Do You Like Simple?

He said, as I struggled, “You wouldn’t be doing this if you knew what lay on the other side of this…” He was right; the only struggle was with myself. I had made a struggle out of thin air. Ego made it important. Ego just wants more like itself.  It perpetuates what it thinks is important. Your stuff is so important, isn’t it?

 

 

Now I invite you to look at someone else’s junk and think about how easy it is to see how much folly it is. It’s easy to do, isn’t it? We see the mote so easily, but we miss the beam in our own eye. And that’s how it is. Now turn it around on yourself: you are just like this. Your junk isn’t junk, it’s important stuff! But really, how important is it? If you knew the clarity, calm, and bliss lying on the other side of each “problem” you wouldn’t be feeling so stretched, pulled, or slammed into a vice. Such a tight place, right? But it’s important, your ego says, so you keep the vice ratcheted down nice and tight. We all like it nice and tight. We like it because it proves to us that we are validated by just how hard the world is. But it’s not the world, but our reaction to it that’s the problem. The real problem is when you make the injustice so grandly horrible just so you can feel grandly horrible.

 

 

Just walk away.

 

 

It’s simple, you see. Letting go isn’t work. You just need to let it be….simple. When you do, it just goes….poof! (Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?) Many don’t know that this can be because most of us just hang on for dear life —we spend lifetimes like this until we ripen into needing to do things differently (and the way increasingly becomes clear).

 

 

When you are ready to make it simple, the biggest problem is made small. It’s huge roots untangle from you and turn to slick threads that billow in the wind. Just. Like. That. The suffering comes from having become addicted to our attachment to feeling like…..crap. In so many cases, you’ll find that a negative reaction washes away your willingness to bear compassion and understanding because your hurt is more important than affording the other person understanding. I could go into detail giving you example after example, but we are making this simple, right?

 

 

If you keep “working it” you just delay its release…..anger, upset, jealously, you name it. Over and over this is how it plays out for all of us. The harder you try, the harder it is to break free. It’s like Chinese finger traps; they hold harder the more you pull on them. So imagine loosening up deep inside. Use imagination to feel and realize how easy it is to loosen inwardly enough to realize YOU have been the one who was the vice holding those roots tight within you. I’ve been through it hundreds of times and each block is like this. Oh the emotion might be different, yes, but the result is always the same. You just give up. You might have to practice this to bring this into your experience more and more. No, it might not get easier. In fact, it might even get harder because the stuff you have been holding onto the hardest can be the last to go. Awakening for me removed the easiest stuff first with the harder parts later. The fresh stuff. The memes that plays out the most in my mind. The freshest hurt. The strongest attachment to suffering. But an aspect of it gets easier; I know I can do it. But a warning: as you get deeper into the fresh stuff, you owe it to your sanity to give it the heave-ho because the longer you put it off, the more it can fester and just build more of itself. That’s why many can get tangled in the hardest stuff even in awakening and become stuck. Remember; you have this. You can do this. It’s yours and no one else’s….and you owe it to yourself, you really do.

 

 

So do yourself a favor….keep it simple. You will like what lies on the other side of this.

 

 

Blessing of All That Is.

Making It Count

 

 

I only want one thing for you, if you are blazing with the fire and rushing with the rivers running through your heart and soul as your body is taking this wild ride of awakening: to make it count.

 

 

You can push this beyond what you think is possible, you can reach for the ripe fruit. You can dare yourself, you can reach uncharted waters.  I have been there, and I am egging you, nudging, waving my arms.  Its here.

 

 

Imagination is the portal through which you will go. Learn to trust it.  If you bring the awakened state with you, as you sink into it and it fires up, a world will emerge before you.  Blank slate at first, but hush, be quiet; its up ahead.  I am pointing you to the impossible.  I am asking you to make the unknown, known. Now lean into it.  Lean into it and ask a question….but that question should be something that you are really interested in.  Its not stock quotes or the lottery; you are here for the secrets of the universe, right?  Ask about how things go, the root cause of things.  Do not expect an answer, just make the call inside of your mind.  This is the inception.  It broods, it grows, it gestates. This is how it goes.  Wait.  But be ready. At any moment, it could come.  Make awakening your friend, make it your partner.  In it will be everything reflected.  But disbelieve that you can even do this and poof! It scatters like light in rain.

 

 

Then you are lost.  You are stuck with what you think you know, relying on what your senses have been telling you, which is itself a limited story.  You don’t need to read or acquire knowledge in the old way.  There is a new way, a way that has been used for a long time by a very few people.  It isn’t magic, and its poorly understood.  It just takes getting in the right grooove.

