The Next Big Thing

Someone once thought what a great thought it would be to connect machines that we use for processing information so they could talk to each other.  The concept of interconnectivity rustled and moved in the mind and heart of humanity.  The internet was born.  But this new idea was reflected in a still deeper sense, expressed in the world of form veiled in technology. This is the deep well of connectivity that we each have at our fingertips, a world which rests at the outer edges of what we seem to think is real or possible.  It is indeed the next big thing.  It has in truth been with us for since....well, for ever.  Built into the windings of dna this Presence has rested, for it was creator and conciever of All Things.  It is the Creator, maker of all codes, all languages, all modes for expressing. It was Creativity itself. A Great and Mystical Power.  And it has tangled us up and eluded us, and shown itself, always present in the Moment, always ready to leap forth out of our inner code into our conscious awareness.  Rising like a tide, rising like the fiery depths of the earth.  Inside of you lies that molten core, covered in watery depths, seemingly mysterious and unfathomable.  And yet, we humans are spurned forward in our innate curiosity for understanding ourselves throught he world around us.  Truly the world is but a giant mirror, showing us who and what we are.  The degree to which we turn from the nature of nature is the degree to which we deny our own nature.  We and nature are one.  Nature and Creator are One.  One looks into the other and the trick is that they are different, somehow not the same.  But it isn't.  And yet it is, all at once.  Somewhere Creator thought it would be a great idea to make a corner of its universe capable of seeing itself in this way.  We, children of its becoming, are working out the great mystery that it is.

We are each individual and separate, all at once.  One is not illusory, one is chosen, created out of a broad realm of knowing and yearning.  The echoes of this yearning live on in our dna, a Choice to be a certain way, a sacred path of becoming.  Some call it illusory, but that is only part of the story.  To know more, you must go deeper into it.  Your mind, your very brain, is a reflection of a given choice made a long time ago, and yet it also has the innate capacity to become every form on the planet if it needs to.  As you rested and grew in your mother's womb, you moved through the long hallways of all life here.  You were reptile, mammal and primate.  You grew a tail, lost it, only to build a different body as your very dna mused over the path that all higher life has taken. Somehow, this is important as it has been stamped upon your brain, embedded in the cells of your nervous system and makes up the wiring of what makes you you. But together, we take this journey through these many lives, a family of humankind, a family that knows itself as All here. As we take the step into this next big thing, which is as ancient as the stars, a new wrinkle in our being emerges.  Now, at this place in history as the population builds and the resonant frequency allows for a broader interpretation and experience of life here and what it means to have reached this place, only to go further into the next dimension of experience, we are faced with Awakenings that are happening as a result of all of this.  Will the species bring forth a new form of life?  And what does this mean for us?  Perhaps it is as simple as getting it all right internally so that the power of an awakening can be best utilized for bringing us to this place.   Some might say its the move from what we were to something else, and while that may be true, the way that it can take form is not necessarily something that will separate us from what was before, but join us again as it has always done, deeper and deeper still, down into that world that is reflected in all of nature.  Perhaps it means that we are readying to move into a new community of souls, some of whom aren't even human, but part of some still larger community of beings who are themselves waiting for us.  Our relatives who have gone before us.  our paths perhaps intertwined in more ways than we might even know but that our myths and old stories reveal as the fire crackles in the night as we tel our winter stories and dream a whole new world into being within the shimmering screens of our imagination.  The fires we sit before now still flicker but its with a blue t.v. light as a whole world of possibility seeks to bring itself to its maker.  Maker and made, looking back at each other, all a part of each other, each imbued with the gift that was loaded in the dice of destiny from the start. 

Inside of you lives the next big thing.  It is not something your mind can conceive.  It means bringing what we think of as being our more rudimentary senses or sensibilities.  Within the hands of feeling lie our ability to conceive as broadly as the oceans spread and surge before us. The path to this place is through feeling.  Your imagination carries the keys.  Never think that your imagination is anything less than real because what is real is the least understood thing here.  Our greatest sages and gurus all want to agree that this is all illusory, but for them, that was the next big thing, but the big thing keeps expanding as our ability to imagine and conceive expands within our awareness.  In truth, its endless, our awareness, we just have to learn how to feel into it and once in it, move through it with the facility that we each have.  Time to grow up, time to enter the great cosmic community.  A world interconnected.  We are dreaming it, becoming it, trying to understand it in all its shades and possibilities, with freewill at the helm always.  We rise and fall on that one simple element planted in us, not a scourge but an opportunity for learning and becoming.  Will our need to discover and move forward overcome our need to destroy the very life that sustains us?  I am hopeful.  And if not, then a lesson it will wind up being, and it wont be the first time.  But with each step, we come closer to something deep and ineffable, entirely mysterious and deliriously wonderful. 

