The Ocean Of Bliss

Just as there is a kind of ocean of sorrow, there is also an ocean of bliss.  I have come upon this place and it is described by many.  the experience of it is consistent from experiencer to experiencer.  It has a vastness to it, and endless quality and it rests in a state of neutral potentiality.  It is like a vast source that has feeling or presence as bliss but it does not contain the same sense of volition that you would normally associate with sentient life.  And yet it is life.  It is just a different form, a different level.  It is more like a higher order presence that certainly is made up from the collective bliss of all.  It is possible, although I cannot say with absolute certainty, that it might be  a field of energy that has always been and is not dependent on what we do even when it is connected to us in higher awareness.

The Hindus have described this as a sea of milk which Shiva froths into ghee, which is refined butter.  The imagery here is just that, a material way to relate what is not material.  We mustn’t take the imagery as strict since the energy itself is without normal physical form.  It is just a way to relate to it.  As such, the milk is connected to the imagery developed to describe the bliss of awakening.  If you read into this and tease out the details you will see that this sea of milk is in truth seminal fluid. Out of Shiva’s head you will notice that his hair swirls into a kind of funnel shape where a white discharge of liquid is always seen flowing.  This flow is shown to flow from him and into the mountains and out into the ocean. It is seen as the bliss which he bestows upon all life.  Shakti is often shown with her hands caressing this fluid in her hands as it flows out along its way to this ocean. This is at least a nod to how these two forces are related.

These are images and they tell the tale like poetry gives voice to the ineffable.  But these images were created, and since the culture from whence it came was paternalistic, the bliss is seen from the vantage point of men who had experienced this bliss themselves.  Certainly, for them, the bliss is very similar to orgasm except it is now loosened throughout their bodies so that the flow of this bliss moves up their whole being and out the top of their head.  Thus the seminal discharge from the top of his head.

I point this out because these higher order experiences can be described in your own way.  If you are a woman, how might you relate to this sea of bliss? What images might you prefer to connect to it?  For a male there is an awareness of opening a door, entering into a vessel of great possibility and fertile power.  This is related to our own sexual union and much of it is felt and seen in similar terms.  A man opens a woman, a woman engulfs the man.  they each draw and contribute in this singular act of creativity.  And yet each will feel and respond differently to the same thing, just along different energetic polarities.  One pulls in, the other plants or tills the soil. One sparks life, the other nurtures it.  These qualities are very different, yet beautifully cooperative. One cannot exist creatively without the other.  This is so in our physical world but also in our spiritual world, too.  As above, so below. 
It has been the journey of art to create new ways to see and relate to inner material and this journey has been about changing how we see and relate to all of this.  So you have this great power for shifting your perceptions.  Perhaps an old image is limiting what you are able to perceive.  It is your choice to develop your own ways, your own images, for relating to this vast realm of non-material reality.  This can give birth to new and vibrant forms, to new discourse, to new ways of relating.  Awareness of the divine feminine as an equal partner in spirituality is coming to the fore in a way that has not happened in a long time.  Old institutions are having to grapple with past efforts to repress feminine spiritual experience on its own terms and either stay current or risk becoming irrelevant.

The paradigm is changing, and slowly but surely the voice of the feminine is rising to a powerful chorus. More are speaking about her ways, her awareness, and as this happens both women AND men are learning to touch this awareness within themselves and it will help heal us individually an en masse.  Period.  So I encourage you to find out how you relate to the feminine in the spiritual and physical cosmos. Nature is littered with the keys to how this all works, all you need to do is observe.

As the feminine begins to express itself more and more in ALL of ourselves, it will help to balance the terms of engagement in the most wonderful of ways. The march of paternalism hasn’t worked as well as maybe we had thought it would,  but has brought us separation, division, and endless war.  We now need the feminine to step forward in each of us, even if its a small step, to soften the blows, to have the perspective to step back and see the forest and not just the tree, to see the long-term effects of our very manly actions.

The old way isn’t working and if we are to survive as a species, we need her breath filling every body on the planet.  She will help to bring a humanizing effect.  It is true that all renaissance periods have been marked by an ability to embrace both sides of human nature so these two elements can bring the best the two have to offer TOGETHER.  But we need more voices, more dreamers, more thinkers and artists and goddesses and priestesses to be brave enough to speak their voice, convey their vision, and help to inspire others along the path.  We do this through art, but we do it also in every creative effort which includes science and everything else that brings new ideas to the fore.  This means ALL of life.  You don’t have to be an artist to be creative  You merely have to be human. A dancer, a musician, a physicist, an auto mechanic, a farmer, lawyer, florist, accountant, or caregiver, nurse, doctor, or book keeper. The more balanced you are with these two aspects of the universe, the more sanity arises and the more creative things can get inside of you.  These two characters, presences, essences of our being are magic in what they do when brought together close.  Mentally, emotionally, spiritually, tantricaly, and in every other way we can dream or think of!