 

 

Feel with your body. Stop the mind.  This is how you shift out of the physical senses.  It is also how you can make your awakening count by doing this.  It does not seem legitimate simply because our world is awash in the belief that you can’t do this.  But you CAN.  I have, and so can you.  Sink into it, and let the mind go blank.  Its easy once you know how.  So slip into that delicious space where you don’t have to think or worry, you are in that place where you feel Presence.  It is YOUR presence that meets the Tao.  The One.  Its simple, no thunderclaps.  In fact, no one would believe you had done it, so let the haters hate, the empty suits just be empty.  You have this.  It is all done through feeling.  Its how its been done for centuries.  FEEL your body, FEEL your energy.  Let it grow and increase. Its so simple, so easy, yes?  Get quiet.  Feel those eddies and currents begin to flow and increase.  That is the first part.  Your mind goes quiet, you focus inwardly.  You are almost there…

 

 

You let your body FEEL it and the mind goes silent.  There, as you wonder if its even working, is the first thread.  Just grab it with that empty mind and don’t worry what will come.  FEEL it!  The more you learn to feel, the more of it that will come. This is the secret.  This is the reverse of rational thought.  It’s okay, you can do this, you have permission.  Play.  Consider.  What is there to lose or risk?  Then, it will seem as though some part of you is magically coming up with ideas, images, concepts. They will slowly begin to resolve.  Reach beyond what you think is possible.  It is like being suspended in thin air and all of a sudden land builds around you to support you: impossible, you think.  But there it is, a world is forming.  Let form build.  See where it takes you.  Everyone will go in the direction that they are most intimately interested in.  That is always the best stuff because it is so close to your heart, you see.  Your imagination is stepping beyond mere production to reception.  This is the other side of what imagination is! As you go, things add up….ideas stack up in your head.  You feel excited, you feel inspired.  It all seems crazy, your rational mind is in fits.  You let the rational mind go in circles for a while longer as you tease more and more threads from thin air.

 

 

I will tell you that I saw how matter is formed from energy using this method.  I wanted to know, but I did not know how it could be known.  Weeks later as I sat in a park I felt the inner Presence speak: “Look at the trees” it said.  I did, and I felt something pull me inward through their leaves and cells, down into their compounds, atoms, then subatomic particles.  All of this, through my third eye, I saw as if in my imagination a world explode into view.  I was there, feeling the warm breeze and watching carefully as my child played in front of me.  I was all completely there, tantalizingly present, totally aware of everything, yet this energetic presence was supporting me and showing me another channel.  My mind was fed information about that place where matter turns into energy and energy into matter.  It took me years to untangle it, to understand that what I was seeing had been described by such great minds as Plank, Heisenberg, and more.  I knew what I had seen was true, but really, who would have believed me?  I hadn’t gone to school for this, I hadn’t studied for years in books, and I hadn’t worked on advanced formulae.  I simply got pulled down into it and saw it first-hand.  I related to what I was feeling.  I FELT the phenomenon as an atom might feel itself.  I WAS the phenomenon.  I had to translate it, make it into something my mind could grasp.  But I did, and you can too.  All of this took only moments. I kept going back to it over and over, just to get a better look, and to satisfy my rational mind that it was real.  Of course it was real.  Doubters will always doubt, and that is the rational mind for you…

 

Seers have done this for centuries, and because it was so poorly understood they were often oppressed.  You do not need to fear this this time around.  The world supports this, this way is built into the very molecules of life and matter.  It is encoded into the All like light shines through our world.  This thread can lead you to many other worlds and can fill your life with inspiration, creativity, and life.  It IS life.  A forgotten life….but you can remember it, and the more who do this the easier it will be for others.  I have blazed a trail as others have, too.  Just follow the path of least resistance into the underbrush.  Feel the currents pull you.  Trust the universe in the wisdom and structure built into it.

We can all do this, it isn’t so hard.  It is reading the light.  It is teasing strands out of the ether, and it can be used for the good of all.  We can learn how to do this and we can teach others. We have this one moment in the sun of our illumination where this can be done and passed on.  It need not be covered over in myths and legends, or in misconstrued notions about how reality is or might be.  You need only consider that it could happen….

The Stink Of Enlightenment

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From a friend who got me thinking on a subject I stay mute on…but now it’s nagging me. Thanks to the Reverend D’ for the kick…

We talk about enlightenment the same way we talk about a city where we have never been to. We think we know what it’s like and we build up many assumptions based on so very little actual knowledge or experience. So I ask you: if you are not enlightened, how is it that you are so sure that you even know what it is? It’s a fair question, one I’d like to dig into.