As we move into the deepening winter, I hope deeper things still for you, for in those depths lies the story of who you are to become within the shifting sands of freewill, the very tool that allows for creativity to unfurl within.  It makes YOU a co-creative being.  We each have a voice in all of this, each of us combining and bringing into the Collective Interconnectivity of the planet. Drops becoming waves, waves becoming the tsunami that washes up on shore, washing away what was before, making room for something new.  Its big, and its in you.  Blessings!

Awakening cannot be explained, but experienced.  Trying to explain it is like trying to understand liquid water by studying ice.  It is close, but the opposite end of a far larger experience.  Explaining what nonduality is by talking about the ocean of being or just the individual is in a sense missing the point because in the experiencing ALL states exist at once with no paradox, no contradiction.  An Awakening breaks you out of the old accustomed modes of being and moves you into a watery realm of self that has always been there waiting for you, a fundamental aspect of your creaturehood, your being.  Like love, it can be described, but all descriptions fall short for the simple fact that its in its direct experience that it is known.  In that one moment, though, your world shifts in a significant way.  Even those who are touched by it in a temporary way are changed forever.  It is not something foreign to us, but fundamental.  When you find it, it is like awakening a long lost love, or something you always knew but had perhaps for the time being forgotten.  It is the mover of worlds.  It is a game changer, a churning of your insides until your earthly self aligns with the cosmic, and in that moment, you will know that the two were never separate.  Something inside of you served to create a rift that moved you in directions far afield from your fundamental self, your larger self.  While ego was involved, this has not been some cosmic accident, but an experiment, a journey we have chosen to take here in this world.  There is far more design in the stars than we could ever dream possible.

Unlike some, I do not feel that our more icy side is a false self.  All aspects of being serve a purpose, and we chose the arrangement of self for a purpose, which has been to learn the myriad ways that consciousness can arrange itself and express itself.  This purpose has served the infinite self in its quest for experiencing a boundless realm of awareness.  All of this, every scrap of it, is a creation, and suggesting that the creation is any less real than the consciousness that formed it forgets the nature of the infinite which is itself creative energy.  In fact, you can work your way through an Awakening by learning to allow this creative energy to flow through you.  This energy is freeing, opening, and liberating.  It actually breaks away the ice of your former being so that you may begin to experience the more watery realms of your awareness.  It isn't that the ice isn't of any benefit, its that it has its place within being, but so does the infinite ocean, and when the ice clogs the self so that the watery self cannot flow, we become limited in what we can ourselves experience in the moment.  We feel cut off from some still larger source of purpose, which is the foundation of our creaturehood; the creative.  The egoic self, the individual is a part of being, its just not the whole story.  There are vast realms of awareness quite different from the ones you know now, and it is in this broader awareness or state of being that will show you in a direct way what awaits you.  The beauty that you are, the beauty that is the universe, lies nested ---curled--- waiting to unfurl, bringing great fruit to bear in your life.

Since creation is itself an act of love, creativity is itself unifying and a bringer of love. This is why those who are creative, regardless of their discipline, will love what they do.  Its because the work, be it a physicist, mechanic, librarian, teacher, lawyer, or artist, bears the mark of the creative.  Otherwise, the work become work, instead of ones passion, and everything becomes ordinary, perhaps even perfunctory.  Observe anyone who is great at what they do and you will find creative energy, innovative thinking, a willingness to break out of old modes and molds. In truth, our creativity is our connection to our divinity.  Ringing within us are the faint echoes of the first impulse of creation, the very essence and secret of how worlds were formed out of a seeming "nothing" that was itself full of everything. This is why the experience of Awakening is full of passion and power, of beauty, and grace.  Its is beautiful and terrifying as the old you, so crammed with ice, finds itself on unsteady ground while the volcanic passion of this experience seethes up all around you, threatening to swallow you whole, threatening to destroy everything your egoic self has worked hard to install, protect, and propagate.  It only seems a threat at first because of how conditioned you have become to feeling like your individual self was all there was.  The ego is threatened and swings into action, creating body pain, trying to keep together the old alignment based more on a limited understanding than on anything enduringly infinite or larger than itself. Because it is a young self, it cannot be expected to move with the same depth as the soul, the infinite self.  It tries, and slowly slowly, it learns, but knowing already exists within you and it lies deep within your breast, deep within the yearning that is but the tail of a much larger tiger.  Hot blooded and alive, it moves with the certainty that its divine being has conferred.  The only threat that it brings is the threat of change.  Uncertain, there may be fear at first until you are utterly seduced and brought into a new way of being, and of feeling.  Out of the intellect and into feeling, you learn that the one language in the universe is Feeling.  It is through this that we commune with the entirety of All That Is.  Here, secrets unlock and we resolve into beings who are unmoved by those secrets.  It isn't that a secret isn't juicy and wonderful sometimes, its that using the secret it simply no longer necessary, for the secret is that it is Us.  Whatever it is, we are One with it, for this Watery realm of our being means to heal the separation that our individuality has served to create through its having been created. 

