Caring For Our Awakened Loved Ones

Awakening as an event in the life of a loved one is like a rock being tossed into a still pool.  The pool, which has been relatively quiet for years suddenly becomes turbulent as sudden waves crest and move out in all directions, bringing a sudden burst of realization and reflection into the life of the person so affected.  If you can imagine that most of our lives that our inner waterways remain quiet like this, like a lake that has never had any significant ripples, waking one day to such an event could wind up feeling disconcerting.

When this event occurs, it is like a bell which has rung.  You cannot go back and unring it.  The event is so fundamental that it begins the process of change within that has a force of its own.  It is our own fundamental nature emerging and it is stronger than any force put before it.  It is like being told a truth that completely changes how you see and respond to the world.  It is so basic that it simply is not possible to put the genie back in the bottle.

If you are someone who has a loved one going through this process, it is important to realize that like it or not, the person whom you love is now in the process of rapid change.  How you respond to this process can serve to make the path easy or hard for you and for them.  This is not so different from any other human interaction, though, and being mindful of what we say or how we think about what we believe we know will more than likely play into this new event.  The truth remains that the person you know will undergo a transformation that is not unlike the process of a caterpillar into a butterfly.  The difficulty for most is that we endure a transition period when our cells are being populated by this energy that comes in waves and moves through our many layers of self.  While it may feel like a lightening strike to the person so affected, the aftermath is where the greatest changes take place because they serve to reform the person in what can feel like radical ways.  The reality about relationships is that when one person changes faster than the other, the differences between the two become much more apparent.  Because of this, it can lead people in relationship to feel like they are either left behind or no longer understood.  This works on BOTH sides of the equation.  If you are someone who has awakened, this can mean that you wind up feeling missunderstood.  When you are the loved one who has not awakened, you might feel left behind.  You might also think that your awakened friend or loved one has simply gone around the bend because what they are trying to explain to you what their new life is like is outside of anything you have experienced.  These are two very likely and very natural responses to have to awakening.  There are as many others are there are people, and the bottom line question becomes are the two people in relationship ready to do the work to adjust to this new event in a way that makes sense to them and that will keep their ability to relate to one another on a balanced and even keel, or will this serve to draw the two apart?  This is a choice that we all make whether we realize it or not.  It can also be a choice that happens very slowly, or very quickly, all depending on the nature of the relationship before all of this took place as well as how it goes forward as all of this begins to unfold within the relationship.

I write about how to care for someone who is going through an awakening in my book Waking The Infinite, and I do so based on what I know what would have helped me had I gotten the support that I needed most at the time.  I am going to walk you through the process some and point out a few of the things that are useful to bear in mind if you have someone who has gone through this awakening.

First, your loved one is now aware of things that are outside your own experience very likely.  They may want to tell you about these experiences as a way of seeking support during a tumultuous time.  Some of the phenomenon may even be things you have some experience with if you are inclined toward matters of the spirit.  But even if they are not, one very important thing to consider is that while your loved one might tell you something incredible over breakfast that sounds impossible or even crazy, there is a reason for why it has happened to them.  Your loved one may not know the whole story any more than you, but the important thing to remember in the moment is to keep from judging whether the experience has any validity or whether you think that it strikes you as a form of delusional behavior. This is where keeping an open mind and an open heart is important.  Even if what you are told strikes you as strange or even deluded, it is important to remember that the person sitting across from you is shedding its skin.  Many skins.  However strange this might seem to you, taking a stance that whatever is going on inside of them may well appear strange but actually has a critical purpose will, I think, help you in achieving the right state of mind that will help and not hinder their process of shedding the latent psychological material that is now being sloughed off.

Perhaps you can remember having a dream one night that seemed utterly fantastic, amazing, and entirely impossible.  This dream may have left you feeling very different when you woke up.  Something ABOUT the nature of the dream simply shifted how you felt as you went through your day.  The dream itself was so fantastical that it could in no way adhere to ordinary reality, and yet, somehow, the quality of that dream left you feeling completely renewed, refreshed, and feeling different.  Perhaps you found you had inner resources, at least for a time, that you thought you did not have.  If you can remember ever having a dream like this, then I would like to suggest that you approach your own beloved's awakening experience in a similar way.  You may not be able to understand how it is that your loved one is now communicating with a binary star cluster, or an angel, or a future version of themselves, and it may be that all of these perceptions are simply an approximation of what it is that really is going on.  It is possible that there are glimpses of Gods or Goddesses, demons or other shadow creatures.  There could be impossible to believe synchronicities happening that all seem incredibly important to your loved one that simply go over your head and you do not understand.  I caution you to resist discounting these experiences.  I say this because your loved one is like a person on a train who is describing their new experiences to you only to find the following day, the view from the train window has changed from verdant forest to rolling plains, and then to a beige desert-scape.  Further, in seeing all of these changes and range of experiences, their own understanding of what it is that they are going through also changes or is somehow revised in some small way, or placed into a still larger, more inclusive framework.  What I am saying is, be patient, don't take anything as entirely literal, but don't seek to discount it either.  The truth is that your lvoed one IS facing an important truth about themselves and the world.  Some of this can be more like dream than waking for all of the archetypal images that can crop up. It was Carl Jung that did a lot of work using archetypes as a way to help sasist people in healing.  He was aware of this because he saw how these cropped up so often in his analysis of his patients.  Whether "real" in the physical sense or not, the deeper truth is that these types of experiences can be the medicine that aids in helping to move a person emotionally and cognatively to a new place within themselves.

Second, I suggest knowing the many symptoms of awakening so that you can understand that this is not a mental break happening.  The challenge here is that if medicating the symptoms is attempted, it can only serve to extend the process for the person.  There are other ways that these spiritual emergences can be handled, and as far as I know, none of them involve medication of ANY kind.  Bear in mind that the change taking place is so broad based that it can include what seems to be very real physical pain happening.  This pain, though, tends to be related to intense forms of tension in the body.  All pain that I have ever had in my body has all been related directly to holding on to something.  This implies a form of holding, a clutching action emotionally or mentally.  All of this resolves into a kind of emotional and psychic tension that becomes so severe that it reads in the body as pain.  But how could such a psychic reality be felt as physical pain?  There are many examples of how the body can read or register pain that is in truth psychological or spiritual.  The etheric energy pouring into the body moves through every system, from the nerves to the physical tissues.  The brain is well known for taking this psychic material and placing it in a place within sensing that makes sense to it.  The clue is that there has been no form of physical injury that brought this on.  the other clue is that there is a good deal of distress or anxiety associated with the physical effects most often for the simple fact that most of it comes from a sense of not being at ease (dis-ease).  I am going to also say that you have to be careful.  What might seem to be etheric could also  be a very real physical malady that is manifesting in the body, so you don't NOT want to go see a doctor!  What I AM saying is to be careful about JUST trying to treat a symptom when its source is still unclear.  All of this is a balance because on the one hand you do not want to medicate when the problem is spiritual, but neither do you want to ignore the issue in case it winds up being something that could wind up being a very real physical problem!  What I am saying here is that when it comes to taking prescription drugs for anxiety or other psychological disorders, care must be taken in weighing the advantages of doing so over the repercusions of taking the medication.  While anti-anxiety drugs can be useful in helping to break a cycle of anxiety, few doctors like to prescribe them for extended periods since this points to a deeper problem that is best solved by correcting what is causing the anxiety in the first place.  Most anxiety stems from a fear, not a physical malady, and so the solution lies in clearing up the inner "malady" which will in turn shift and change the physiology away from the stress hormones that wind up putting a person on edge in the first place.

Third, it is important to consider that we all have within us the means to heal ourselves and to get to a better place.  Those who insist that we do not are themselves grossly underestimating our own potential as human beings.  If we lean on outside sources to heavily, we can miss the opportunities inherent in our own inner functioning to resolve the problem.  Many people have simply been trained that they are not capable of getting their arms around the problem.  As a result, I have had people get upset with me when I insist that we are more resourceful than we know and that it is only when we are tried that we discover the resources we didn't even know we had.  Excessive fear is as destructive as excessive optimism.  Both can do harm, and the essence of life is in the balance of the two. Within us are triggers that can aid us in releasing stubborn psychic material, and the realization that they are there does not come until the moment arrives when the test comes.  This does not mean that one should go through torture.....but there are aspects of the experience that CAN feel torturous.  An example of this difficulty is what we oftne call the Dark Night Of the Soul.  This is in fact a not-well understood passage from one state fo being to the next.  With it can come some very real physical effects such as excessive adrenaline which can make a person feel like they are being torn apart emotionally. In most of the cases I have heard about (including my own), this particular rough spot was cleared up by the person learning how to control HOW they felt in order to control their own physiology.  Kundalini puts every little thing under an intense microscope of awareness and small things become VERY big.  This is in truth a saving grace, but it is not a grace that is easy to master.  But once it IS mastered, the mastery is genuine even if it is hard-won.  For myself, I learned to hone my physiological response so that I could keep from feeling the harder parts of the experience.  This resulted in my learning to release latent fear that had built up over years.  The single most helpful thing during a process like this is for the person to know that you at the very least feel for them, that you are behind them in getting through this.  In the overly bright light of the experience, sometimes it is helpful to have a soothing and kind voice who does not judge but is as compassionate as possible.  True compassion, then is without questioning.  Nurses in a hospital may have never had to go through how an illness may make them feel, yet the great ones give care regardless and provide support without judgement.  This is where helping someone rid themselves of a personal demon by keeping judgement to yourself instead of suggesting that this is all created by years of bad living or wrongful feeling.  Responding in this way hardly helps the situation.