I encourage everyone to seek deeply your own inner essence and learn to relate to it on your own terms.  No one can tell you what you choose is not correct or worthy, for it is the most immediate thing that you have given birth to. Come up with new forms and ways to see things.  Who is to say they are right or wrong?  We are curious in our adherence to tradition.  We think that just because its been tried on by so many that it MUST be worthy.  And yet, look at our world!  Do you really think that tradition has served us that well?  I ask you, what do we need to heal and shift and toss out and adopt anew what is based on the ancient within us?  How do we express this very ancient essence that IS us?  We don’t need tradition, we need courage to dream up ways that match what we are NOW. Do you really feel like Eve got a bum wrap?  Well let’s rewrite the story!  Maybe it was Shiva who had to refine himself in order to be on par with Shakti, spending months and months alone refining himself in order to be worthy of her instead of the other way around.  Or, we simply create NEW stories and forget the old forms.  We can do this.  It is in you and my power to do so.  We need only to do so.  This is the power and gift of creativity.

It is like how paper money is made.  At some point it [money] does not exist and then someone comes along and PRINTS it.  Then we all agree that it is real.  Or some authority SAYS its real and everyone follows lock step and they lend their belief in these pieces of paper actually MEANING something.  It is the SAME thing.  It is an idea.  YOU are the voice.  YOU are the authority.  YOU are the captain of your soul and YOU are the divine sovereignty within.  No institution, church, club, monarchy, government, bureaucracy,  or worldly authority, has any say so over that unless you cede this power TO them.  Time to take it back.  Not in anger or retribution, but in the simple affirmation that we ARE THAT.  And let the past slip away as we face a new NOW and new tomorrow.  It is after all a creative act at its core.

We are printing our own spiritual currency. 

We actually can heal ourselves of past issues through this kind of work and it was Carl Jung who realized this early on.  Images so often tap the subconscious self and help to stir up old latent material.  New images and new ways of seeing help to lead to broader perception.  This is the march of evolution.

How we choose to describe it will also be a force for helping us to understand things in new ways.  Just as an image can liberate it can also limit, so how we fashion these makes a difference. Drawing our intuition and both left and right sided thinking will result in a more complete fusion of possibilities.  You are the crafter of reality!  Take hold of your power!

One flows into the other, and the other returns to the first a new energy.  This builds on itself as the masculine and feminine blend and merge in energetic union.  One is not above the other but both are equal partners. The seeming opposites of the universe merge and unite.  Unity, not fragmentation, is what we seek to become and be.  The left brain connects and cooperates with the right brain.  The masculine linear helps to give voice to the miraculous right brain, yet without the linearity, she would have a limited voice.  Without her, he would only be a pinpoint of linear awareness.  They need both within the body.  What is within you is within the universe.  It all fits together like this giant holographic puzzle that will become increasingly amazing, miraculous and fulfilling.  It is like watching some new creation unfold.  There is nothing else quite like it in anything I have experienced in this or any other life.  It has been my journey, and perhaps it is also yours.  We all yearn to know this, to feel this, to express and create and learn and work through what is ours to clear so we can see ever more clearly the marvel of creation shining within us and in all of life.

Out of my conception of this ocean as something new, I cast aside the milk for a moment and saw it less as an image as a force.  Masculine and feminine, were in truth existing like drops in an ocean completely merged.  This created the very explosion that gave birth to worlds.  Above the sea of milk is  the explosive reality of what these two universal forces do when merged in this way.  Pour the waters of yin into the waters of yang and there is this frothing that occurs, a moment of silence and stillness and in a hyperdimensional level, an explosion spreads out of unimaginable force.  Like a big bang.  Except this effect is not time based. Somehow, at every point in its unfolding, this explosion is taking place outside of time.  Every single nanosecond can be felt.  In duality, perhaps it is a star exploding or the universe exploding.  In other realms, it could be something similar yet different, but built upon the same explosive quality as seen in its primal state.  This primal state is reflected down through countless worlds, lives, experiences.  It is like an explosion frozen yet not frozen. Pure potential force which is itself not expressed in the terms we usually understand it here and yet, it feeds into our world its infinite potential.  It is an explosion that is not spending itself but constantly recreating itself.  In a sense, it is beyond any normal way to describe it or explain it except that it does manifest in myriad ways in our world and our own beings. When you feel it inside of you, it is like a gentle understated rippling of energy that fuels a constant flow of bliss that has limitless potential.  Just like the ocean.  Mix one with the other and it explodes into worlds of new possibilities that would surprise even the most adept creator.

This is how I have been relating to it, and while it may seem a bit abstract, the feeling is entirely present and powerful, vivid and real.  It just seems to have needed to go beyond mere seminal fluid to include a more balanced sense of energetic ( consciousness) engagement.