We think we know what it’s like to be enlightened and we draw assumptions from old (ancient, really) accounts. But here’s the thing; if you follow Gautama Buddha’s own experience, he discovered that once he did become enlightened, no one could tell he had been to that fabled city. He didn’t have crumbs on his shirt, a tell-tale sign, along with a dribble of mustard from those hotdogs they only sell there. It might sound silly to read my writing about mustard stains, but it’s just as silly how we determine whether a person is enlightened….or not. Like we know. 

The problem with a word like enlightenment is how it’s used. It‘s a poor descriptor for a much more involved experience. 

Enlightenment is much more like a divine spark that gets unleashed in your body, mind, and soul. It reaches into your tiniest places, clearing out the memory of shock and trauma (and all of our emotional reactions to them such as anger, rage,fear, jealousy, loathing, etc). It moves through the subatomic to your macrocosmic, and this takes time. It also preserves the most precious parts of you, like your humanity (which on the shadow side also means a total lack of those things!). It does this to the degree that you allow it to happen, and this is why we have such a range of development amongst the enlightened…if you still think that word is even useful to use…

That’s because the actual process of waking up is just that; a process. We step into that fabled city block by block, wary tip-toe by wary tip-toe most often. We hang along its borders for decades never fully aware that we were so close. We have peered over its gates never fully realizing that the lock on the gate is the lock inside of us, with no clue that there’s a key given to each of us. Awakening can be gradual, and it can come all at once. Some even get shot out of canons to get there, ejecting not just themselves, but their entire lives whether wanted or not.

I know this was the case for me. I was three years old and falling into these trances where I’d go out of my body and watch as souls came into this world to inhabit new bodies. I can also remember choosing my parents before being conceived, floating above the treeline looking down at them and being filled with this sense of joy about the love they had for each other. In the case of my “edge of the world” experiences where I watched souls coming into our world, it seemed for some  reason that a presence near me felt it was important for me to do, to witness. Why? And who has these experiences in full wakefulness? 

In later life my dream world would be full of my helping people who had died to get comfortably and safely to the other side. Weird for a mere earthling, maybe, but I suspect this was my awareness of my macrocosmic self, my higher self, who is off doing other things like this work of helping people come and go safely. The thing is, we all have things like this….but most aren’t aware. Through all of this, I hadn’t awakened. There is a reason why, and a word such as “enlightenment” can’t hope to explain why.

Awakening is, in part, about moving into a greater awareness of who and what you are. Now why didn’t I wake up at three years old? I was seeing energy in my teens, I was an ardent seeker, wasn’t I? I KNEW there was more. Why didn’t I find it until later in life? I now know that awakening is brought forward through a subtle trigger that relies on a number of conditions to be met. It’s what keeps so much of this shrouded in mystery for some, which is an invitation for people to formulate theories about it without knowing much more beyond the fact that it’s a thing. “Enlightenment” feeds our need to quantify and put everything in a box so we can move on with our lives. The problem is, enlightenment changes the lives we want to get back to, and it also won’t stay in the box. 

One misconception centered around awakening is an idea that it grants you a kind of perfection. In fact, those who do become enlightened are still stuck with dealing with their unsettled accounts, and this is about our being all so human. I think people expect enlightenment to change you so that you get this irrevocable branding of your spirit that guarantees against only being…..perfect…and smelling of a lovely scent or something. But the truth is more nuanced. People will fall in love with the idea of enlightenment, and this is what is popularly known as “the stink of enlightenment.” It’s a hard term to use because it can be misunderstood as much as enlightenment as a word is not well understood. I’m about broadening our awareness, breaking down old cognitive barriers in order to see more clearly so we can be clear with ourselves. So lets do some expanding of awareness and tear down a few misconceptions!

Those who awaken begin to learn, however hard it may be, how to accept this world in all of its messed up colors and tones. More and more, those who are awake contribute less and less to aberrant behavior because it chokes off the bliss that is the experience. It is the bliss that is what heals all manner of dysfunctions, neurosis and the desire to firebomb their neighbors homes, or to engage in the kinds of behavior that are hallmarks of our lives here. When the bliss truly heals, it’s as though the old impulse from the shadow self has simply vanished. It doesn’t need to be controlled, it no longer exists to be a concern for “getting a handle on.” You miraculously give up-permanently-what “hooked” you and sent you into fits of rage or upset because someone wronged you, or behaved a certain way, or that the world short-handed you. No, for the first time, maybe in your whole life, one by one, the knots and triggers are released. It is truly salvation and it leads from being spiritually dead to spiritually vibrant. But this takes time. Being reborn in this way is a major project despite what the fairy tales say. It is, instead, “the great work.”