Awakening isn't just about your loved one.  Awakening is also about you as well.  You both are moving through this transition together.  It may be that the two of you can be perfectly great together without either of you needing to feel what the other is feeling.  it may be that what your loved one needs more than anything is someone who can be a rock solid anchor in a stormy sea.  I know one woman who is a close family friend who went through awakening and while her husband is a very practical guy, a mechanical engineer and she a dreamy artist, the two of them make the relationship work.  He doesn't need to venture out in to the ether while she does, but this does not cause him any problems.  Somehow, they manage to strike a balance in their different worlds.  The quality they each bring, I sense, is a simple appreciation for the other.  While she could not be technically minded, she probably likes how her spouse IS technically minded, while her broad dreamy artistic side helps to bring a counterbalance to their lives.  The foundation in this case is mutual respect.  This respect, though, can be easily eroded with an eye roll or a sharp comment that shows a lack of awareness about the other person's worth.  Both of you will need to matter, and while your loved one might need a tremendous amount of patience and resources from you during this time, all of life is a give and take, and what you will probably find is a loved one who comes out of the most turbulent parts of this experience feeling renewed, more at peace, and also ecstatically happy and ready for life to begin anew.

How long does the process of awakening take?  Well, Id say that such a question is itself flawed and need revision.  The process of awakening continues.  It is itself a spiral of awareness "upward" into still broader ranges of consciousness.  It is a refining of the self, and it is really hard to say how long this will take.  I do not see it as a process with a beginning middle and end.  Some of the most noted people who have awakened have shown remarkable harshness in their later lives, which shows that there was still more work to be done.  You do not "self perfect" necessarily.  You spiral upward.  What you are unable to slough off will remain for another day.  This is the same for anything in life and awakening is not some silver bullet.  it is true that those awakened can be just as deluded about their progress as anyone not awakened.  People can get stuck, and the awakened can be driven to fits of rage simply because they don't know HOW to deal with the forces now at work within them.  Just because you are awakened does not mean you suddenly stop being human. So what is the answer here?  The answer I think is to continue living life, to drop expectation to the degree that you can and simply enter the Moment and enjoy it for all it is worth.  Life is a great mystery sometimes, and while we can effect change in the moment, sometimes great understanding can also come through our own spirit or intuition that no act could ever trigger or surrender to us in the moment.  Living with our seemingly dual selves is key.  How does the earthly rough and tumble parts of us learn to soften and evolve in the presence of the divine self shining through?  This is a process that goes on day by day.  It can be ruthless and seemingly unforgiving for how careful we all must be in keeping ourselves balanced atop the crest of a wave of bliss that is the only good place to be in the entire experience.  As such, we will slip off the wave.  When we do, learning to observe what led up to that slip is fodder for learning the next go-around.  We wait for the next wave where we become silent and still and happy.  Here, we are lifted up onto the crest of the wave as if by magic and we ride it in until our feet rest on the sandy shore with a big smile on our face.

Awakening is not an excuse for people to behave badly, but this can happen.  Emotions can run high and the single best thing to do is what we do in every healthy relationship; we communicate, we do not point fingers and we learn to reach concensus and bear enough humility to see our own frailties without fear of recrimination.  Being emotionally honest and open while also compassionate is key I think.  When I say this, I do not mean a false-sense of compassion, since this never served anyone.  If we seek to be easy on others when it means ignoring the truth, this method of relating will itself have a natural expiration date.  So the love we bear is best when it is true, without strings, and is patient and childlike in wanting to know what awaits around the next corner.  When I say childlike, I mean the sense of openness and wonder that we all have when young about the world.  It is known that when we imagine what it is like to be like a child, we actually change how we think and feel.  Artists, for example, can be more imaginative and creative when they simply imagine what is is like to be a child.  This has a great deal of very helpful insight into how just the way we feel and anchor that feeling in the present can bring great benefit to us in how we wind up reacting.  React, yes, but not in a reactionary way.  :-)

Beyond this, there are resources that are available to people going through this rapid change.  there are therapists who have been trained in transpersonal and nonduality experiences.  I know they exist, and while I cannot reccomend anyone in the field for the simple fact that I have not utilized them, they are certainly out there and if it feels like you are both overwhelmed, this route might be the one to take if you both need more support as well as tools and tips for coping beyond my very brief introduction. Beyond this is your being willing to provide resources to your loved one that can include really great music, hypnosis tapes for calming anxiety, as well as dietary changes that could be of some help.  I have found Indian curry to be very calming as well as cantaloupe.  I have found eggs to be a good form of protein for when my stomach had trouble keeping anything down when the fires raged within.  I have found fasting helped at a critical time, and breath work can be of great assistance in calming.  I have also followed the suggestion that I do some kind of energy work to help remove bloockages in my energy field.  this took the form of Qi Gong (also spelled Gung) classes and these also served an important role in helping me to move through the healing process faster.  What helps me most these days is remaining devoted to my life and the wonderful outlook I was gifted with.  When days grow dark I am reminded that I have never been a glass is half empty kind of person and it is here that I find myself sitting in a garden of wonders and am just so glad just to be here. the greatest resource lies within, of course.  The ancients called this process "self realization" because it is really very simple.  However, we are not simple creatures.  We delight in making things complicated ( me included) but with some work, we gradually do get the memo!  Nothing can take the place of pure love and care.  We don't have to know what it all MEANS.  We don't always have to have all the answers.  How we each choose to live our lives is this great gift that we bear and the degree to which we can each hine our own light onto the world is the degree to which we offer ourselves up as the gift that we each are.  Our lives are a great gift which is in truth a river than flows in both directions....to us and from us.  It is as important to give as it is to receive.  It is here that the headwaters of spirit are both small and big, powerful and gentle, capable of getting you to where it is you need to go.  And never underestimate the power of awakening to bring you the resources that you need, sometimes in perfect timing.  I have written plenty about synchronicity and what lies beneath it, both her and in my upcoming book.  We live in interesting times, and how we each choose to orient ourselves to it makes a difference in the quality of the experience.

There is a list of kundalini resources to the right of this post and there is also a resources page also which you might want to look through.  This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I have been meaning to add more to it but have not taken the time to do so!  There is a lot of great writing and insight out there.  The world is filling up with the awakened and it is a very hopeful thing for me to observe as it happens.  The more this happens, the more voices are added to the mix.  take from them what you can or that you can relate to.  What you do not relate to might simply mean that you do not relate to it now, and you might never relate to it.  All of this is a garden where there are many fruits.  Take what is meaningful to you now and always ask your higher self to show you the way, for as you ask, so shall you receive......whether you are awakened or not!

The Trap Of Ego

I talk about this subject a good bit....and I do this, I realize, on this morning, because I have not always spelled out just what it is that I feel is important to consider when it comes to ego. Some new thing will rise in my awareness as a result of some real life experience that will bear new awareness to me that I realize I know but have not mentioned.  I often tend to assume people know this....I KNOW people know this deep down, but we don't always know we know.  This is what awakening is, the very core of it, which is moving into knowing, something the Greeks called Gnosis and is the root for the early Christian movement called the Gnostics.  Agnostic means you do not know.  But knowing you do not know is far better a thing then thinking you know when in truth you are substituting a piece of a puzzle where the part seems to fit but does not.  And this is really the challenge in all of this. We seem to have pieces that fit, but have never really fit.  You either take it into yourself and know how it fits inside of you or you don't.  What I say can only matter if it works for you.  If it works for you, great.  If not, then either I am completely off the mark, or you just haven't felt how the thing that it replaces has a shape that you now realize was not just right.  And when it is right, it will flow and fit perfectly as your Essential Self flows into the moment and you just know. 

I know that so much of this can seem like pontificating, and we as a species have had plenty of that.  I am not here to prove anything except to offer at my door a plate full of flowers and bits of nourishment that I have found to work for me.  No one is telling you to take the plate and run with it.  No one is telling you that you will burn if you don't.  I would RATHER you deny the truth vociferously and bear the badge of your own RIGHT to do so as a sovereign being and be a little off on the details than to follow mindlessly the rantings of a wild man.  At least you are exercising discernment which does not happen when someone says you are going to burn or that you simply do not know or can't know because you are fallen, or missing that ingredient that makes it possible for you to glimpse the truth of the kingdom, or cosmic consciousness, of divine awareness.  All of this is IN you.  As the Oracle of Delphi said, the only way we know the gods is by knowing ourselves. 

The problem with ego is that you will never get rid of it.  You wont get rid of it because of the important purpose that it serves.  I say important because it is.  But that importance is itself limited in a certain sense.  Ego plays a role in divine awareness.  It always will.  Without this awareness, you will not be able to experience anything as being individual within you. Ego itself is, I suspect, a natural outgrowth of our gift given to us from the Prime Creator.  If you want to give that gift back, then I suppose you might find the path back to a primordial state, but I rather think that this is like a bell having rung.  I don't think, in knowing individuality, that you can ever really go back to a place where there is no observer, no part of you that looks out and knows itself as you.