Even the sea of bliss is itself a kind of trap, though.  Becoming too enthralled in it has lead to being strung out.  It is not in our nature to just drink from its waters only, but for me at least, it always feels best when using its inspiring force to lead to new creations, new ideas, new things.  Some, having drunk from it, do not wish to leave, and so feel that to do anything WITH it beside abiding with it, is maya or illusion.  The thing, though, is that we ARE here to create our lives.  And when we leave this world, we will go on to create in other ways.  We will always be creating, expressing, and bringing new things forward.  This expresses the primal urge that the Prime Creator initiated in bringing all worlds into  being.  So yes, we will continue to have maya clinging to what we create, but so too will our creations refine as we refine.  As we do, what we create will mirror the changes within and what we create will be ever clearer and more potent because they will simply be less encumbered by the dross of what came before.  We will go from making objects to kill each other with to making objects to liberate the heart and mind in soulful healing and celebration.  At the foundation of all of this is choice.  And we each have it.

What shall you choose today?

Beyond The Sea of Sorrow

At a certain point in my awakening process I came upon what I called the sea of sorrow.  It felt at first like a bunch of unresolved issues that I needed to feel into and cry out.  So I did.  A tough and defensive get it done kind of guy was reduced to a blubbering mess.  A good mess, I thought.  Finally the walls are coming down.  I was having a struggle with the energetics of ego and how it was effecting me in a myriad of ways.  This new development seemed like a good change even if it was very very sad.

This went on for months.  I finally reconsidered that what I was experiencing wasn’t just my own past but something else.  It felt like I was seeking to drain an ocean one tear at a time.  This was looking impossible.  So I looked into it without my self-accepted bias that this was all mine.  For a time I figured if I had lived several hundred lifetimes or more there could be THAT much sadness locked up somewhere. But this.  This was a horse of a different color.

I have explained how, in other posts, that the force of kundalini stirs and clears you.  In doing this, the material that you have been dealing from lifetime to lifetime that has remained persistent and repetitive, is seen for what it is in a new context. This might mean you have memories from past lives, but not necessarily.  What seems most central is to simply deal with this material, no matter how it is done. If a memory helps to trigger a release, then it comes into your awareness.  I had had numerous incidents with guides and beings who would awaken me from a dead sleep at four in the morning and bid me to go out into the freezing night to observe something, to show me that moment when my life and the life of the cosmos, which are linked, slipped into an unfathomable synchrony as I watched the stars turn in the predawn sky click into some position with the earth and as my past came alive and like a sack, had its contents emptied like so much chaff.  Like leaves blown in an autumn wind, this had become my life.  I was familiar with this, knew it was the substance of my experience at least for the time being.  I had assumed that the great sorrow that I felt was part of this.  A catharsis.  For a time, it helped to open me up like a sardine can, but after a while I found myself in the same place over and over with an endless sense of volume to this great ocean.  I could feel it, sense it, see it.  I was in this place without the same old limits to perception.  I had the universe as an extension to my sensing.  It felt into me and I felt into it.  Assuming the old ways will work can tangle you up. This is where some discernment is needed. So in asking the question, I sought of it an answer.

So I asked what this was.  What was returned to me was the image of a boat on the ocean.  It was an ocean of sorrow.  I asked if it was mine.  No answer.  But I need to know whose this is.  It returned to me “It does not matter whose it is or its origin. Focusing on that only keeps you soaked in it.  What matters is that you get through it!”

In time I realized that this was the Collective sorrow of the race which existed straddling time.  It was nonlinear and borrowed not just from the past but the future also.  It was not time based.  This made it larger than most things in our 3-D experience, which often has a sense of limit or linearity.  Not this.  I also understood that the lack of answer was that an answer would not have served me and would only have led to questions which would have kept me in “it” instead of learning to move on.  Yes, it was mine.  As each tear drop dissolved into that great ocean, all of it was mine, some of it was mine, none of it was mine. It is ours.  But we also choose to stay i sorrow in our day to day lives or we choose to get up and move on.  I was still early in my awakening, and so much was falling away that I was tempted to focus on the sense of loss.  This was itself an illusory form of loss because all that kundalini was stripping from me was nonessential.  With ego still in play, all I could do was to focus on appearances even if I was being gifted with this sensing in the quantum world. I was in a sense like the caterpillar with one foot in one world and one foot in another.  This is certainly how it all happens as I grow out of the old and into the old/ancient/forever newness of our soul self.

I realized that what I had been doing was trying to get into this ocean and somehow working through it.  Doing this began to look ridiculous, like someone taking a shovel to Everest and expecting to move it by next month. So what was the answer?  If it was an ocean, I needed to navigate through it, over it, and out of it. So I did.  My visualizations of a boat and an oar provided the catalyst for no longer focusing on being IN the water and instead I settled on myself moving across its waters.  Within a matter of a month or two, I was no encountering this sadness.  I spoke to someone who had awakened about this and asked if she knew anything about this or not.  She offered some suggestions, which was that it was her own sadness.  the scale of it just seemed beyond any one person even in their lifetimes here.  This had to be the collective ocean of sorrows.