I have personally disliked the term. I dislike it because it leads to so much misunderstanding. It’s like the term “ascension” which sounds as much like a fairy tale as the rapture where people are supposed to—voom—get sucked up in the clouds, no clothes, while really bad stuff happens here on earth. I mean…really??? The amazing thing is how many people who have awakened buy into this idea that our molecules will magically shift into another dimensional aspect when the time comes. The problem with this thought is that it misses that we are already there. We are already multidimensional. Now do the work so you can be aware of it! 

Further still, religions all claim a handle on enlightenment while tending to say that their brand is the only worthy one, and some insert scary things to keep their flocks from departing for more heathen fields. But lucky for us, religions were created after enlightenment was a thing, so this condition really is available to all and predates all belief. It is also a destroyer of belief. 

Enlightenment destroys belief because you don’t have to believe in it to know it. You are also equipped with a new panoply of tools that makes inquiring into the mysteries of life possible. You don’t have to rely on belief, you can inquire. You can know. What everyone finds are the errors inherent in belief, and that belief serves as a veil to authentic knowledge or experience. Hence, in most traditions the entry into the fabled land of enlightenment involves “secret knowledge.” Its only secret because people have never bothered to inquire, to do the work, or to illuminate themselves. You don’t find out any of these things outwardly because they cannot be discerned through the physical senses. This is why the living will always feel an emptiness when someone dies; their physical senses tell them that physical life has ended here. Physical senses do not have the capacity to show you what is beyond. The physical senses are made from physical matter and are not made to sense beyond it. 

People believe that this city is real where people go to be enlightened. They believe in it because they really don’t know anything about it, so belief stands in for authentic knowledge. People want to believe that there is an afterlife, but they won’t ever bother to inquire or do the work that would render belief unnecessary. Do you see what I mean? Why use belief as a substitute for knowledge or experience? There are cultures where this inquiry is considered healthy and normal, expected, even. These cultures trust inner experience because this is where the inner senses emerge. But to use these senses, you have to begin to know how to use them and also to trust your experience. Now I ask you, in Western culture, where is it that we pay slip service to this realm within?

What is even more curious is that when people do seek to inquire, it tends to fall outside the norms of religious thinking or belief so that it falls under mobbing criticism, or bias. It’s no wonder enlightenment has been so rare on our planet. 

We believe it’s like a place we have never been, and once someone has gone there, we argue over whether they really even got there. And all along its not a place “out there” but a place within, taking up no space, no time, and thus serves making discussing it here nearly impossible. Imagine what happens to millions of souls who die only to find that heaven is a state of mind, not a place that you go. Taking up no space, unbound by time, where do you think the soul goes? 

This experience is infinite, ineffable. To know it, you can’t grasp it with your hand, but once you open your hand (your innermost being) it flows like all the rivers of earth flowing there, or all the sands of the deserts. Try to grasp it, and all you get is a little bit of grit, or a drop of water.  How anyone thinks you can apply normal rational thinking to this is beyond me. And trying to understand it without having known it is like a flock of parrots all copying each other…repeating words that are sounds with no comprehension of their meaning. There are many people who do this, and the sign is that they quote everyone but do not formulate ideas beyond rehashing, often with grave distortions, the words of others whose wisdom was being conveyed by the words. The difference is like the difference between a Walt Whitman poem and reading the instruction sheet for how to sow fescue grass for your yard. And it isn’t even that one is poetic while the other is not; one is capable of carrying you right into the ineffable while the other will never dream of doing so. One contains wisdom while one includes instruction. One has a soul carried by a body while the other is a corpse. 

Since enlightenment comes by degree, so too does wisdom. 
The great secret and great gift is that it’s in everyone, and it’s yours when you are ready. You do not even need to believe in it to gain it. Having attained it is the essence of all religion and it requires no belief, no incantations, prayers or mantras no matter what any teacher may have told you. Since it can ask more from you than you can give, it is normal to find the bubbling spring that is in each of us where the source of our lives spring because it is the supporter of all life and vitality. For anyone drinking from it, they will know that to seek to ascribe a name or deity of one kind over another is like a blasphemy. It is beyond all description. That’s how fabulous it is. And since it emerges into you, it becomes your teacher, your priest, your priestess, guru, or friend, and it guides insofar as you are willing to listen to it. It could care less about labels.