There is a problem with some eastern practices or perspectives that involve ego death.  This feels to me to be more a kind of self loathing than anything doing directly with something practical.  For if it were, the path to being ego-less would be a straight line that would lead us all perfectly to a place where we could dispense with ego and know the supreme state of cosmic consciousness.  Most things in life tend to be very simple once you get down to them.  We only want to make things complicated when we ourselves do not wish to glimpse their truth. When we are ready, my experience has been each and EVERY time that it all gets incredibly simple.  Simple like how things are simple in childhood.  By this I do not mean diminished capacity or lack of knowing, for children know things that adults have forgotten.  Childhood is remarkably nuanced, unencumbered by the false biases that have grown up by our mountains of hurt or wrongs done to us or some perceived slight.  In childhood, we are more clear without needing to call something a given thing.  We experience it AS IT IS without judging it or running it through all of our filters of mind and belief, which may or may not conform or align to the divine within us.  I am not suggesting that the eastern practices are somehow tainted and not worth learning from.  Learn, certainly, but first use your discernment, see if that piece fits.  It is up to you.  What fits today may not fit tomorrow as your insides slowly shift and conform to that part of you. 

The one inconvenient reality of ego is that your higher self has an ego.  Some call it the super ego.  It is an extension of the earthbound ego. The importance of the higher self in my own practice is that it serves as a template for me to become.  I don't need anyone else's say-so on how to be as long as I am doing my best to follow my inner higher self.  Here, I am doing what the Oracle of Delphi admonished people to do; to know themselves and in so doing, they would know the God and Goddesses within them.  if you have a superego, then doesn't it make sense that all this talk of eradicating the ego is simply a huge waste of time?  Okay, look, I can feel your resistance to this, and I am saying all of this in the way I am saying for a reason, to get you to identify your reactions and to then look at the matter at hand perhaps in a different way. 

It's not a waste of time to work on ego.  Certainly ego has been given this inner throne inside of us so that it keeps the core or Essential Self from taking its rightful place in our awareness.  But in so doing, ego is not sent to the gallows.  In moving it out of its central position, we allow for a more productive arrangement within us to happen.  Imagine having a garden full of beautiful flowers.  You want to provide protection and privacy for that garden by putting in a stone wall.  It serves to keep out the animals that would feed upon it and it gives you quiet and solitude, all of which you like when it comes to this beautiful garden.  And yet, it is as though we have not placed our rock walls around the periphery, but straight through the middle of our gardens.  Instead of helping to unify the self, it in fact divides it.  This does not make much sense since you have to stumble over this rather rigid wall just to get to see the poppies or the lilies. It makes sense to have the wall encircle your garden, don't you think?  And while a wall will always serve as a division, if you are going to have such divisions, then make them in such a way that they make some sense.  Perhaps, in the end, the wall does come down or you have many entries into the garden.  The self knows that the divisions can sometimes be arbitrary and as a result, no wall every keeps out what must enter in in order for you to know fulfillment and inner knowing.  The wall is more the result of intention.  If you intend to keep ego centrally located, it will quite naturally serve to blot out a central awareness of the soul as infinite and eternal and wedded to a much broader form of consciousness that leads you to the gods and goddesses within that the Oracle of Delphi was hinting at.  Like the God and Goddess within you. 

It is true that in order for this type of awareness to flood into your being, you have to set ego aside.  When I say ego, I am talking about the part of you that is more earthbound in nature.  You have a higher expression of that same ego that exists outside of time and duality and it is a more advanced form or version of your own earthly ego. the only challenge with the earthly ego is that it serves to filter and blind you to the broader awareness that you need in order to make more considered decisions about what you are and what the world itself is.  The ego in its earthly role has a tendency to blind you and in so doing keeps you thinking that you are more limited than you are, and also limits your awareness and experience of vast amounts of energy that is your birthright.  It is in knowing and feeling this energy directly that you will be able to know the bliss that exists as a natural state of being within the current of energy that is the universe.  With ego in the way, this awareness can sometimes be blotted out entirely. 

The best thing is to cherish who you are in entirety, forgive your shortcomings and move forward. Move forward by giving ego the assurance that you value its contribution, but that it wont sit on the throne of your awareness.  If you allow this to happen, ego will feed off the energy flowing in at that spot and it will grow slowly but surely into the monster it has been for most people and become a huge stumbling block.  Just let it be like your trusted advisor who goes back to its quarters without trying to run the show.  Let it come and go.  That is the role of ego for now. 

Your higher self form of ego is that part of you that touches the infinite.  Until you use it to do this, you may not believe me.  Your experience alone will tell you whether this is true or not.  If you know bliss from awakening, for example, your higher self has already been in the picture since the higher self is firmly rooted in the soil of the bliss field. The superego or higher expression of your own ego here in your earthly focus is an extension of your own troublesome ego here.  It isn't that one is an outgrowth of one or the other.  Super ego does not give birth to smaller earthly ego.  They exist, outside of time simultaneously.  So to say one causes the other to be is an irrelevant question to ask. If you do, you will go scurrying to find proofs that this is so in in the process, will cobble together some facts or appearances that seems  to fit the picture your own mind is seeking to create.  They are of a piece.  If you want a model to think of them, think of them as being like a cone, for this is how I have experienced it and it seems to work pretty good thus far.  One one end of the cone awareness is very focused, which is good in its own way.  You need this sharpness of focus, but it serves sometimes to be less aware of the broader picture that is available on the other end of the cone of consciousness which is what you call your higher self.  Consciousness expands outward and the part of you that you call ego is present in the higher self as a form of self awareness and identification of itself as individual.  In this state, though, the higher self knows that it can flow into the consciousness of the sun and flow out of it, merging directly into the consciousness that makes up the sun while never having its own identity blotted out or destroyed in any way whatsoever.  The difference between your higher self and your earthly selves' ego is that earthly ego does not have this assurance.  Ego, partnered with your present awareness tells or suspects that you are limited even though the genie in the bottle is but inches from your grasp. As you let go and surrender, consciousness naturally begins to flow out from the center point of this cone into the broader portion of the cone of your consciousness. There is no end to what your surrendering to your own natural self will do in bringing you higher and higher levels of awareness and experiencing of broader forms of energy.  There is not place where this cone ends.  It is infinite.  As you remove the hurdles to your awareness and allow the inner surface of this cone to be entirely free from bumps and points of resistance, your own consciousness will be free to move into ever broader realms of your being in and out of time.  You will reach places that there are simply no words for (and thank goodness for that).  But all along this path of expanding awareness is a sense of ego, and this ego does not strike you as being like the ego you have here on earth because the ego you have here has some work to do to reshape and mold and reform. 

Seeking to get rid of ego will only result in it popping up somewhere else inside of you.  Evidence for this is present in the psychological experiments that were done by both the Nazi's, Russia, the United States and Cananda in their now-infamous mind control experiments.  Central to the Nazi discovered mind control was a kind of crushing of the self by trauma.  It was discovered that if enough pressure was applied, the self would fracture into many smaller parts.  these parts were not random in any way.  Each portion that broke would have its own ego, its own core self, its own emotional self, mind, and all the rest.  Each portion would often serve to express different aspects of the personality but would have all the parts normally found in any fully created psyche.  the self fractured in holographic fashion, which makes perfect sense that it would do this.  It was the goal of the mind controllers to then manage these individual selves for their own ends.  Now the only reason why I am even mentioning this is that it points to the reality of what will happen if you seek to destroy ego.  You simply cannot do it.  Seek to kill it, and it will merely fracture off five of itself in order to survive such a hard blow to itself and in the process you will have a mush more difficult situation than you had before.  Try knitting all these pieces back together.  This can be done, certainly, but the effort to knit ego back together will be a greater challenge prior to the trauma induced. 

The challenge that  denial of ego produces is a rubber banding effect within the psyche most often.  What we repress will come back in a dysfunctional way.  Ego will become exaggerated, will explode, only to go silent again.  You will keep telling yourself that thank goodness it was just one small explosion and you have it under control the rest of the day, but there is still a problem and it will continue to be a problem until you align with the reality of how you are made. 

It is much more healthy to admit and understand you have go than seeking to banish it entirely.  Facing up to ego is much more productive because you learn how to deal with it on a day by day basis out in the open instead of seeking to pretend that it is dead and gone.  Don't do it---it will only lead to problems down the line and you will be chiding yourself for believing you got rid of ego when in fact you hadn't. Your mind will then go to another method or means for destroying ego, all with the same results as before.  So don't do it.  Ask yourself how you can arrange your awareness so that ego is present but not holding the reins in your life.  You can have a much more nuanced and peaceful sense of self if you will do this.  Notice I am not telling you HOW to do this.  There are no techniques.  You simply have to begin telling yourself that you will allow ego to step aside each and every moment.  Your own insides will then begin to take a different form and ego will be less of a problem in an incremental way.  Slow growth is better than seeking to have a lightening fast explosion of growth sometimes, even though these spurts do happen, they just happen more from the higher self than from your own earthbound intention.  You are still a pup learning the ways of cosmic consciousness.  You have a task before you and you are learning to undo centuries worth of thinking that goes beyond just this one life but the slow and gradual accretion of material that has served to create the edifice that is who you are.  Be easy on yourself, find the sense of devotion within that is married to love and compassion and apply that to yourself.  You have all the time in the world, and what you do not complete in this life will be continued in the next. Your spirit will see to it that it happens.