Beyond who you are, and what you think is possible, is something still more. In our conventional thinking there exists all manner of distortions and presumptions that do not serve our larger unfolding.  Knowledge is not the key to unlocking the universe.  It is love and the creative, and all of this is spoken in the language of the Creator which is FEELING.  This is the bright sun that shall melt away your ice and bring you to a new alignment to your being.   The secret to all of this is learning to feel deeply.  And in those depths of water fire and even ice, we discover through wonder what it is to be a human reaching for the stars.

The Way of Things

I read through sites that explain how to attain enlightenment with a posture, a breathing technique, with a way of holding the hands, a diet to follow.  These are all tangible things that we can wrap our heads around, something that feels stable and useful.  Its like a recipe.  If you follow it, you are likely to get a good result with some practice.  The makings of the cosmic muffin might be mysterious, but at least you have a recipe.

But what if I were to tell you that kundalini can be awakened with just a word, with just a breath of intent, with destiny flowing in fullness....that all of this has within it a miracle waiting to be known....and until this great secret is revealed, we cleave to what we think works best, which are words and chants and prayers.  All good enough, and sometimes will work.  But they don't work just by saying them.  Within is the power of intention.  Within is a new way of feeling.  Breaking through to that place is what its all about.  Moving enough material within to spark the shift, to begin the movement of the fire within you....

There is an idea that certain words like Sat Naum will help you to raise kundalini energy.  Or certain mantras.  The idea here is that they have a certain vibration in sound that helps with raising a certain energy within.  The other part is that countless adherents over the centuries have chanted this word and when you chant it, you are accessing a wellspring of that collective awareness and intent that has been pushed into service with that one act, the mantra or chant.  All of this makes some sense, and can be useful in a certain way.  But I am going to suggest something far more powerful, more direct, and more true about all of this.  It is what Awakening has brought to awareness and knowing, it is what this experience of the cosmic that visits one, changes and informs. The presence of awakening IS knowing, for the Awakening is an energy, a universal life force energy that is conscious.  When it inhabits you, it brings gnosis. It is simple, like looking out across a field of grass and knowing something in that instant that had escaped you for years, but whose answer seems now to be so simple, so obvious now.

Intent is key. The way to Awakening is not through a practice but an intent.  If a practice helps you to focus intent, good, otherwise, it is a corpse and you may not realize that you are doing things that do not serve awakening.  I will say the unpopular thing and explain that chants and diets will not work.  Releasing yourself of those entangling issues enough for your body to register cosmic energy will.  So if you imagine the energy moving upwards, fine, but it wont move upwards unless you have cleared the way for it. No amount of chanting or mudras or postures will do it, even if it is a centuries' old and respected method.  I am not a traditionalist.  I do what works instead of getting stuck on the romance of what a way or affectation will bring.  Perhaps I am a fire brand. I don't think so.  The same thing happens in the church where people go to church thinking going there will somehow confer purity and divinity upon them.  The act will not do it. The intent will, or can.  The bread and wine do not become the body of Christ unless it becomes that in your own intent.

Awakening is about being different.  Its not about chants or postures or ways of life. When you are ready to peer into the center of things, when you are ready to look at your life in a way you have never done before, to do the heavy lifting and work required to release the material clinging to you that will free you to ever greater realms of awareness, you may be left wondering just what this is all about.

It is about being.  You do not need a method, or guru.  You can listen quietly to it and it will tell you if you will but listen.  And then, when you hear it, be ready to love in a way you may have never loved before.