I thought about this and wondered if anyone else had any experience with it.  In perfect form, I stumbled across a book that described an ocean of sorrow in the Hindu tradition. Okay, I got it. Others wrote or spoke of this place.

The more my mind settled on it, the more was offered up.  Awakening is all about alignment to energy.  No one is telling you which way to go, and you are exiting out of your old way of life.  I realized that for me, this was one area of the journey that was about vibrating at a different frequency.  Yes I felt bliss, but there were periods of trouble.  I was not there yet.  More material from the etheric sheaths were falling away very fast at this stage, and I realized that this was part of it.
Some part of me was magnetized to this sadness.  The crying had helped, but it had gotten out of hand.  I thought somehow like I was supposed to purge it all until it became clear that this was just too much.  I could see it in my third eye. It was vast.  I had to navigate out of it as soon as possible.  Just go.  No considering what this was, no solutions sought to fix it. Just go.  I’d be wrapped in knots if I stayed.

Day by day I anchored this in my awareness and performed visualizations where I would get out of the water and rest atop it in this boat which I had been using in my work to learn surrender. I had to surrender my attachment to this sadness and dip my oar in and move forward.

This part of the journey took a lot out of me. It aged me.  Up until that time my system had been energized and aging effects had been slowed and healing had increased.  It was time to move on.  And I did. The less I looked back, the more I moved forward, the better my progress.  It was after this that ego collapsed and my life was reordered and the old life was shed like the skin on a snake.  My temple was torn down and the rubble was used to rebuild a new one in its place using a new paradigm.  I began building a new life and getting used to what the new one offered.  Bit by bit, I emerged out of those doldrums.

My advice to you is to certainly allow yourself to feel.  Don’t be afraid of tears or any excess for a time.  Afterall, we have lived excessively in the wrong direction for so long that the scales may swing some before balance is gained.  But know when to say enough is enough and move on.  You can.  You are not a prisoner to the fores of awakening but a conscious participant.  Let its force guide you but also know when to use your own will as well.  Don’t tarry in the sea of sorrows.  Its just not worth it and nothing is gained by it.  The route to healing and change seems to lie along a different path.

Bows deep….

Dealing With Blocks

Do you know what it feels like to be blocked?  I was almost two years into my awakening before I realized just how blocked I was.  Kundalini had begun its work and was loosening the material that had crowded itself around me. I thought things were getting better.  They were.  I was a changed man.  But awareness is a very relative thing. By being aware of how blocked I was, it led to still more removal of harder to get at material.

Certainly, the easiest material fell away first.  I could feel it. The more central material in my core, that was a different story.

I began the process of still-greater blockage removal by realizing it was there.  I began to attend a class that met twice weekly just a block from my home offered by a man who was an expert in his field. the classes cost me five dollars per two hour session. The teacher did this is a community service for the most part.  Lucky me and everyone else that took part.

The process that began in earnest in those classes, which utilized what is known as White Crane Qi Gung is the same Qi work that the Shaolin monks use.  There are many versions of Qi Gung, but all of it is based in movement. It means "energy work."  I can't say that any one type is better than another. My teacher, though, knew a lot about Chinese medicine and he was able to offer many different pointers to help facilitate the flow of Qi (Chi) through the body. The effect at first was that I felt awful.  I went away feeling clammy and more aware of how blocked I was.  This made it seem as though I was more blocked than I was.  I had merely become more consciously aware of these blocks.  I think it is important not to let yourself get down on yourself during these times of awareness.  The very fact that you are now aware is an important first step in removing the blocks!  Remember; where attention goes, so does energy, and if your intent is to remove something within,  the universe will conspire with you to see that this happens. Persistence is key.  So keep at it.

I found that the blocks I was now feeling felt like very real physical things. Around my heart there was this stony mote.  I could feel my heart scrape up against this hard surface every moment of the day.  This was maddening. It hurt.  It was hard. The pain was very real and I had no idea how to get it to stop.  In about a year in a fit of sadness, it all happened without any effort.  I felt the part of us that is known as the Observer step in and the rest was history.  It gave me just enough room to feel the forgiveness that was my own enough that this age old karmic thread was able to slip quietly into the ether never to return.  For as hard as the feeling was in my heart chakra, it did drive awareness in me in a 24/7 sort of way.  It wasn't until I gave up trying ot was at the end of my rope that the answer came.  It was swift, simple, and permanent. My heart center was then magnetized towards something very different. The effect that this had on my life was substantial. Events took a sudden turn in a new direction.  It was as though I was living in a different version of a world populated by people who were no longer attracted or affected by this thing that I had only a few days before.  Instead, a new story was unfolding.  Miraculous.