In truth, most people only come by this ego issue through what feels to them (and me) as a kind of collapse of the self, what some call "destruction" (Jesus used this term in describing it in a lesser known gospel) and while it may feel sudden and devastating, it is only in direct proportion to how centrally installed ego was in the first place.  But ego does not die.  Its just not as important as it was before.  A new feeling of importance comes about as a result of this that is not so narrow and monodimensional as before.  Suddenly, the self emerges as a this rich and wonderful thing that it is deeper down.  The ego simply can only deal with things in the way that it did when asked to be the gatekeeper for so much.  Here you can fall in love with yourself in a way that does not court narcissism but instead glories in the beauty of all life, which quite naturally includes yourself.  If nature is beautiful and wonderful, then being a part of nature, you yourself are naturally a part of this, but the difference is that you are less invested in the old positions of where you were when ego was so central.  With ego its all about me.  With ego to the side, it is all about we.  If you want to simplify it even more, think of ego as being the masculine current in you and your infinite self as the feminine.  Or the ego is the left brain and the infinite as the right brain.  They each do different things, and they do things much better when they are in union, when they are working cooperatively together.  And reflecting in this way, by being able to work cooperatively with those of the opposite sex will naturally reflect a willingness and ability to allow your own insides to work cooperatively also, for we each have this dual character inside of us.  We each have the yin and yang, the Shakti and Shiva within us.  It is the cosmic current, and we can put all kinds of labels and attach all kinds of images to them, but they each stand beyond all efforts to pigeon hole them.  All efforts to do so only point in their general direction.  The best way is to know them within yourself.  But once you allow the man to step back, the ego, he allows the woman within to do what she does so well, and she can only do this when the loud ego silences himself.  then her quieter and gentler nature that is her grace and softness to come forward.  Strength is not defined in how strident you are in your opinions, nor in how powerful your ego is. It is also in how compassionate you can be, how much you allow yourself to flow and be at peace.  It is only when we are at peace that the nurturing of the self begins in the same way that a woman can nourish new life in her in a physical way.  Only when we are in a stable and peaceful environment can new life, new ideas, new insight emerge.  Only then are we free to imagine, to go beyond ourselves, to go beyond what we thought (in ego) what we were capable of.  The feminine side I am talking about will always leave the ego side in the dust.  Every time.  And yet, the infinite self is so unbounded, that it is not capable of being able to fit all of this potential into a framework that has a chance of making its entry into physical reality....be it a child, an idea, a school of thought, a new product, or a way of bringing a method into your life for supporting this glorious flow that is the beauty of who you are. 

So don't fool yourself.  Be honest with yourself.  You are indeed stuck with ego, but ego need not be stuck in your very core awareness.  Utilize ego for what it is so good at, but do not make it your god.  If you do, then you will reinforce each other and then it will grow to ridiculous heights.  It just isn't that important in the final analysis.  You will be much more effective a person if you let the flow of the universe into your life.  Stop worrying over how it is all going to work out.  Let the flow more room.  If you do, things will begin to happen much more effortlessly.  You will have begun to anchor a much more effective cooperative mindset and soulset that will facilitate this great mystery that you may have thought was mumbo jumbo five minutes ago but are willing to bring back into your life.  This is the seeming magic that humans keep wanting to believe in.  It is the idea that incredible things can happen if we just let them happen.  And in being open to their happening, they will to the degree that you self realize and examine your competing beliefs that block their being able to happen. Some of the smartest people have the hardest time with this because this is so easy to do.  they think that nothing worthwhile comes easily, but here they are simply wrong.  there ARE things that will come with great ease, but their entry has been blocked just as surely as a gatekeeper within has denied them at the periphery of your being. 

So the garden wall itself begins to tumble down and my analogy is seen as a limited construct simply to get you to a certain place, after which you must abandon the wall and realize that the flowers that you think are yours are also others.  You will then see in the crumbling of that wall that your sense of identify never goes away, it merely refines itself into a much more grand and nuanced sense of self that has nothing to prove and that can move mountains if given half the chance.  I have this happen all the time now as a regular feature of my experience.  It happened yesterday as a matter of fact and it helped to clear the way for a project I am doing with a student whose work will be greatly facilitated through the connection that just showed up as I was displaying work in an out of the way location and entirely out of context with the work that this person does that I met.  The intention had been out there and it was only a matter of time.  It only took a few months, and in terms of the project, the timing could not have been better in all truth.  If you are locked into what the ego believes is possible, then you will always be limited.  Let ego step aside and allow the infinite self to show you the miraculous big and small things that can happen effortlessly.  You may even know people in your life who always seem able to get things done.  They seem just lucky, and you might find yourself feeling jealous or even angry at how easy it is for these people to do what they do.  You might even think you have very good reasons for knowing WHY they can get things done.  Maybe they are rich.  Maybe their wealth somehow puts them in touch with all the right people somehow.  But have you ever wondered how that person manifested their wealth to begin with?  Regardless of how they came into it, they attracted this in one way or another.  Once you tear down your bias towards these people whom you feel jealousy towards, the sooner you can begin to learn from them.  The secret is not some form of privilege, although certainly this may appear so on the outside.  Eventually if you follow the current back far enough, it goes to the headwaters of the soul.  All of it does.  No exception.  And if you can think in this way, you can remove the bias that keeps you stuck where you are thinking that the world is just unfair and some people have it and others do not because of something material in their lives that makes it so.  And yes, the appearance of something like material wealth might seem to be a cause, but it is only a symptom.  Letting your pride go for a minute will open more doors than standing beating your head against the wall. 

The trap of ego is the trap you set for yourself.  You can have too much of it and that is a problem, or you can have too little and believe that its gone and done for.  Either side of this equation there is too much imbalance.  The trick is in being honest about what IS.  This can be known in the moment, right here, and right now.  Keeping your intent in the right place will assist you greatly as this all unfolds in your life.  Whether you collapse ego suddenly or wear it away as it slips to the side, either way, you are setting up a new arrangement of self that is much more conducive to the universal flow that is your birthright. 

Time Traveller

I dreamt last night that I had traveled through time and was meeting my past self as a 17 year old waiting to get on the bus.

How I managed to get back to that particular place and that particular time seemed like a miracle.  As I walked up to him I realized I didn’t know what to say to him, but there was a sense of very real urgency in all of this.  I had landed in this place standing in front of him moments before he would be on the bus, surrounded by people, and on his way to the next place. I was going to talk to him even as I walked up to him I didn’t know what it was I most needed to say. He saw me as I walked up to him and there was this odd moment where he thought I was someone else he recognized but realized I was not him and this led to a still more sudden realization of who I was a split second later.  I was going to talk to him, there was no question about it.  I felt the moment pressing down on me as though I had one page in a book to read and once I did that, it would evaporate from my eyes….

I held his face and said calmly and quietly that I was him…..but from the future.  I knew he would not freak because I knew he used to think about this stuff when I was his age. :-)

The one thing that I knew to tell him was how to see the woman he was in love with, and that if he waited here for a few moments more, he would be able to see her. The message was to love as much as you can.  I could have taken lottery numbers or news of impending war in our time, but in that moment the only thing that mattered was how to help him seize the day and honor love.

A Great Blog On Awakening

I came across the following blog recently and I think it is so well written, so clear, so considered and nondogmatic that I think everyone should know about it.

With the rise of awakenings on the planet, in perfect timing, there are as a result many voices rising to write, blog, create in various ways, with the force or power of awakening serving as their inspiration.  It is also not easy to do, or to do well.  I am constantly caught between crawling inside the microcosm of it seeking to describe every detail to being exploded out into the macrocosm of it and being completely at a loss as to what to even say or do.  I feel like I am circling the fire and trying to explain something that no one else sees, and yet once you see it, you KNOW it and cannot fully describe it at all.  Others who write about it often wind up with very similar sounding language or descriptions.  Our words very often are best when they are simple, straightforward, and sometimes poetic.  I can remember feeling into this and plucking out the word "essential self" only to find it was later used by so many in the community of the awakened.  Similar language abounds amongst those who are not broadly read in the older traditions, or even the newer ones for that matter.  This comes about because it is right...and we all all dip in our own ways into that vast pool of the collective that bears to us a thread of commonality.  Many voices, one voice.  

I give you:  Adapting to Grace.

The Love Level

You enter the world without an expectation of what love is.  No divisions.  Perfect.  A clean slate.  But.  Then love begins to be identified as being associated with certain people.  Love becomes a thing.  A thing you associate with people and things.  A chink in the armor grows and here the karma flows.  Perhaps it is made to do just that; to let in the secrets of the past, the hidden things that must be dealt with if we are ever going to get this thing right.