This may not be popular or believed, but it is true.  It is simple, and it is beautiful.  It is also you, and it is mysterious and amazing.  It will fill you with purpose while emptying your life of it all at the same time.  Your old life may dissolve like an alka-seltzer while something else almost beyond your control takes its place. You might want to end it all, or you might wish you could sleep for a hundred years.  You might want to shine like the brilliant diamond  you are or throw your hands up, trying so hard to align the world you thought you knew with the new world that faces you. Its not an easy path, this, but its real.  You might need a practice just to stay sane, but it could be as simple as knitting or listening to a certain kind of music with your eyes closed. There isn't a special magical or properly proportioned recipe or method that will make you feel a certain way.....you will feel a certain way by FEELING a certain way.  Do you get what I mean?  How could this be so simple as being a FEELING, and yet, its ALL about the FEELING.  Its not about methods or intellectualizing or egoistical postures or ideas or any of that......so going into its flow could be as simple as calming down at the end of day while in bed (I used to do this a lot and it worked GREAT!).  Or it could be done in full lotus in the middle of day in your office while striking a water bowl and holding your tongue on the roof of your mouth and your eyes on a certain spot, in just a certain way.  But just because a Buddha did it this way does not mean you have to.  Things change, and this is not some complex equation, but a surrender into something deep.  However you get there, you are there through something genuine, not faked, not affected or like dressing up on Sunday thinking this will make you something just by doing it when it all springs within.  A robe or a turban wont confer anything on you that you do not already have.  Its your human-ness that you have to plumb deeply into in order to get to this special place.  Its your human-ness that will spark the awakening.  And then you will be a goner. In the best of ways. 

And when you do come to this, you will come to all of us, and some part of each of us will welcome you on that day. Its within your grasp. 

Everpresent Nondual Awareness

This, they say, is enlightenment.  I don't know what enlightenment is probably because it sounds so much like a destination, and nothing about any of this feels like a destination.  Without a real understanding of what enlightenment might be, I tend to feel like the word simply confuses rather than enlightens.  I know illumination, and I think many people are this.  But enlightenment.....if this is an everpresent nondual awareness, then I am enlightened.  And I have to ask; and so?

We are humans in this world of the walking wounded.  We have karma to untangle, and the world to love.  Moving out of the tangled barbs of our own making, or all the finger pointing and all of the recrimination, everything resolves into one simple truth; somewhere along the line we had some rift in our souls or selves and we brought it into the physical in order to heal it, fix it, or to accept it as it is and then learn to move on in a more wonderfilled way.  Awakening, this experience of nonduality, is part of the process I think.  It is a form of liberation from the shackles of what went before.  The thing  though is that we can still have other less binding or obvious issues within us.....as this process is ever-continual, ever changing, and growing in dimension.  In one simple moment the universe can open up wide and in that moment you may wonder why, what for, what to do.  And I say that it isn't that you do nothing. I say its showing you your dual nature as particle self to wave self.  Particle is the bubble that defined your awareness wince you were born.  Finite, bounded within the bubble of you, you could not hear others' thoughts or feel their feelings.  You were neatly contained within your body. Individual. But the wave connected you to the rest of the cosmos, wedded you to a special aspect of yourself that allowed you to also blend into the Allness of creation and quite suddenly you DO feel others' feelings, or hear their thoughts.  Suddenly a trap door opens within you and some new things ruse to the surface of the waters beneath that trap door.  But its not a trap.  Its a way to freedom. Wave Awareness.  And you move from partical and wave with ease when you become safe within this experience.

Everpresent nondual awareness.  An awakening brings this, and in you, it will work with you in dealing with your inner material but your ego self will have control if you let it.  By letting go more and more, the authentic self moves forward and there is less to do as this self knows that instead of moving the universe ourselves as little beings we can use our awareness in the waveform to move mountains. When we are one with the wave of the universe, this is how it can be done.  The universe is suddenly behind you.  Belief determines whether you succeed or not.  Belief is required.  It opens the door.  Feel it in totality, and then the universe will align to you.  Its already aligning to your beliefs.  If you change them, so does your experience.

Practice Element

Healing the Root

One powerful way of healing the root chakra is to place one hand on your heart and the other on your root, or near your genitals.  You might feel one hand will flow into the root from the heart better than another, and if this is so, follow your instinct.  My right hand is the sending hand while my left hand is the receiver, so when I do this simple exercise, I place my left hand on my heart chakra and my right on the root.  Imagine your chakra breathing in the energy from your heart.  Feel into this and do this for at least 15 minutes.  You need not have a thunder clap experience since most of this is a gentle feeling of healing. You may also feel as though something is moving around.  If so, ask what is moving to leave.  Imagine it being rooted out and slipping away from your field.  It no longer has a place in your field. By breathing deep and exhaling deep and fast while focused on the root, you can help to bring new energy into that place.  You can also shake or move while doing this, and movement can help dislodge old material in the energy field.  The secret is to FEEL the movement as coming from your core, not from the outside inward.