Movement has long been inculcated in the removal of past traumas.  There is a biological dynamic that happens where both etheric and physical are affected so that what lies in the energy body is also removed from the physical.  They work together so that the act of merely moving can loosen age old material in the energy body.  This material can be from lifetimes ago.  It has been observed, for example that nearly every culture on earth that knows ecstatic states (all of them actually) will tend to have a corresponding movement that goes along with it.  This can be expressed as twitches, jerks or "quakes" or shakes. The movement of the Holy Ghost is the same and Kriyas and mudras are an expression of this in the Hindu tradition. Aboriginal peoples will go into shaking fits as they reach communion with the spirits of gods.  Animals will shake after they have been attacked by larger animals all in an effort to "shake it off."  For more on this, search the archives using the search term "shaking it off" and you will find an article written over a year ago that addresses this very subject.

Staying physically active is helpful in removing blocks.  The Sufi tradition recognized the role that movement had in reaching higher states of being.  Sometimes it just FEELS good. But dance is another form that can also help, especially if you can dance ecstatically and get your body moving.  Will aerobics work?  That is a good question.  I do not see why not.  I have heard that pushing ones self physically can often break through energetic barriers to feel a deeper sense of self.  Runners often speak of hitting a wall that leads to a euphoria that give them the means to go further with less struggle.   Is this the same?  I can't say. I sure would be interested to know if anyone has experienced this and whether it had a liberating effect long after the event of the running took place.

Something about movement helps us to cognitively and emotionally rid ourselves of past issues that we have been holding onto for a while.  I notice that it gets me out of my thoughts and into my body, which is a peaceful place to be.  Here, with the mind silenced, you can simply be with the body as these small miracles happen drop by drop. This is not an intellectual pursuit, so keep the mind out of it.  This is much more a fundamental exercise.  Let it do its work without needing to know or understand.  It works.  That should be enough for your mind to chew on.


Part 2


There is another aspect to removing blocks that can also be very helpful.  I discovered the effectiveness of this as a result of my own work professionally in art.  I am a glassblower and my work is very physical.  It fuses grace, brawn, and skill in an act that is itself alchemical if you know how to let it work for you.  In these early sessions I found myself channeling different energetic aspects of myself.  Whenever I say "energy" I also mean consciousness. Always.  For energy is itself aware and you can feel into this when you know how to feel deeply.  A deep surrender ensues and all turns to bliss. 

But less than the movement used in my work is the power that creative energy has on us. In the same way that movement can help to remove old material, so too can the flow of creative energy.  Having said that, tantric energy also has the same effect.  All of these aspects all happen to have a lot of energy as a hallmark of their presence in your life. you can literally fuse them together in an intuitive way to make them work for you in a powerful way. 

So creative energy is very closely aligned to sexual energy.  It opens you up and allows you to feel yourself more deeply.  It leads you into that most beautiful part of you that awaits for that touch fo the divine that we are.  This can lead to a pulse of life so amazingly wonderful you will wonder how you ever lived without it. All you need to feel it is to become inspired. That is the core of all art.  But being inspired is also the same as being turned on sexually.  Both of these states have the same elements attached; we let go of the mind and begin to FEEL.  

When I teach my students in art and when I work in the studio in glass with people taking classes, I do everything I can do to keep thinking from getting in the way.  If you are of the opinion that you have to THINK in order to create; stop. Right now, put away that idea because it has no place in all of this.  Trust me.  In the same way that you let go all thoughts and just allow yourself to surrender in an act of intimate love, so too do you do the same exact thing when you are creative.  The feeling of the energy is different, yes, but not terribly.  We get excited and feel happy in both states.  We do this because it is what we are.  the act of becoming inspired is itself the shepherd to your core self.  Let it do its great work.  As you open up you can imagine or even feel those hard shells fall away from the outer parts of your being.  You become vulnerable, perhaps the most vulnerable you have ever been.  Let it be that way.  No one is here to hurt you. Be soft and feel yourself.  It is here that you are in this ancient current of the divine.  It is your soulfulness that you are bathing in.  You are infinite, and here you get to settle down into your pure essence.  Revel in that.  

Be like a child.  Stop feeling like you hve to put the brakes on everything.  All of these things are the very things that my students show me are their biggest hurdles and they have been mind, too. When I stop thinking about WHAT to do that it all just comes down like some giant download of information.  be a channel for this energy.  You will feel enraptured, enlivened, and renewed.  It will feel so good that you wont want to stop.  And why should you?  the challenge I p9ut to you is to learn how to channel this energy all the time.  This is what you are, and what you are learning to become. 

