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.