As long as love is for someone, it is something coming from our own set of expectations, and these will always be limited.  Just is.  So love is limited.  Since it is coming from us, it is also colored by our own projections, what we believe in our limited way what we think it is or can be.  We are then looking to another to fill the void.  We inch closer to something great and terrible.  We inch toward the end of the road where love is FOR something.  It isn’t about anything though. We are not a void.  This is the terrible lie we have told ourselves and we utterly believe it.  It seems that love is for or about something (it HAS to be, right?  Isn’t that what love IS?) , but it is a current so vast and unstoppable that it flows through all our kinks and contortions.  It just is.  It flushes all the dross along with it so we think it is ours.  It is the universe.  AND it is us.  It is way more than what we think it is, and it is an “it” that is not outside of us but is the very stuff of our souls. We were stamped by it, marked by its presence, made to recognize it when it comes like the thief that steals our clothing in the night, which makes us utterly naked to ourselves. It steals away our shame and shows us that all this piety and purity is a false-sense that we have clothed ourselves with.  Divine love first makes wrecks of us in truth, until we get back on our feet and begin following a different star.

We believed in the rigid intoning of long since dead priests and monks and mendicants because we told ourselves we did not know ourselves.  We needed a professional to get us there, and yet those professionals were the most lost of all souls because they believed they knew only made their conceptual corridors all the more rigid. And so you have to be careful even with me when I tell you what it is….because in truth it is only something you can know directly, but when you have gotten it, it transforms you from caterpillar to butterfly.  Until that happens, it makes a wreck of you.  What seemed a process of demolition was in truth the unbending character of love as a force.  It will not apologize to you or soothe you.  It will come into your life and it will wash away everything that does not belong to your soul that is not serving knowing ‘it.”  And this isn’t even done because it wants to get rid of all the dross that is not necessary in your life.  It does it the same way that the wind will knock limbs out of trees.  It didn’t do it out of spite or even intention.  It did it because of what it is and has always been.  And when you recognize this, then you can submit yourself for such cleansing and realize it is just what you need to do to more properly align to it and realize that where you align and feel it like a power like no other are the parts of you that are moving in harmony with it.  What we mistake it for is how we choose to express it.  Yes it makes us kind.  Yes it makes us want to be generous and considerate.  But you see, it is more than how it makes us respond.  It is a sentient force somehow….or SEEMS so, and perhaps it is only the force of the blood coursing through the veins of God/dess and we, like tiny cells somewhere in the kidney or skin take it to be some great presence that we want to idolize and personify.  It is a great mystery. Like the wind. We cannot see it, but we can feel it, and in feeling it, we can learn how to become it….and perhaps harness it.  But in harnessing it, we get a by-product don’t we?  And that is fine, perfect, wonderful to have this by-product, but for now I am pointing to the source.

And then it is felt.  It is this incredible surge of energy so strong it knocks you flat.  It makes you grow nauseous.  Not because it is sickening, but because it is stronger than anything you have ever felt, and your physical body has a little trouble translating the etheric energetic flow now moving through you straight from the center of the cosmic universe (think of how aware we are now of the great central sun of our own milky way galaxy right now as our solar system dips into a place where we are out of a dust cloud and receiving more direct radiation from the center of the galaxy—-it is warming the entire solar system up as the ice caps on Mars are now all gone and the earth and Neptune and Saturn all show definitive signs of warming…it is like that….this force flowing from the center of SOMETHING ineffable and mysterious and great).  And as you flow and loosen the kinks within, it only grows stronger.  It is coming out of you.  Not because of anything happening; simply because of what you are. You are now no longer resisting it, no longer keeping your finger in the dyke to keep back the rush of its waters (which would surely wash away all of your carefully constructed life….which is perhaps the point….yet we resist without even knowing it)  You are touching on the infinite within and it is waking up inside of you. It is so undivided your mind simply cannot make sense of it.  You really ought not do that.  Let it be.  Watch it like a cascading river in front of you.  It is a torrent that simply must be.  For as long as your mind will let you, let it be just this.  It seems to WANT to be here like this….but this is just my own observation….it may not even care…it may be so utterly unconditional that this is beside the point.

Then, learn to harness it in your highest. Not the easiest thing to do.  It is a hard task master because it has NO side.  It simply IS.  It takes no side.  This is hard for our delicate egos to deal with.  And yet, it is what it is.  It could not be what it is so perfectly if it were divided out in the way we’d like to make it.  So you learn that this is like the tail of a very powerful tiger straight from the multiverse.  You can move with it, or you can get dragged along. Eventually you learn to ride it and let it take you where something still larger seems to be needing to go.  You look at the wreck of a past life and you leave it behind.  Its sheer force bids you to forget; do not even bother picking up the wreckage because it would only remind you of that old world where you were so perfectly perched and so utterly dead to yourself and the rest of the world.  You only know this AFTER it flows through you and changes you because it is unbelievable what THIS will do to you.  It seems big, and it is, but it is also very small.  It is the mustard seed.  It is bringing heaven to earth. Just by letting it flow, you are doing this.  You are changing the terms of engagement here on the planet, and it is the most goddamned awesome power and no force in the world is going to stop it because it is flowing through YOU and YOU are sovereign now.  You are your own freed soul.  Lifting above the mists, above the clouds, you see something for the first time with the eyes of your heart that tells you that there is a different way. It bids you not to be afraid of joy and bliss and pleasure. Forget those people who say those who seek pleasure are weak.  Those are lost hard souls.

Our very nature is to be bliss.  We forgot that in the Garden.  We ran from the Source of bliss and are only now returning in great numbers. You then wind up seeking forgiveness for all your efforts at trying to control it or fit it into your conceptions of what it is.  Because it was like water, it naturally filled your life to the extent that you let it.  But that wasn’t all that it was or is. he more you let go, the more it can show you what it is, and the more you let it be, the more you feel it.  In feeling this, the more it fills your life no through kinks but in greater flows.  This will not satisfy everyone you meet.  Love becomes like this wild thing that is part of everything and we are used to partitioning it off and saying this is for Lucy, this part is for Tom, and this is for my car……because I love my car.  Or money.  Or sunsets.  But it is just flowing as it always has.  When you can let it be like that, it will do something remarkable.  Then when you can let it flow and BE in you, its wildness and power can be felt less as for something as what it always has been.  If you can let it flow in your life, then the fountain will never lessen.  You will have become it.  A living reflection of its mighty power.  It has the ability to utterly change you.  And make you into love.

Its not easy talking about this because it seems to almost trivialize it as well as make it seem terribly ambiguous.  It just can’t be described better than it can be experienced.  Yes it sparks inspiration. Yes it drives creativity to new heights.  Yes it drives greater love that fills lives.  It transforms lives, mostly your own.  After a while, it just seems impossible to even explain.  Just come to the edge and slip quiet into the water at night and swim its deep currents.  Once there, you will never wish to get out as our voices rise into the stars at night and our movement merges into one greater movement that shows us that home was always within. Even as we journey there together.

Chakras and New Awareness

I would like to expand your awareness a little today.  Breathe deep if you have to and be ready to consider something new.

Consider that a lot that we know has been handed down to us.  We tend not to trust our feelings or our own awareness or capacity to simply know.  So I am going to offer you this one treat and ask that you carry it within to see how it helps you to see anew. When you consider that the world is not set in concrete and that your own thinking need not be either, can you be free to see more broadly.  This is the cutting edge of your being.  One thing that we have been told by those who have come before is that the chakras represent a gradual migration of the soul into ever higher realms of awareness.

I am going to suggest to you that this is just not so.  But in order for you to know this for yourself, you have to give it a chance.  A good chance.  So here goes.

Yes, you have chakras.  Yes, they have different frequencies of vibration. As a result of this certain issues or characteristics tend to migrate to those chakras.  It is the Law of Attraction.  Like attracting like.  Simple.  Straightforward.  But who says that the crown chakra is the penultimate of our experience?  Our ancestors have.  Why buck tradition. right?  Well, consider that awareness changes, expands, over time. Just like the universe is said to expand. You are going to have to allow your old biases to be set aside for a moment to consider something truly remarkable here.  It can have a deep impact on you if you let it. So be like a child for a moment.  Consider there is something amazing yet to discover. 

I have used Thales the Presocratic philosopher before in explaining a sense i have about the way the universe is ordered, which is that everything that is has its higher expression.  Everything that is is energetically, like a cone.  Yes, a cone.  This cone expands outward into larger and larger scopes.  Thales, who I quote once said "All things are full of gods."  It is my feeling that he meant the same thing; that all things have their higher expression, and that the atom or quark has its own god.  I don't mean god or goddess in the usual way we are used to thinking of it (as something outside of us) but rather that we ourselves have our own higher expression of ourselves in eternity.

Now I know this might be a hard one to grasp for the first time. So I will suggest to you that time itself is not quite what we think it is.  Sure, we experience it in the way we normally do, which is a linear progression where events follow each other in a neat and orderly fashion.  Certainly.  However, the bigger picture is that our time is itself a subset of a still larger expression of time as an ever expanding present.  People who have had NDE's (Near Death Experiences) have all expressed their sense of this Present as eternity.  Jane Robert's Seth also spoke about this Present and that time itself is largely illusory.  It isn't that it isn't real.  It serves a purpose, but it has a way of going by the wayside to a certain extent when you reach into higher forms of consciousness.  You aren't stopping time here, it still marches on. However, you can begin to glimpse different aspects of time.  You can see into the future.  Time can slow way way down or speed up unimaginatively fast.  This is not just an a trick of the mind. it is how we choose to perceive it.  So there is more to time than just what we have here.  And in the same way, there is more to you than meets the eye.  there is a god and goddess within, a larger expression of yourself which you can and will encounter as you move along this road to higher forms of consciousness.  It is a given. It is not some egoistic illusion where you hope for some grander form of your ego existing, no.  It is just what is.  Your consciousness expands "outward" as you are ready to experience that part of what you are.