So use your imagination. What I do to get there is consider what would I make if I had all he money in the world.  No limits.  I think of how I once had a kingdom at my command and these people, whom I loved so much and who loved me, were willing to do just about anything for me.  I had such a rich supply of resources. We built temples in the forest.  We quarried stone and we decorated it with beautiful colors. I think back on those days and it helps me to realize that when i loosen up what i think is possible inside of me that the flow of inspiration just begins.  I have no thought in these moments. I have no idea what will come.  I direct it, yes, through my interest and desire, but I also am careful to allow accidents to happen.  I do this as a signal or cue to the higher self to step in.  My accidents are always full of discovery as a result.  I know this may sound haphazard to some, but because I intend it to be an entry point for the higher self, it quite naturally does.  It works because i believe that it can.  In order for it to work for you, you have to carry the same belief or else it might not work.   These events are very good for bringing in new ideas that I hadn't considered before.  There are simply no accidents in my experience.  But you have to be able to let go enough for this kind of magic to happen. 

As you do this work, you fuse your physicality with your energetic being in creating something.  In just the same way that making love can lead to creating new life, creating art leads to the creation of new forms of "life" which are embodied as ideas. We can quite literally break down old cognitive barriers that lead to new ways of seeing and feeling. When you still thought, you give this inspired moment the room to move in you.  Most great artists know this, but it is not taught as a methodology in schools. The students that have the most problem with art are those that are worrying about how it all will turn out.  You simply have to allow yourself to play and enjoy it, like a child does.  You CAN do this. Stop being so serious for a bit!  you do not create by ploughing seriously through the process but in surrender.  Your mind opens, your body and hands take a more receptive posture.  Then it slips through you like a small boat slips through the watery waves of your awareness.  First one, then another.  Here being in the moment, being present, is important. Then, still thought so you can feel your energy.  Just feel it.  You don't have to do ANYTHING with it. Just let it be for now.  It will get you excited.  This is the coming of inspiration.  It will show you that there is nothing to fear in letting go like this.  

The body gets in the act.  The two energies of the universal current begins to move.  the yin and yang merge both in your energy field and your physical body.  The brain, a mirror of the masculine and feminine aspects of the universe begin to work together.  The linear more masculine left brain takes the wildly imaginative yet almost formless right brain material and gives it a voice or a form.  The right brain sees the big picture and the left sees the details.  It sees the leaves and cell structures, but it gets lost in the forest.  the right brain sees the scales of form in great volume. Together, when they work perfectly, it is like tantric union except this is the creative act of birthing new ideas and forms in the world. Here, you are in your element.  I can hear the protestations now: "But I am not creative!"

Of course you are.  Maybe you cannot draw a perfect nude or a still life.  But you ARE creative.  In your own way, it is what you are.  It is what we all are. It is not an "art thing" that makes for creativity.  But I have a neat trick to help with that when it comes to art making.  I have glass. 

Ornaments, Parker Stafford

Glass is a material that, in its molten state, glows with a life of its own.  It is an amazing material.  it is also difficult to control, which for our use today is perfect. I use the molten plasticity of glass to keep people anchored in the moment.  This works!  Your focus with the glass is so total that your mind has the opportunity to go quiet.  People have told me that they like doing glass because it forces them to think of nothing else but the glass.  This is a lot like zazen or other meditative states. You can FEEL your energy in moments like these.  The other side to glass is that when you flow with it, it looks beautiful.  In fact, you can dribble glass onto the floor and it will look fantastic.  How can you go wrong with a material like this?  The simpler you are, the more its essence comes through.  Just let it do what it does naturally.  Colors are brilliant, and the glass sparkles and shines. Everyone who has tried glass for the first time have all been surprised with the beautiful results of the glass they have made at the studio.  This serves as a way to trim away all of those thoughts of their not being creative.  With glass anyone can make beautiful things.  It also doesn't need to be anything other than it is.  Sometimes an ornament winds up looking like a planet or world from some other realm.  It is interesting to look at.  Sometimes I just gaze at the ornaments on my own Christmas tree and see all of the wild details I had missed just a year ago.  The funkier and wilder, the better.  You see, glass can show you what is possible when creating blown forms.  

Nautilus bowl detail, Parker Stafford

In no other instance does it feel like Christmas then when we open the kilns where the glass we blew the day before we placed so they could cool slowly.  It has been over fifteen years and each time there is an excitement to see what is going to come out.  You'd think after hundreds of tons of glass made in my studio so far that I might get jaded.  But it doesn't ever seem to grow old.  Every day that has something waiting in the annealing ovens is a day where there is something new to discover. 

My work in the studio is designed now, when it comes to teaching others, to help set their wild horses free.  One moment we are doing a large sun catcher and moments later it becomes a ribbed tendril that get placed in a flower garden or hung with others as a light fixture or placed on a stake near a door to greet all who enter with its crystalline beauty. 