Enlightenment here is rare because once it comes, people tend not to remain here for very long. Those who do, often return as teachers and we tend to wrap religions around them. These are rare individuals who remain concerned about the situation here, working to improve our understanding of just what we are capable of. While we want to call them saviors or gurus, each of them try to point out that the real deliverance resides inside of us. The less successful religions or schools put the responsibility on someone else’s shoulders because that’s how bad things have gotten here when it comes to self accountability.  It is also completely expected until one is struck by the light. 

The best way to enlightenment is to accept that you do not know, that there is no rational method for grasping it. Accept that you do not know, then cease with all belief because it does not exist in belief. It exists in direct experience, and this experience is not guided by the rational. 

Once you have that down, then remove what divides you inwardly. Give up hate, give up your grudges, give up what frustrates you. When you do enough of this kind of work, along with meditation focused on feeling for that ineffable well-spring I mentioned, it is like removing stones from the path of that bubbling spring within you. In time, removing one stone can lead to the water of life creating a cascade of stones that fall away, which are composed mostly of stuck emotion and limiting beliefs about yourself and what you think you are. Until you remove stones like those, you will never fully know the wildness of the universe now alive in you. This is called cosmic consciousness.

This is not a Hindu or Taoist, Christian, Muslim, or Zoroastrian experience. Regardless of culture or belief, the result is the same, minus whatever your belief system serves to limit you in your readiness for embracing the cosmologicaly-scaled ramifications of such an event. This is why an enlightened person can read the words of another enlightened person and relate to it instantly instead of having an intellectual grasp of the material. 

The ancients had methods for assisting in this process, and some of them work when you are ready for what will come. Many are frightened by the rush of these life-giving waters that has no compunction about penetrating into every inch of your hidden inner self once the flood-waters are released. It will illuminate every inch of your shadow and this can be hard when you aren’t ready to relinquish it. It illuminates your thoughts, your greed, your jealousy, your sloth, as well as your sex. It doesn’t care and it has no shame. It heals as it goes. So anything you have been hiding will become known if you accept that this well-spring is something that you want in your life….or you simply turn around and it comes of its own accord. But however it comes, it saves, renews, and corrects as it goes. And yes, you can hold on to your shadow as long as you need, but it gets harder and harder the longer you do that. You can be awake while also being deluded with one foot in and one foot out.

Enlightenment has layers and levels to it. It isn’t a fabled city, and it doesn’t do everything you think it does. It does not require you to change anything about your personality, but it does lead you to many other changes that fit where you are with it.I t releases you from fear, all fear, since there is nothing that is that is not divine. There is no reason to fear anything in the world being a glitch in the creation. Trust in the creation in order to be a conscious co-creator with it. Do you know what this means?

 A shining truth in the beginning is seen later as one of millions of grains of sand on the shore. One summit is surpassed by still higher ones. But by being powerfully present, you can soak up a lot in each moment that this experience affords us in such a way that the error in emotion and belief is reformed. Great truths can be known, but the Tao remains in an unmovable place of silence as it’s presence looks out through all things. By sensing this presence, your life can change utterly because you attain the vigor that exists in the Tao which supports and invigorates all things. It is boundless and it’s power and grace is available to all—a power which is bound up in grace and beauty.By loving yourself, you have a direct line to the Tao, the Brahman, the God, and the Christ….within you.

People who say others are not enlightened tend to be the ones that aren’t focused on their own work. It’s easy to criticize and shut down others. We love to point out the more in our neighbors eye while ignoring the beam in our own. The great work happens when you focus inwardly such that the concerns or calamity in the world moves you less and less. When there is injustice, you can right wrongs, but you never right them by seeking vengeance. Correct a bad law, stand up for your brothers and sisters, show how love can conquer ignorance and how it heals all misunderstandings between us here. The path forward is not by the sword but by the heart. Tend to your own back yard before you point out the deficiency’s in others. I can promise you that you still have a mess yet to clean up on your end (and you may have been ignoring it).

The world is a bit of a mess, and it’s this way because we have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten that we each have a compass that tells us right from wrong, and we most often ignore that compass. So the best thing is to inquire within in order to find it. It is not found by way of rational inquiry but through every fiber of who you are; your feeling self knows and instead of being in the head, it is felt all through the body as an effervescent presence that is easy to drown out by focusing on the physical senses. You dont have to take my word for it.

Enlightenment is who we are. We have become estranged from ourselves such that we only know the outer appearances instead of the inner truth. If you want to know enlightenment, you can gain it but it will never come by reading about it. It’s attainment is much more simple than that. And who reading this will make it their imperative? I hope that you make it soon.