Practice Element

Healing the Root #2

Another good way to heal a chakra is to draw that chakra into the heart chakra.  Concentrate on the chakra that you wish to heal and as you breathe in, imagine the energy drawing up or down into the heart. Imagine that chakra energy as like a thread or line of fluid in a tube that you draw upwards (or down depending on what chakra) through just the force of your breath.  As you draw this energy into the heart, you create a cohesion, a balance and grounding as well as healing of that center.  The root and heart have an interesting energetic dynamic.  They are each oppositely charged, so your energy will tend to flow upwards into the heart if you let it. The more you are able to release, the more broad the healing effect is for you.  Imagine the energy from root moving into the heart and then flowing into the root again.  This creates a renewed energy balanced by the divine heart field. This is the core of love and compassion, and even if you don't know what you are doing or wanting to do, with simple intention, you can still achieve results.

By doing this, you effect a change in your field by intentionally drawing upward the sexual energy into the heart.  When you can balance the root with the heart, there is a more balanced effect, a more balance alchemy.  From there, the third tier of awareness can be brought into it, which is the crown, but by keeping the focus on the root via the heart, you can keep the energy simple and straight forward.  Your heart can transmute the energy from the root and feed back into it a very good divine energy. It can also begin the process of bringing greater awareness into the root, the foundation of our experience, the base from which kundalini springs.  By drawing this up into our heart, a powerful form of bliss can be experienced, and a subtle but powerful inner alchemy can be catalyzed.  Performing this daily over a period of a few weeks can help move or shift your awareness in a significant way.  It can also bring you closer to a more healed place.

What is behind most meditation practices is a simple calming of the mind.  When you do this, you can begin to allow the Waveform to come forward more.  All methods help you to feel differently.  If you can achieve this, then it doesn't matter what method you use, even one that is fashioned on your own.  When you realize that all any yogi ever did was to crete something that worked for them and then handed it down as it was continually changed and improved upon, the result has always been the same; creating something that helps you to feel differently.   This truly is all that you need.  There is nothing special in the half lotus or full lotus except that many people have used it.  It CAN connect you to the field of broader awareness that others have touched, but this is just the beginning.  The broad field is within you, so all you do is to use this posture as a catalyst.  You have within you the means to awaken, and when you do, you will not need a spcial posture or even breath. You will learn that breath, true breath, is the respiration of the soul, and this is a moment by moment taking in of cosmic energy.  While your own breathing physically can help to bring in more energy, you can in fact bring in huge amounts of high level energy in a powerful way through a simple act of intentional letting go and opening within.  Oddly, for me, I have found that I can bring in large amounts of energy by washing or immersing my hands in water.  Warm seems best. The thing is that just about anything can help you to feel differently.  For you, it might be something different than me.  I can also open energy in all parts of my body by a type of flexing and rubbing of my hands, which will bring chills all through my body, all through my meridians sometimes.  I can also do this through intent, which is seeking to feel differently.  Seeking to flow instead of getting trapped in a mental state that is both rigid and linear.  By flowing nonlinearly, I don't know what to do next but everything that happens always makes sense and works out in the end.  By trusting, intention can bring me to a new place.  I suspect it can work this way for you.

If you need a system, make one that works for you, or fashion one from others based on how ti makes you feel.  Release expectation and open to feeling as you feel into how the technique makes you feel.  if you feel good, stick wtih the good.  If you feel tight or hard, move away from that.  What will make you flow? Your own inner sensuality will help.  It knows.  It is nonlinear and it is not rigid.  Tapping this is uncommon for many who have grown up in certain faiths because inner sensuality is often tantamount to physical pleasure that is seen as of the flesh and thus bad.  Because flesh is built from this same sensual consciousness, it too is miraculous and wonderful.  There is nothing sinful or bad about it.  the only thing bad about it is that we have been taught to feel badly about it.  Through it, we can enter into our higher consciousness, regardless of what some might say.  Release your idea that the body is somehow bad.  It isn't.  And neither is your desire.  It will lead you in tantric fashion to your divine nature.