Nested Yin Form, Parker Stafford

My work in the studio discipline is not hard. It is deceptively easy.  It is about feeling into it.  The power of this is realized in how you feel as a result. It sounds like it is too simple, but it is in the simplicity of it that the effects are achieved.  It is in letting it happen to you that is the key.  When the mind gets out of it, something else gets into it.  Sure, you have to keep molten glass balanced on the end of a four foot metal rod, but in my work I am there telling the person what to do next. I don't map it out first in order to keep their mind out of it and simply engaged as it watches what happens as it all unfolds.  It is an approach that works very well. It is not always best for seasoned blowers who need to understand a complicated series of movements, but it is very effective for ferrying beginners through the process without building anxiety over the many steps or things they will be doing. In this way people tend to maintain a form of engagement that is very good for what I am seeking to help them achieve.  Just feeling good about making something beautiful itself has a very positive effect on a person. Fear goes away.  Creativity does not do every well in the presence of fear.  Like love, creativity and fear do not mix.  One closes you down, the other opens you up. 

Absent having glass as a moving modality for healing, you can do anything that lights your creative fire.  It can literally be anything.  Writing, drawing, dreaming, singing, dancing, writing music, or rearranging the house.  Working on the car.  Any act can be one of creation if you know where to look.  Then, cultivating a life that is passionate and engaged will keep your energy moving in you.  You can also observe those times when you feel suddenly bereft of creative fire and consider what it was that happened inside of you in those times that caused that to happen and learn to avoid that kind of thinking in the future.  I can tell you that my experience is that anything that causes me to pull back from life in anything less than a full embrace is what kills my creative fire.  Sometimes it is just a stray thought that turns in me that my ego get to work on and then after a while a very small thing turns into something big.  There I go again! I remind myself. I then just get myself worked back into a state of energetic excitation and suddenly the world glows with a new life.  This is a moment by moment cultivation of the very force of life in the day to day.  This is learning to bring heaven to earth. It is, after all, a worthy cause. 

20 Seconds

Manifesto

Live with passion and without regret.  There is nothing worse than a life lived weighed down with regret.  It causes you to look back incessantly and keeps you from the warm embrace of the present, which is your power.

Do not fear power or abundance, but embrace it, child-like with the desire to always seek the highest.  We are all here learning how to manifest and manipulate energy which happens to come in yriad forms including power and abundance. Only then will you channel the power of the true divine within for the good of all.  Everything in life is a transferal of energy and this includes money.  it can bless you or curse you.  How you go about it determines which it becomes. 

You are not powerless.  Inside of you rests all the resources you could ever need to heal your most troubled parts, but it is also up to you to allow yourself to dare to be bold enough to consider ti is there and be on the lookout for it.  There is a genie in you, but you may have bought into the idea that you are limited.  You aren't. You are one petal on a much larger flower and by going beyond your own sense of self, you can merge with your larger self for great fulfillment, self knowing, and wonder.  True power does not need to prove anything.  It is easy and content in what it is and does not seek or need approval from anyone; it is its own reward.

You are worthy of love. But you will only be worthy of love in the world when you feel that you are worthy.  If you have a past littered with lack of acceptance or awareness about how incredibly great you are, do not take it seriously; it is only because you yourself have had some difficulty in seeing it yourself.  It is true that you ARE love incarnate.  The atoms and the life force and all of what you are are supported by a force that is itself a distilled form of love so powerful it will simply make you turn red-faced as you excuse yourself because the force of the realization is just so strong that you can't stand to be feeling so incredibly intimate and powerful in such a public place.  Until we ARE what we seek, what we seek will not mirror what we hope the most for. 

Your karma will make you do what you do not want to do and keep you from doing what you want to do.  This is an excellent opportunity to begin dissolving karma.  The path to this is forgiveness.  Not of those who have wronged you, but for what you yourself, in your genie-like way have attracted into your life.  For as hard as this may be to do, it is the only authentic means to sloughing off the negative karmas that have haunted you for so long.  Doing so is the greatest of freedoms.  It returns you to yourself.  Forgiveness is not a word you use but an essence within you that is felt to your very core  To heal a negative karma, you must be able to feel so deeply, completely, that the weed of karma is loosened by its roots, not merely trimmed.  How someone behaves is their karma.  How you respond is yours. 

There is nothing that you do not already know that isn't hidden within you waiting to be discovered.  Whatever path you take to find it, the clue that you are on it is that you do not buy into anything but compare one idea with what lies within you.  Buddha cautioned never to buy into any idea until you have examined it fully.  Even if what you accept into your being winds up being somehow distorted or off the mark, you had to go through the process of realizing it before the lesson could be learned.  You are unique in this way and trusting yourself is the best way to go forward.  Second guessing makes the path hard. 