The Lie And The Shadow Self

The story of the night in shining armor has a shadow side that we often prefer not to look at. 

I was one of those people-pleasers who grew up with all the right family dynamics to bring this trait out in me. What begins as a desire to make the life of a depressed or bereaved parent or sibling’s life better can set up a pattern that gets carried into relationships later in life. Most of this is unconscious behavior, so it is neither recognized as it’s being felt or acted upon nor experienced. This is most often experienced as what some call the “karmic merry-go-round” where certain behaviors and personality types come into our lives repeatedly (hint: we are attracted to them without fully knowing why…and this is why I say “karma creates chemistry” for all you twin flame and twin-souls out there).

 For every man who wants to come to the aid of a damsel in distress, there is a woman who wants to be saved. Notice I didn’t say “needs to be saved.” We do these things because they satisfy a deficit in ourselves. The deeper problem is that there is a brokenness in both people, allowing themselves to be drawn into a relationship that is highly codependent. The question becomes, why does that “knight” need to save anyone, and why can’t the woman save herself? The answer, or part of it, lies in our inability to be truthful about how we feel. The man probably feels innadequate in some way and saves people to make himself feel better about himself. The woman, incapable of accepting her own feelings of inadequacy, relies on others to fix things she believes she is powerless to affect.  Both are relying on someone else to give them what they lack within themselves. I don’t need to tell you that such relationships don’t end well unless both are equal in their respective need or dysfunction. The moment one grows or changes is the moment this delicate house of cards can fall.

It’s common for us to point to childhood as the genesis for these behaviors, but this is short-sighted when you bring in the issue of karma. In all of my experience in releasing karmic blocks, all of them emerged from a central point within not just me, but within my larger being on a reincarnation-based scale. What I am saying is that many of these glitches come about not through a linear progression of lifetimes lived, but outside of time and most often trouble multiple lives at once.I say this because I have had access to numerous lifetimes and I have seen how these issues often repeated in some lifetimes (but not all). The themes predate life here, ad in going to their root, I did not find a Genesis here, but “elsewhere.”

 It appears that we come back over and over to work through a number of different themes, some which can be very different from each other. 

Some cycles in reincarnation can be fairly straightforward in the sense that a soul comes in as a woman, man, father, and mother. These encompass the entirety of our possible relationships (including siblings when we are a part of a family). For others, a soul with a more expansive interest will come back in a variety of cultures in order to get a larger perspective. It’s possible to develop many major currents in karma as well as sub-currents.  All of these come in with you while the soul is drawn to the very factors in life that will help activate these patterns, even when they are negative. Once a soul on the planet begins to be self aware, these deeper patterns begin to be more noticeable and they can be worked through. Healing these patterns actually can have an effect on past lives as hard as that might be to believe. I have seen this happen in my own experience when my spiritual guardian awakened me in the wee hours of Good Friday seven years ago to show me a vision of how all my past junk was being shoveled out through my lifetime now. I stood outside in the cool night air at 4:00 a.m. as he motioned for me to look off to my side. I saw a long hallway appear going off into the woods behind my house. He told me to watch and the hallway tilted downward while the other end tilted up and I saw the doors to each room (a lifetime) fly open and the refuse contents all came sliding out. Hopes, dreams, fears, upsets, all repressed emotion the self was unwilling to deal with, all of it, came sliding out. Sandalphon turned to me and explained that this was part of why I had come here, to be that life where this material was cleared for lifetimes. This wasn’t just from my life as a child, this was from my soul, a pattern that was being made right again. If you understand how something you do here and now can impact your existence both forward and backwards in time, its easy to get very “hungry” for wanting to clean that kind of mess up in your life.

The result of these changes I was going through in the early stages of my awakening put me on a collision course with my then-spouse who was unsteadied by the forces at play in my awakening. Angry over the changes taking place that made me less reactive to her codependent behavior, I had to move forward with the forces in my awakening regardless of the ramifications it might have had for my old life.
I learned that I was drawn to these damsels who, I would learn, were engaging in a form of destructive behavior known as projection. Projection is a type of lie we tell ourselves, a lie that we completely believe….