The same is true for your energy system.  The root chakra is thought of as the denser of all vibrations.  But this is not true.  Neither is the crown the ultimate in human experience.  The reason why this is so is because each part of you, each particle of your being and awareness has its higher expression.  The root chakra, then, is made up of layers.  I recently mentioned them in the post a few below this one as being the Hindu concept of the Sheaths.  Or layers.  Like an onion.

So what I want you to try is to feel deeply within all levels of your being to tap the inner divine in you.  the crown certainly has its role to play in this, but so does every other part of you.  the chakras are like highways for broad currents to flow but you also have countless smaller vortices's or chakras all throughout your body.  In fact, if you were to see them as I have seen them, you would know that the body is a vast webwork of energy lines that get so small that they resolve into a kind of glow.  Leylines of the self, let's say.  But this energy system is also nonlocal, which also means for the physicist that it has not one location in space time.  It can be anywhere and everywhere.  This is part of precognition and intuitive insight.  Here you are, and you are everywhere.  But your awareness and focus tend to be a bit limited, so this will take some focus in order to being streaming it in.

What keeps you from experiencing the divine union in anything other than the crown is your own focus.  So begin focusing gently on each center and see or feel how each center is itself connected to the divine.  This isn't something that is hard to do because it is in truth what you are.  What will keep you from glimpsing the divine at each level are your own blinders, your own shame or guilt or lack of self esteem.  The plus in all of this is that by focusing and doing this little piece of work, you also wind up clearing out your inner attic of any unnecessary material. Your own inventory of junk that is best released.  And as this happens, you feel the divine ever more clearly.  this then leads to still greater awareness and this can lead to a cascading effect within you.  All you have to do is to consider it a possibility.  That, and you may have to lay aside what you thought you knew for this radical thought I am offering you.  I promise you, it wont lead you down some primrose path.  If you are honest and let the junk go free, you can begin to glimpse this reality.  To do so means embracing all that you are unconditionally.  You are worth this moment "in time" to do this.  And if you are easy with yourself, you can begin to glimpse the reality that these words contain.

So no technique or method; you know the way.  It is native to you.  Just be quiet and feel your energy.  Let it flow through you and just let yourself float.  Feel each center begin to lighten and shimmer as its great truth is revealed. Feel into it.  Do not think.  Just be.  that is the best technique I can give you.  The way to this awareness is what you are deeper down.  So let yourself go deep.  Feel the shimmering energy within you and don't try to make it do anything.  Just let it BE. 

The idea that there is only one center that is touched by god or goddess is itself a form of separation. Prime Creator is in EVERYTHING, so it makes perfect sense that its presence can be sensed in the wind, in the water, in the glisten in an eye, and in every fiber of your being.  So let those fibers speak to you.  Let yourself listen for a while.  And let me know how it goes.  :-)

Knowing

As I lay in bed I felt it come over me, this self turning into itself, something I cannot quite explain, only what can be experienced directly.  Like a bud which blooms as a mystery is revealed from within that is also without. A stillness that is not still, a broader being in a vast ocean, floating within an ocean of potentiality. I told you there was no way to really explain this.  My mind turned to those who do not know this.

Nietzsche once said that the people thought those mad who danced because they could not hear the music.  For ages we have been stuck in this place, destroying and killing our own kind because of something we thought was madness in them because we did not hear the music or knew what they knew. Certainly Christianity was this way, but it goes deeper than that.  Science is set up in similar ways.  It all flows out of a rigidness within human nature, an inability to expand awareness to consider that maybe, just maybe, there is worth in the seeming madness of others.  Women were branded witches in what we call the Dark Ages.  They had old folk knowledge of how to heal, or may have had a glimmer of inspiration, this life of this Bud which rests within every single soul on the planet.  And yet, so tightly shut, they do not know.  Certainly as I awoke, I tried to explain to those around me what was happening to me.  I was only a mile down a hundred mile journey.  It is hard to know the bigger story when you are so fresh into it.  One part of me cautioned me to keep quiet, that I would end up like all the people branded witches, misunderstood for the beautiful thing they were or would become.  I had kept no pretense about being different, even from the beginning.  Everyone knew about this who was close to me.  I was told that I needed to get a grip on myself, that I was to blame for the ills of others.  Every person who abuses is most often a claimant to victim hood.  This is both a projection of their own insanity onto the world which in my case was like living in a world gone mad.  But it wasn't that I was immune, for I had been led to just such a place by my own insanity, the part of me which kept me from the divine knowledge of who and what I was curled up in this bud.  We all so identify with our neurosis that we cling to it and will not let go of it even though heaven awaits.  This was my case.  But I was willing to let go. I let go of the madness around me, stopped subscribing to the sickness which had gripped our kind for so long.  I had children and all of this worried me greatly.  I had to find peace that one of them chose to go a different path despite facts and reality shining right in front of him.  We greatly love our neurosis and will cling to it to the very last.  All we can do is pray for those who continue to suffer, because trying to tell them about the music and way we dance is like speaking madness to a madman.  And even though mad, those around this madman will believe the words spoken which are distortions of the truth.  We will march to war for this conviction, and we will abuse children by asking them to take sides when there should never be such a side taken.  When se seek to demonize one another in this way, we empty life of its promise and all who are touched by this are touched by the death of the soul, a leaking away of the very life force that will invigorate and awaken the self to a still larger awareness of what it is.  Out of self loathing and hate, we empty life of all that makes it special, miraculous and full of wonder.  Those who watch this process believe in it, cheer and push it on, as they seek to reinforce the part of themselves which mirror all the death that they see around them.  And each life is diminished by this and the war against awareness lives another day in the hearts of those who fail to see the light or the music which plays just beyond their range of hearing.  But it does not change that there is a symphony of wonder playing just beyond their ken.

But just so you know, this most certainly comes through with a bearing on ego.  Certainly.  I make no bones about it.  But neither do I pretend in the fallacy that ego dies.  If you read my blog, you know where I stand on this.  There is a lot of delusional thinking it seems in the world of awakening stil, and it is okay. People will be ready when they are ready.  Until then, ego awaits its true unfolding in the self.  There is more to understand, to be aware of.  Until then.....

When we set ourselves against such forces of our own making, of the grinding turn of darkness in the world, we make ourselves an enemy of the dark as we awaken to the warrior of light within.  Every great leader so awakened has tried to relay this fundamental truth to the suffering of humankind and have all met terrible ends.  Until the madness is stopped and healed, this goes on.  But the bud rests within each of us, and it will take a deft hand and a kind heart to help it to open.  The only thing that will urge it into bloom is a special type of love of which the loves we know on this earth are but a hint  or glimmer of in this great symphony of a world that exists just beyond most people's reach.  The reach is not without, but within.  the path to it is through awareness.  It is a willingness to see all of our foibles, our missteps, our misconceptions and seek honestly for a better way.  It requires confessing our sin against ourselves and the divine that dwells within all.  The divine is not conferred by good action or deed, but is inherent in ALL.  It is not a gift bestowed upon those who do right.  It is not a reward. It was freely given in the beginning when our souls were new and we were untried.  Even then was it there and even now does it rest withing every single particles, within every heart and mind, each animal, insect, and thing that is here.  We live within the body of the divine and some of us are just waking up to this incredible fact.  Even in science, in physics have they been saying for a century now that the matrix of all matter is mind, that everything is part of an intelligence, a holographic seeding of the universe with something so incredible, we have simply thought it too grand the believe.  Or see.  And in choosing not to see, we have turned from its reality to the false reality of the insanity that has filled our lives.

All of this can be over when you are ready for it to be.  All of this finger pointing, this blindness, this punishment, this hurt.  All of it can go out with the trash tomorrow.  It can be simply left behind and a new way allowed.  It is as simple as the intent to make it so.  Gone is our dizzying fascination with the car wrecks in life, of the hurt and suffering others feel.  We tell ourselves how horrible it all is, and yet we cannot pull ourselves away to look the other way.  We take some grand sick enjoyment in the suffering of others and in so doing, turn a blind eye to our own and the mote in our own eyes as we congratulate ourselves for how much better our own pitiful lives are.

We hold onto our neurosis because we fear anything different.  We hold onto it like some badge of self righteousness that defines our own broken beings, unable to see just how incredibly ridiculous that it all is.  And we go on in this fashion ad nauseum thinking it the only option that we have left to us when all it takes is a little awareness and willingness to see our own shortcomings and forgive them.  For when we do this, it is as though we place a great fulcrum against our destinies and we shift the world that we lived in.  It rocks boats and it causes a shudder to gather 'round each life that it affects, but it is not the end of the world but the beginning of it.  It is the wild cry of the soul seeking to break its old cognitive shackles that have held it for so long.  It is the one cry that makes any sense in a world gone mad.  And those who do are reviled as the ones mad even though they speak the only true sense left in the world.

