and thus falls away.  Many who have had kundalini awakenings have themselves expressed how all of this awakens them to a deeper perception of time.  Yes, there are all these linear events happening here, one right after the other, but there is a deeper sense that there is something more. 

I have written on numerous occasions about the great benefit of realizing that you can see across all time or in that expanding present.  If there is no time, your soul exists in perfection, already complete in a sense, yet always in a state of becoming in a realizing of what was already there, a process that is itself, I content, the very act of becoming aware to your own divine being and higher self.  Becoming more aware in this way will open you to a greater awareness of yourself as already complete, perfect, and alive in a sea of love too wonderful to perhaps contemplate.  I say this because we have so much grief and shame and guilt over ourselves. The thing though is that what is causing that grief and bad behavior is the fact that we are so cut off from everything.  We forget who and what we are.  The path back to the garden is by becoming naked again, and not feeling shame.  Your sexuality is an expression of a very profound creative impulse.  Gurus and sages and other aspirants from every possible tradition on earth have been able to harness this energy which is itself just the divine bliss flowing through you for incredible work.  In the end, its all the same stuff.  The fact that we would feel such shame over our so-called "Animal" impulses just shows the disconnect we have with what the divine has brought us, has made for us. Certainly, we do need to be good and thoughtful and compassionate.  But when you ARE full of compassion, you aren't going to use sexuality as a weapon, or to hurt someone.  You wont.  You will BE this divine love so powerfully that its much more likely that people wont understand you and will think you strange (like all awakened leaders).  But it wont be a force for hurting others.

Our fall from grace was simply a feeling like we were not good enough.  I think it was ego very likely that was involved in it.  We slowly fell away from the divine pulse and then blamed ourselves for not being good enough....which is in a way true, but not a good enough reason to stay outside of the love of the divine, which isn't experienced as some objective deity but is the energy snaking through you, setting you on fire, making you wake up and come alive in the midst of an awakening.

The Hopi Indians have this story about our distant past.  They explain that we used to have this opening in the top of our heads that connected us to the whole of the universe. We were able to sense and feel through this opening in a way that we no longer do as well.  They explain in this story that we slowly had that connection lost while being physical.  Its interesting that there wasn't an effort to inject a sense of failing in this story, but instead seems much more matter of fact. Still, we need explanations.  The sense remains in so many cultures that we somehow got cut off.  My sense through my experience is that all of matter has been encoded with the divine within it.  As individuals we have free will, and this can lead to a sense of being separate.  Perhaps its possible to simply feel into our swirling world of atoms and cells, all busy utilizing the field of attraction, as a way of learning to tap this lost world of our belonging.  As it is in each particle, it is within us.  We yearn to be part of something more, of something larger.  We know we are more, but we also have this individuality that seems to compete with it.  Perhaps we are just trying to get the mix right, to find a way to harmonize the yin and yang, the small self with the big self, to bring the infinite into the moment again so we might feel more connected. Until then, we look outside ourselves until something comes along that makes us look inside in a way we may have never done so before.  

Awakenings are, I think, an opportunity to step back into the garden, to heal this rift in us, this ancient shame we have had whose ONLY purpose has been to keep us sealed off from the divine.  Whatever the problem is, whatever the bad things done, none of it matters in the face of this perfect love.  And if you can FEEL this perfect love, it will transform you.  You will suddenly come in from the cold like some prodigal child who realizes s/he never really needed to be out there to begin with, and all this time could have been partaking in the great bread of life.

We aren't dirty and fallen.  We just think we are.  We have spun stories that have kept us marinating in this sense of fallen-ness  It has brought a veil of forgetting and illusion upon us, a legacy that we have chanted and sung in our churches and temples for thousands of years.  We are not walking very close to the garden wall and we just have to realize that the wall was never put there to keep us out.  You are amazing, and beautiful.  Each soul is a perfect diamond.  It has such stunning facets, is so excruciatingly beautiful you just would not believe.  Looking into the heart of the world, you will feel a nursery planet full of children who years to be with their parents, to feel the love they have been missing all this time, to feel the pat on their heads that says that all is okay, that YOU are okay....and good enough.  It does not good to hide in shame of how powerful this energy is.  Its what the universe is, its what the Deity is, so why deny it?  Why not revel in it?  It bring nothing but bliss and wonder.  Its a bit much to take, I will admit, but I think this is just getting used to 24/7 bliss.  This is the healing of that old wound in us.  C'mon.  Come be a part of the family.  You deserve it.  Every particle, every atom, every cell and planet and person and galaxy is worth it.  Its all beloved.  We are all slices from that great bread of life, infinitely divided, yet indivisible too.  Its both.  And its wonderful. We aren't one or the other.  We are BOTH individual and infinite. Perhaps its time to learn to balance the two, to bring them into synthesis.  And perhaps this synthesis is the healing of the self....which bring the yin and yang together into a unity and when that happens, kundalini emerges.  But that too is one step in a still larger spiraling stairway.  It goes on and on, and as you step upwards, you slowly but surely shed the old notions and rise or ascend into something truly marvelous.