You are immortal. You will live many times and your awareness is scattered throughout time. Only in this one life do you seem bounded.  Being aware of just how unbound you are in a larger context can give you the courage to live life without fear or regret.  Live it like its the only life you wil have, for in a way, it is THE life you are leading now  When you are ready, you will begin to know what else has happened beyond your current physical awareness. 

Ram Dass said "Be Here Now" just as did Buddha and others.  This is important. Be present.  Be mindful.  Only in the present can you tap the power of the universe.  Once you know how this is achieved, you can begin to heal the past as well as the future simply by going there in meditation or in dream.  These excursions can have very real effects on you in your present.  You may not believe that the future has not yet happened, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is indeed happening and is more like a bend in the river you have not yet gotten to yet.  The power of awakening is itself a highly refined form of your own consciousness looping back to you from a "future" self, and it is this effort that you may be experiencing now that will enrich that future self immeasurably.  It is not cheating, it is how things can work for you when you learn how.  As you do this healing, things tend to grow exponentially.  This has an effect on all life on the planet and all consciousness. Healing the past time lines and future ones can be important work for how it has the power to change you and the planet.  Stop each day just to feel your energy.  Energy goes where attention goes.

Do not limit yourself in what you think you are capable of or what the universe is capable of. What you think and feel is what you become.  When you wish for something, wish big. Better; ask the universe to exceed your expectations. Events will have a way of surprising you in the best of ways. 

Examine your beliefs and your feelings. They are both tied to one another and feeling is the language of the universe.  If you wish for something that you do not believe you are worthy of, it is likely it wont manifest.  You have to feel it clearly and with belief.  Be careful of the deities that you choose; you will reinforce one another.

Don't shrink back from life just because you fear what other will think; come out boldly and with courage; it will inspire others to follow their own most desired star.  If there is something you have been putting off doing, do it today.  You will be surprised how it changes your outlook and the content of your life for the time being.  You never know what act will snap the twig that opens the universe to you, or some still larger awareness that now can come flooding in.

The Oracle of Delphi commanded "Man know thyself!" It explained that in this way we also know the gods and goddesses because they reside in our higher natures. 

Don't take life too seriously; it is just a ride that will be over all too soon.  Try to enjoy it for all it's worth!

What We Create

I was talking to one of my children today about an incident that involved someone putting a rather negative spin on events that could have been seen or reacted to in a completely different way.  It was an excellent opportunity to illustrate how it is that we create our lives and our world by what and how we feel and how we choose (yes choose) to see it.  It led to a rather nifty saying that is, I suppose, a derivation on other older sayings....

"You can either make the best of what you have or the worst of what you've got."

I think that sums it up, don't you?  Interestingly I had come across a zen saying that is essentially very similar that states that when we lay aside all of our opinions about the things we see in life, we are left with what is and can then see that event or thing without the blinders or biases that we think are real when in truth they are not. Even then, with all that veneer or gloss stripped away, what we see is even more miraculous a thing because it is still so incredibly amazing. 

How we choose to feel governs how we see and react to the events going on all around us. Be happy that you are here experiencing this life. No one is perfect, and yet, we are all doing the best that we can with all the blinders we happen to have.  When ready, we can let all of that stuff slip away when our souls are ready and hungry for what lies beneath.

Live life to its fullest, and I shall talk to you soon....

Destined

Destiny is created
breath by breath.

It is not made of stone
but fire
water
wind
and sky.

What was so permanent and certain
yesterday
is given a whole new meaning in the now
of time.

An infinity of timelines
and possibilities
surround you
in each waking and sleeping moment
as the maker and the made
swing gently one around the other
in a mystery greater than we could believe
but which we percieve
moment by moment
as it all unfolds,
gathered and garnered
pushed and molded
by intent
wish
dream.

The only destiny
is the one you create
and re-create. 
No fatalists need rest
within these arms
or seek comfort
in some time-worn
idea
that we are all all born for something greater
even though we are.  

Speaking To The Flow

What is this that is happening?
Unbounded, beyond word
why seek to contain it
by limiting it.
Just set it free
let it be
what it can be
and it just might show you
that very thing
taking your hand
as the wind lifts you
beyond your old conceptions
old skins
drop away
as everything you thought
was perfect for the time
but now you are growing
going beyond
the cavalry left far behind
flowers and stars
nothing but light
and the power to become
your friend.

Shattered windows
lost lives
and revolutionary thoughts
beckon
what was lost is now found
what made you poor is now making you rich
again
I say
why limit it
by seeking to define it.

By the fire
at night
fireflies but a memory
by a babbling brook
or a thousand possible places where we sat
and dreamed
we each look one into the other
and nothing could come between
this something more
that has the power to always open us
as life ends and begins
and new conceptions are born
and die
a million times
as turning we laugh
and smile
all of this just keeps going on and on....

Reaching Out From The Inside

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

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

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

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

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.