So if this bud is going to open, it will be because you have been driven to the very edge of your capacity to cope with this dry rot of a world that you have been living in. This is so because the only time we let loose of our insanity is when there is no other option available to us.   But once you do, something in you will turn so inextricably to the truth that nothing else can shake it.  Here, in a place of such great uncertainty, the one thing that remains certain is that the old way is simply no longer working and your own self, your soul, fashions a new way for you to go forward.  And in what may seem a fools errand, will come such wonder and amazement that you too will know the promise that this holds even as you join the ranks of those who hear a symphony no one else hears.  But by then, there is no turning back lest death find you and overtake you one drop by precious darkening drop.  The desperation will have grown so great, the bridges to completely burned that there is nowhere to go but forward into this new life and land.  No paths save the one you alone blaze will be the mark that you were even here at all, and it will be for you alone to know the wonder of it, for this was not made to be shown to anyone except yourself to yourself.  When we break out of the old means of dysfunction that tell us that we are responsible for the happiness of each other will the way forward be better known and the madness of our old ways finally realized.  Until then, it will be like beggars eating dust and thinking it a great banquet.  Any fool can be lied to and believe it. Only once you have tasted the clear waters of this life will you know just how dimly you have seen and tasted of life and the great spirit that is indwelling that has been so carefully hid within yourself that you scarcely knew it even existed.

This path requires bravery.  It is a wild war hoop of the nations, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a soul unbound by what it was told was wrong for a way that is perfectly right.  For most though, in order to taste it, you have to be at the end of your rope.  And when that time comes, the great chasm you see opening up below you will not forsake you when you let go, but begin to support you as it yawning maw transforms into something that could only be dreamed.  Only then will you begin to be a true captain of your soul. Only then will you be overtaken with the knowing of just who you are as a bud beckons you deeper into a world full of wonder and bliss beyond imagining.  Here, you will have died and been reborn.  You will learn the secrets of the true resurrection.  Here you will be filled with knowing which I cannot speak to you about because it is yours and yours alone to face and become. And on that day I shall know the glimmer you have added to the great chorus that is becoming on this planet, that is the collective blooming of knowing that is our one salvation.

The Etheric Sheaths

The Hindus call them sheaths.  I experience them as layers which are not always clearly defined like the layers of an onion. This sense or awareness of layers becomes more obvious as you go through awakening and get some time under your belt with this phenomenon.  The material that you shed is that which has stood in the way of your authentic self being able to be present and more fully known. I know it may sound silly; don't I already know who I am? You can tell perhaps that the statement is very relative. Well yes. You do know who you are. There is also more of you to know.  Perhaps it is as though one day someone gave you a microscope and you were able to discover whole worlds of yourself that you never knew existed.  They were of course there all along, and everything you see is mostly no big surprise, for since it is you, it has a certain essence peeking out from within it that naturally makes everything have an air of the familiar.  Familiar, but also new.  Maybe a distant sense of familiarity,  Sometimes, though, and often for me, every time a layer is removed, it feels like a revelations.  And that, at least for me, is exactly what all of this is; a revelations.  A revealing of ourselves to ourselves.  None of them are foreign, and none strike you as new.....you realize it had always been there...somehow it seems as though some essential part of you is rising to the surface of awareness, as though the stuff that never really mattered all that much is suddenly being sloughed off like a snake skin.  Perhaps no surprise, then why kundalini is so often associated with snakes. There isn't a literal snake in you, there is just some things that have a serpentine sensation when it first rises that could be attributed to being LIKE a snake. A skin that gets shed, an ability to make ones self over, or to renew ourselves. 

These layers.  They reside in each chakra center. Many are told that you feel the energy rise from root to crown and you are done. But this is not so. This is just the beginning. The force of awakening continues to move in you.  This is why if you think you have removed an entire layer of material from your etheric sheath, this is just one layer.  We are complicated creatures!  A number of years ago I experienced a heart clearing in my chakra.  During my awakening I knew that the energy was having trouble penetrating that center for some reason.  I didn't know why.  Much of the material that was clogging the heart had been driven down into the subconscious.  Some of what was clogging it came from other lifetimes.  All of this material would be churned up, blessed and forgiven and the center would be opened more and more. The effect for me on the first clearing was feeling an enormous sense of space in my heart. It felt pretty amazing to me at the time. Then, about a year later, I had another heart clearing and opening that was completely different from the earlier one. By this time, I had by this time removed a number of other things from my field of awareness, and now with the heart opening at this new level, the effects were so utterly profound I simply do not have words for it.  What it did for me, though, was to open my soul to the possibilities for feeling on a continual basis. I felt as though someone had hooked my heart into a 1,000kva power line of pure cosmic bliss!  For days after this, I continued to have these heart openings that would cause my body to shake and move.  My head would fly backwards.  I just could not help it.  My body wanted to arc upwards.  I understood in those moments what was meant by kriyas, which are involuntary movements brought on by the movement of kundalini.  Then, a year later, there was ANOTHER heart clearing and opening that was completely different from the previous one that involved a long standing pain I had felt that was being driven or illuminated by the presence of kundalini. Each time this happened, more material was shed. Each time my heart felt different. Each time, there were marked energetic effects that accompanied these clearings, and while I can describe to you how these felt, each was different and I also tend to think each person is going to be different.  Some clearings come reluctantly as the self holds on for dear life.  This can give the energy a completely different quality then, say, complete surrender.  Some energy feels thick and vibrant while others feel incredibly light and buoyant.   How you respond will determine the quality of the energy based on how you participate with it.  Each time there has been a clearing I feel "Ah!  I have finally made it!"  only to realize that this has all happened before, and that this is a steady shedding of old material from my being.  I am, step by step, coming home to myself and the inevitable realization of who I am in the bigger picture.  So, absent having this sense, it is easy to think that with some time under our belt, there is nothing else to do.

I feel that the process is continuous.  There is no arrival, only an infinity of arrivals into the present whereby we are transformed, changed, brought back to square.  Each time a new level or different level and aspect of our complex being is changed.  Forever. And yet, we continue on, deeper in soul, more vital, more joyful, more alive.  Each time these experience seem to put us into contact with essential portions of ourselves that we are just now discovering and whose essence has been tied into the seed or germ of this experience even from the very beginning when things seemed so new and mysterious. We move into the place where we shed this old layer, and it feels like THE release, which it of course is in a way, but once the self settles back ito itself, it is more as though you have just shifted gears.  It is a new gear, yes, but now it is time to start working through THAT gear, revving the cosmic engine ever higher until it is time to shift from THAT gear into a still newer one.  Over and over and over this goes on, and the wonder of this experience is in coming to know your relationship and presence as a divine being with the cosmos which is all interconnected, part of a vast family of being that is just about incomprehensible.  Without the power of love and intuition, I don't know that we'd have the means to wrap our beings around this.  It is a beautiful and wonderful miracle that we do, though.

So feel into each level.  Avoid using the intellect to decide what you think is going to happen next or where you think you are now. Be like a child; be open and embrace the world with as much wonder as you can muster.  Be full of joy that you have been given this life, that it is good enough to simply be happy to just BE. If you can approach all of this in this way, each moment remains fresh, free from weight and burden and there is always something exciting just around the corner to see and explore.  All of this that is happening to you, this awakening, is a good sign, a fortuitous happening.  You are coming into your own.  Instead of building something, though,  it is more like you are tearing something down. How do you build a house by tearing it down?  Only in awakening is this true. Tear it down, burn it down; what remains is essential and important to the soul, to your authentic self.  By removing all that mental jewelry, you can get a better feel for what you are deep down and your relationship with the cosmos, your own divine source of being.

Just let the layers keep peeling away.  Observe.  Observation seems to help in removing material.  The effect of being able to stand back and observe instead of being so bound up in our own little dramas helps in developing the type of perspective that is needed.  It helps you to put things into proper dimension.  Is it really important that someone doesn't like you?  Is it really important that someone is bad mouthing you?  Is it important that someone doesn't like you?  Really, it doesn't.  And the Observer in you can help you to stand back from all the drama in life and find what it important.  What is important is the sheer presence of awareness, the illuminating quality of your own being without regard to position or idea, belief or identification with who said what or how.  Here, you can feel your authentic self, here you can step back and feel yourself become very quiet in the moment.  Suddenly, all the wars and struggles in the world feel like a vast carnival ride.  They have been going round and round like this for ages, and they will likely keep going around like this for ages more. Enjoy the ride, learn what you need to learn or want to learn, but the Observer allows you the ability to laugh at this ride and step off, and begin the process of shifting into a different dimension of experience. 

There is something powerful in our intentional gaze it seems.  By being quiet you can allow something still broader and more powerful to enter your life and make for interesting change.  Good change.  There is no loss, here, only a gain, which I know sounds paradoxical, but you will very soon see and know intimately what I mean.  And it may be that some layers are like fragments of a still larger layer.  I say peel away what you can, let drop what is ready to drop away and do not worry about it.  You are, after all, in very capable hands. Trust and surrender. Peace comes as we remove those things that were a barrier to inner peace and bliss.

Energy will come in pure streams of heavenly bliss that might leave you shaking and amazed.  Energy may course through your system in a turbulent fashion, bringing up precognitions, visions, and insights.  It can bring a sense of unity in your being and thought.  Life suddenly resolves into a perfect holographic diamond where the light of the prime creator shines.  But whatever your experience, even if it is hard, is YOUR experience, and just because it is at variance with what someone else may have described does not diminish your experience one iota.  Claim it, wear it joyfully and if it too must slip away later, then so be it.  