Come on out of the cold rain.  Its just not worth it.  You are already perfect, and the company is really fine.  Its time that you know your divine parentage which is not separate from you at all.  Never was, save through your belief and shroud of shame and sorrow.  The secret is in feeling.  And its waiting for you, as it waits for all of us.

Healing Shame

Shame comes from a judgement that we make for ourselves
or that we accept from others.  This shame can strike to the core of our
being, to what we feel is most sacred about ourselves. If something about you
drives shame in you then it seems that that part or aspect of you is bad.
This puts you in an impossible position.

When we learn that our being in its higher truth is perfect, its like a revelation
So much of this is letting go of the shackles of this world the veils of the earthly self
to ascend into our higher selves only to find everything about us is perfect underneath all of the artificial postures, positions, and beliefs which we took on because we trusted our forebearers but never bothered to question or examine them ourselves. We have participated in a world that has managed to keep rolling a very old way of being.

Healing shame means forgiving yourself.
Whenever we forgive it lightens our being because the inability to forgive means we are karmicaly connected to a given thing within and without ourselves.  This uses up energy and also keeps us in a lower energy vibration. It is akin to carrying a weight around.  When you let go of it you will feel your energy field change instantly.  It will feel as though you are soaring.  It gets to a point where you ask yourself what else is there that you can forgive so that you might feel lighter.

To ask how one forgives is like asking how to breathe or ride a bike.  Its something that you simply have to feel. You feel into it and surrender to it.  In truth its the easiest thing for all of us to do but it escapes notice because of how covered over in all of our junk we are, covered over in such a way that it clouds awareness (trust me it does....there are worlds beyond our notice not because we cannot see them but because we have so much competing material in the way of our becoming aware).  It just SEEMS like its hard. Trust me.  The trick, though, is finding that feeling place within you where it IS easy. That we find something easy hard speaks volumes about where we are currently.  Problem is, we can become estranged from our feeling self, and in those cases its as if it never existed sometimes. This is because feeling is not a mental activity but a full energy body thing.  If the mind is the brain then feeling is the body.  And truly when we seek to remove our years of junk it does not come from the mind but the energy body.  Qi Gong and acupuncture and dance and ecstatic movement helps to loosen the blockages in the body where we have "shoved down" our junk.

With the addition of a kundalini awakening our fields begin to be pressed for cleansing.  Sometimes kundalini is not enough to remove things stubbornly infused into our fields.  In this case we have to do the work of learning how to let go of it.  This might mean some kind of process like dredging up old memories, talking it out with a person who was somehow involved in our earlier life issues, or using creative visualization to begin the process of seeding the subconscious with the signals that begin to tell it that we no longer want that old vibration in our field.  Ultimately this is what a an unresolved hurt is; it is a bundle of energies which have a kind of identity.  All consciousness is self aware at some level and since consciousness itself forms alliances (think about the cells in your body!) then this is very natural for an idea to become lodged and remain in your body of consciousness for years even when its usefulness has long outlived itself.  These accumulate into a "body" of "dead" issues that still take up space in us because....well...we are use to holding onto stuff and consciousness creates alliances.

 Everything is connected.  When the being that called himself Sandalphon came and pulled what amounted to a body out of my heart center, this was just what he was doing---releasing old material that no longer served me but which had developed a magnetic pull to me.  It was communicated quite clearly that this was an old dead "body."  When it was removed I was admonished not to go and try to pick it up.  I also felt as though my insides had been cleared.  The essence of life, Prana, began then to move freely in an open house instead of something that felt crowded and cluttered and stuffy (I just didn't know how crowded it was until I was emptied of this "body" of thought and feeling).  St Theresa of Avilla had a similar experience of having her insides pulled out by angel (also through her heart center!). The thing is, you don't need to know what it is you are releasing. I sure didn't.  For me it had been long forgotten I think.  In fact, this can be something that can be left up to your higher self to work on or think about. If you are curious, then perhaps the best way is to ask that it become known to you in a way that wont compromise your forward development, and that if its not yours to know, that not knowing might be for the best for now.