Projection is an observed behavior that both Freud and Jung wrote a lot about. Jung ascribed the need to project to the Shadow Archetype in the self, a part of us that does not reflect on itself. Jung explained that when the person affected by their shadow self has a deep enough fault or a deep enough misgiving about a fault they have, they will turn this on others and believe that the fault lies with the other person. This is more than blaming, it is the result of a rift within the shadow self that can make this possible. While we all appear to project from time to time, those with neurotic tendencies or who are pathological, will most often do it regularly. For people such as this, projection becomes a way of life. I know because I married one and because of how traumatizing it was, I was drawn to yet another person a few years later who had all the same traits. Because I was awakened, the karma fueled a powerful connection which I attempted to work through a number of times with no success. People like this woman who are serial projectors are said to have either narcissistic tendencies or have a condition known as Borderline Personality Disorder. My first clue about this was when I drove with a friend to a neighboring state to pick up a car she had bought online, and while we were going, I talked about my ex-wife. My friend, who was a licensed counselor, said that my description of her behavior was consistent with BPD and narcissist tendencies. 
As a result of our discussion I did some research into these designations and found that I had not just one run-in with this kind of person, but two. Remember that merry-go-round I mentioned earlier? That’s what I mean. I was drawn to another person who would repeat all the same behaviors as my ex-spouse! And the crazy thing about it was after a few weeks of knowing this person and seeing how she let down her guard and began showing her true self, I had already begun to suspect, even was able to predict what range of behaviors I was likely going to see come from this person, assuming at the time that this was a karmic connection modelled on my ex-spouse. And I was right. To make all of this even more entertaining, I actually thought I needed to work this karma out with this person so I could put an end to this extremely hurtful pattern once and for all!

One of the most difficult part of being with these kinds of people are the lies. In fact, when I saw how both of these women were psychopathic liars, I was accused of being a psychopathic liar. Living with someone like this is like living in a hall of mirrors. Everything that is theirs gets put onto you and then they begin isolating you and trying to alienate the healthy people in your life so your relationships with them are ruined. 

My wife said I didn’t love my children and said this directly to them numerous times. It was a cycle of denigration that had a destructive impact on my life, my sense of wellbeing, not to mention how it effected my children and how it strained, unnecessarily, my relationship with them. It was a nightmarish kind of experience. This second person said I was online seeking to seduce women using my “kundalini powers,”writing publicly and creating an air of drama and conspiracy.  These were the tame lies, and they got worse from there. All of the lies she told appeared to me to be efforts at character assassination in order to isolate me from friends and family, or from colleagues professionally. The really crazy part to all of this was how this person worked in a professional capacity dealing with issues of harassment in the workplace. Talk about a fox in the hen house. 

What makes these lunatics believable is how functional they appear to be. How can they be psychotic when they hold down jobs that require a degree of responsibility? In truth, the narcissist and the Borderline personality type have a public face and a private face. No one saw how the Borderline personality would behave at home, ranting and raving at family, or at themselves. “I talk to myself like this to calm myself” she would say when we would get out of public and into private. The truth was, for as composed as she seemed, she was really repressing a huge amount of emotion second by second and on a few occasions would simply go into a temporal meltdown that would be the reason why she would have to leave a public place because she couldn’t hold it together long enough. 

All I ever saw was that this behavior and the words she used were not about finding peace, but as a way to keep the tension in place. We say that venting helps, but all venting does is it serves as a way for us to justify our upset. If venting is done without being defensive then, yes, it can help release stored anxiety. But this wasn’t what was happening. She was putting her neurosis onto me.When she claimed I was hiding her presence in my life by not friending her on Facebook, I was instead not wanting her to have access to my friends for fear she would use them as she had used me in her need to shirk her responsibility for her feelings and reactions. I feared that she would do to my friends what my ex had done to my children. She complained about my not introducing my family to her, but the truth was, I suspected she could use them the same way my ex used my own family members to try and distance and alienate them from me. The jealousy I’m talking about here is beyond anything anyone would call within normal bounds. It was scary. The “clusterfuck” of emotions she claimed marked my emotional state were the result in large part to her own raw emotions and upset, which was vented directly at me. She would get upset if I looked a female cashier in the eye and thanked her by name for checking out my groceries. I was dressed down for being playful with wait-staff at a restaurant. Behavior that was just me being nice suddenly took on a sinister tone. I found myself being punished for being me. What was happening was that she was putting her own hard emotions on to me , the guy so eager to help. The result always felt like having someone pooping on you and then saying what a mess you are. It was beyond upside-down.

It’s hard because people like this do not see how they are creating the crisis they claim others bring to their lives when it’s all their own doing. In fact, the victims of this form of emotional abuse often wind up being enablers by being afraid to speak out against these kinds of people. I was accused of having sexually assaulted “all” of my female art students at my work. When I confronted her with this lie, she pointed out how she had not used my name which is the definition of slander and libel. She then said that had a Constitutionally protected right to write anything she wanted. I have the email. 