What began as a writhing feeling moving up your core may turn into something that feels like the wind the next go-round. In another round, it could feel thick and hard.  It might get pushed into other centers, while in others, the density feels completely different.  In one layer things may feel quiet while in others there is a brilliant shimmer happening all around your awareness.  Sit back and watch.  There is plenty reason to trust this process. Do not be afraid, keep moving and know the bliss you feel comes from the Prime Creator. You are this being inside of you and digging deep, you will find it.  I know this sounds like heresy to some, but I tell you it is true. But this god/goddess self is not some grandiose being (well maybe it IS grandiose!), it is most often quiet but profoundly powerful.  But trust and Observe. I think you will feel a real sense of amazement in what more could be coming along for you! 

Love

I was asked recently what I thought love is and I admittedly was not up to it.  I am not up to it because it is a dizzyingly broad word and takes in so many different perspectives and ways of feeling.  I think, though, that that is not a bad thing, it just does not make talking about it especially easy because of its broadness.  When something is so broad it also has the capacity to contradict itself, or seem to. Love is the biggest contradiction to humankind I think for the simple reason that the finest form of it is so completely unconditional and humans, so often, are steeped or conditioned to be conditional.

I am sitting with you and you and I are sitting by a small river.  We are talking about this concept of love and we have been at it for days.  Literally.  We keep coming back to this one spot because of the perspective that it gives.  Here, nearest us, the waters are calm and move by gently.  When you put your toe into the water, it is pleasantly cool with eddies of warmth from the sun shining on the slow surface layers that slowly tumble and mix with this lazy river.  And yet, to our right and just several yards away is a small creek that is rushing like mad and making a lot of noise  making its way into the river.  As we look down the river a little further, we can see how the slow river turns into rapids as the depths become shallows near a sandbar. It is a whole different world over there since the water moves so differently than the calm quiet current near your toe touch.

But, we have been talking about this for days and it is clear; the small creek is also the river but does not KNOW it is the river until it enters into it, or becomes it.  The creek never knows it will be that river until it is.  Only then will its being be changed and its own being is changed in that instant of merging into that something larger.  And this is how love can be in some people's experience.  Some love is furious like this creek, but it can be also limited in scope, too, until something comes along, or IT comes along and finds itself emptying out into a still larger waterway.  The creeks likes to move fast and hot and hard and perhaps even drop over large rocks and make a lot of noise in the night.  That, I insist, is love even though it moves into a larger current that redefines itself. It is still the same water that dropped out of the heavens and is seeking its way to the ocean. It is the same everywhere that water flows.  It is all love even though it gets expressed so differently, so broadly.

If you think that love is only this calm peaceful river that gives calmness and solemnity to the creek's mad dash to the Source, consider that even this river will very soon, in the not too distant distance, suddenly be all a-shiver in rapids its own self. A calm deep and ancient river can itself turn into a frothing tumble of a gorge.  Never underestimate the power of love to change and transmute.  It is so important and so big that it simply wears many different faces or masks.  It has to.  Even we take love and turn it into all kinds of things.  It becomes our own and we bend it to our will.  Being water, it does what it always has done; it follows its level and the path of least resistance.  It isn't that it is lazy, but incredibly efficient.  It seeks I think to remake you.  And if it not a seeking, then this is just what it does.  We say love is kind, gentle, tormented, or even obsessive, but it is just what we do with it in our hands. There is a miller five miles up the river who uses water to grind grain. How odd that seems as we sit with our feet steeped in its cool flow.  But there it is.  Love has so many faces, uses.  It is the current of all life.  It gives rise and form to everything.  Don't ask me to explain why I say this is so.  I prefer not to get into the quantum mechanical stuff just now....

The woman who shows love to her child is nurturing and loving to that child. She brings the baby to her breast and holds that baby and looks deep into its eyes as her own essence is shared and beamed into that child in the form of her great love.  And only moments later this same woman will lie with a man who will be hungry for her body and fiery essence as well but in a completely different way.  In the same fashion, the father who is gentle and kind to his daughter will show flashes of passion to his wife or lover.  The same river runs deep and gentle or torpid and wild. It all folds into itself.  Only we seek to divide it and say it is this or that.  Instead, we do little to ponder its great mystery and prefer to erect taboos and barriers because we ourselves cannot be trusted with certain kinds of love, only in certain instances.  Love, though, will guide if we but allow it to.  Clearly, clear-eyed and carefully and aware. 

We love food and we love art.  We love each other, and we do so in dizzying degrees and ways.  One way is completely different from the other and yet we all use the same word.  Some people say love while some cross their arms smugly and say "lust" and turn away.  We use love broadly, perhaps to broadly, and yet we know that love encompasses many different states and ways, styles and means.
Someone suggests that love is just and yet love showers upon all good or bad.  Like the sun, love is not withdrawn from any of us.  The worst and the best, so we say, and yet how do we know what is bad within such a narrow picture of the infinite.  How do we know that the worst of us do not go on to do the greatest of deeds in their advanced age in the cosmos.  And would not love itself contradict itself by holding itself back?  When love does that, doesn't it cease being love? And yet, even so, how do we fit it into a world where morality and values and concepts of how to be or should be reigns supreme?  Well, we do what we have always done; we shape and mold love to our uses until we are done shaping it and flow with it.  Then we become it, and that is perhaps when we simply disappear into it in the greatest form of worship that there is.

But I have a secret for you.  I have been holding it back a little because it is the best of all.
All of these things, all of these faces of love merge into one current, and it is within this current that you can stand and feel all of it as an undivided force.  It is here in this place that a miracle has come to me and which can come to you too.  No longer is it something that you just feel for someone.....it is an undeniable force that can no longer JUST be experienced in its small rivulets or streams but as all of it undivided and thus unfocused in a way, yet highly responsive.  A river with endless fingers and pulses, of infinite receptivity and decisiveness within its flowing character.  Felt directly, it is difficult because it is such a revelation.  It could, I suppose, drive some mad who are unable or unwilling to surrender to its one simple and primal truth.  It is the great river that will carry each of us to a vast and endless ocean that is everything.  The only way we can hope to survive is to simply become one with it and borrow from it its own boundless strength.  When your awareness awakens to it, it feels like molten ice flowing through you.  It is dark and light, fiery and cold.  It is the entirety of the universe distilled down into a drop that is at once you and the universe.  If you cant handle the paradox of that, you will miss the river as it flows through you.  In fact, many of us have done just that most of our lives until that one moment when enough of ourselves knits itself back into unity enough to spark awakening and something simple dawns on you that forever grows in depth and dimension.  To flow most free in this river means that you take off all that has encumbered you.  Only then are you most buoyant.

When the sun goes down and the moon rises quietly overhead, you hear and feel the voices of all the people who have ridden in the current of this vein of life and you realize its all that has been and will ever be.  In that silent slip of a moment you are unbound by the time or mortal life and feel the thickening of eternity settling around you with its own certainty.  In such places and times are people undone, taken apart, left to die to the old life they lived and wake up gradually in a new one.  What seemed like sheer violence is now known in a new context as the greatest of mercies, the tenderest way of being.  It means that you can touch the lips of another from a vast distance because this is just how strong this thing called love is.  And even given that, love will itself mix and tumble with the mud of our world and make a dark mix of things until it all resolves back to its pure state.
Love is indeed paradoxical, broad, narrow, hot and fast and slow and warm and cold as ice.  It is all of this just as a mighty river might be.  But even as you experience all of this for yourself, it will always be more and you will always be breathless trying to keep up if you are a knower of souls and a seeker of the Creator's thoughts.  But perhaps, in saying all of this, I have just touched on what I know love to be.  Certainly it is more than just that, but we here have numbered days even though the river does not.

So there is certainly more to say, and because of the many ways of love, I naturally wind up leaving the juicy parts out, but I leave and skim like a stone that does not wait to lunge headlong into the depths but instead skips along on the surface as it touches the many different currents that make up the river that has you casting stones upon its surface.  So suffice it to say that in romantic love there is much more to be known and thus a story that will unfold which will be your own journey to discovery.  I would hate to ruin the surprise near the end.  Perhaps if we ignored all of the rest of love and considered only one of its masks might I be able to satisfy what it is you might be looking for or yearning to know or hear.  Those are like chapters in a book that I have not yet written but are more expressed in the color of my  lips and the flow of my blood and it is carried in my veins like a gentle warm river.  Eventually we ourselves write those chapters and when we do, we have the vast repertoire with which to navigate them while learning to become one with them and stand suspended and transformed both of them and not....curious creatures that pause and reflect as we do.

As all of these different currents all flow back together and into one in your own awareness, you too will experience what this can be as a force moving through your very fiber, that penetrates deep into every crevice and spot you had ignored.  It will sweep you and fill you with its presence and you wont ever be the same.  You will arise thankful in the end that it was so rough with you that it would not bend when you lay crumpled and fearful of its great immense force, willing to stand up once again and seek to know its flow in a new way, with clearer eyes and a richer heart.  You will have been taken back, claimed by the river as you begin dreaming of a still greater world, which is the ocean.  The rest is yours to know and explore, and I leave you as the ocean takes you and a smile spreads across your heart.