Sometimes shame comes with the feeling as though we have done something wrong.  Deep inside of you is a self that wants to do right.  It wants to love and be loved.  In our world we often punish people for wanting to be loved.  We have carefully defined lines and categories where only certain kinds of love are acceptable, and yet the soul knows no such bounds.  This is what kundalini can bring which is an awareness of what is.  What is is inescapable. We all know it deep down and have to move through untold dross in order to get to it, but once there the truth resolves into an ever-simpler thing.  This thing has only one axial point and that is love.  Nothing else.

Learning how to resolve shame and grow self love is sometimes the hardest thing because of how conditioned we are to remain locked in this place.  Some people simply do not know how to love themselves enough.  How does something like that feel when you are not used to feeling it?  An by not feeling it, how dependent does it make you on others' approval and "love" do you think?  But until you are able to break out of your old conditioned behavior, it might be hard to learn how to forgive yourself or others.By learning how to access your higher self you are able to access your nature which is love.  Its a pulse so strong and wonderful its like a revolution inside of you if you have not been used to feeling it.  I wasn't. In fact I had a hard time knowing how I could hold onto such a feeling when my heart opened powerfully for the first time, sending me into what I later learned was a "kriya" or involuntary body movement (mine involved an arching of my neck and back while feeling this sudden release and flow of this powerful heart energy). While these heart openings are seen as rare, I had enough of them in the following year to observe carefully how each one went down. What I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt while visiting this seemingly unusually land was that we reached this heart opening and self love pulsation based on a choice.  I could feel something ancient within me DECIDING to let go and allow this love to fill me as though I was being made love to.  This is a very vulnerable place to be in and further is not something you would ever want to admit to the  casual observer or friend unless they themselves understood what kundalini was all about themselves.  The truth is is that in our world we are just beginning to discover this world within us.  Until we learn to get such openings of the heart more wide-spread those in the minority will tend to be looked upon with some degree of ignorance and bias, even derision unfortunately. The advantage that the internet offer us now is that we can communicate with that growing community of awakened people and build understanding what all of this is about.

At the bottom of all of this is love.  Getting to that love is the challenge; learning how to rearrange the self so that it can be more inviting to this higher energy to enter in.  It mine and your birthright.  Learning how to feel into this is an important aspect in moving forward in this way.  In love and in the forgiveness that it always brings.

Namasté

Post Script:  Day before yesterday as I struggled with some emotional issues having to do with how my life has been,  I went to lay down, and as I did so I had an inner vision which showed a man riding up to me on a horse.  He spoke to me in a glib sort of way, saying how he could depend on me to do his dirty work for him.  In what was an extremely spare but potent interaction with a past life, I learned that I had done something that I blamed myself for for lifetimes (literally) and wore the shame of it around my neck like some old dead goose eversince.  This was something that should have been dealt with lifetimes ago (at least 700 years ago) and its presence in my energy field had its effect.  When all of this resolved in my awareness it was as though I was watching something from deep within me rising like bubbles to the surface of the water.  As these bubbles rose, the issue became a non-issue instantly.   Just like that.  All my problems with being scapegoated or blamed as a kid and in other lifetimes - gone.  Poof!  Then, the pain that ringed my heart disapeared as a feeling replaced it which pulsed with the vibration of joy.  It felt like how you might have felt on the last day of school, but times ten. It was a marvelous relief, a release!  Event began to change immediately after that!  It was amazing to see.  The people who were interacting with me were doing so based on this new vibration which had changed just the day before.  How could the universe react that fast?


Probably because that is how it is....


So I wish I could give you a formula.  I am still thinking it through, feeling it through to better understand it.  All I can say right now is I feel like a free man, and its a great feeling.  To feel my heart vibrating with such joy within it, absent this hurt that I could feel since the dawn of my kundalini awakening, is something worth its weight in gold.  


What I realized I was doing was healing shame.  And I thought how odd that I would write about it just days before....without any thought that this might be on its way.  The reason for my posting the piece was having seen a search term that included healing shame the day before which got me thinking maybe it would be good to start writing on that.  We can be so hard on ourselves sometimes.....