The problem is that in our society when a woman makes an accusation like this, people tend to believe the woman. In this case, it was another in a long line of lies. People don’t stop to consider the pain that this causes men who are often stuck in roles that expect them to just “suck it up” and go on. It’s a deadly double standard that assumes women don’t lie about these things. My experience has been that they do, and do so in spectacular fashion.

So how do you make sense of all of this? How do you deal with people who project? What are some of the symptoms and the backgrounds of people who engage in behavior like this?

Projection is a psychological defense mechanism in which individuals attribute characteristics they find unacceptable in themselves to another person. For example, a husband who has a hostile nature might attribute this hostility to his wife and say she has an anger management problem.
In some cases projection can result in false accusations. For example, someone with adulterous feelings might accuse their partner of infidelity. Considering how much the woman I knew engaged in affairs while being with other men, it began to make sense that she was putting on to me her own inability to control her sexual appetite. She claimed that I had broken up her marriage when she actually said to me privately that she divorced her husband because she was not happy with him. She said that you don’t go looking unless things aren’t alright at home to begin with (I have screenshots of those texts). Months later, she was blaming me for her own broken marriage. She was also claiming that I too was married at the time, but I was not. I had been separated for over two years by the time I met her and my divorce was finalized the following year.

According to the psychiatric community there are types of projection. Like other defense mechanisms, projection is typically unconscious and can distort, transform, or somehow affect reality. A classic example of the defense mechanism is when an individual says “She hates me” instead of expressing what is actually felt, which is “I hate her.”

There are three generally accepted types of projection:
Neurotic projection is the most common variety of projection and most clearly meets the definition of defense mechanism. In this type of projection, people may attribute feelings, motives, or attitudes they find unacceptable in themselves to someone else.

 

Complementary projection occurs when individuals assume others feel the same way they do. For example, a person with a particular political persuasion might take it for granted that friends and family members share those beliefs.

Complimentary projection is the assumption other people can do the same things as well as oneself. For example, an accomplished pianist might take it for granted that other piano students can play the piano equally well.

What Is the Purpose of Projection?
Sigmund Freud believed projection to be a defense mechanism often used as a way to avoid uncomfortable repressed feelings. Feelings that are projected may be controlling, jealous, angry, or sexual in nature. These are not the only types of feelings and emotions projected, but projection most often occurs when individuals cannot accept their own impulses or feelings.

In modern psychology, the feelings do not necessarily have to be repressed to constitute projection. Projection can be said to provide a level of protection against feelings a person does not wish to deal with. Engaging in either complimentary and complementary projection can allow people to feel more like others or relate to them easily.
It is fairly common for people to engage in projection from time to time, and many people who project their feelings on occasion do not do so as a result of any underlying issue. In some cases projection can contribute to relationship challenges. Projection may also be a symptom of other mental health concerns. In my case, projection was part of a personality disorder.
Projection and Mental Health Concerns Projection, one main mechanism of paranoia, is also frequently a symptom of narcissistic and borderline personalities. A person with narcissistic traits who does not respect their partner may say to the partner, “You don’t respect me or see my true worth.” Some individuals with borderline personality may be afraid of losing the people they love and project this fear by frequently accusing friends or partners of planning to leave. However, individuals who project their feelings in this way do not necessarily have either of these conditions.

A person in therapy may be able to address these projections with the help of a qualified mental health professional. When a person can explore the reasons behind any projected feelings, it may be possible to prevent or reduce occurrences of this behavior in the future.

In the end, there is no “working” with a person like this. Instead, you learn when enough is enough. I thought I could heal a troublesome pattern, but I learned that this is not possible with someone with neurotic and delusional traits. In the end, it was far more productive to work out my stuff instead of tossing my junk into a cauldron with another person’s junk and expect anything good to come of it. But I knew this already. I was stupid. I was foolish. I learned you can only do this work quickly and productively on your own. Everything else is an invitation to the tar pit of karmic entanglement no matter how much that karma revs up your pranic engines. The result is I am genuinely happier, feeling safe, free, and ready for the next big adventure I’m about to embark on, and it finally looks like a dream come true.

References:

American Psychological Association. APA Concise Dictionary of Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2009. Print.

Corsini, R. J., & Wedding, D. (Eds.). (2007). Current Psychotherapies (Eighth ed.). Brooks Cole.

Perry, J. C., Presniak, M. D., & Olson, T. R. (2013). Defense Mechanisms in Schizotypal, Borderline, Antisocial, and Narcissistic Personality Disorders. Psychiatry, 76(1), 32-52.

Projection. (n.d.). Changing Minds. Retrieved from http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/coping/projection.htm

Update…

For the last month or so, I have been publishing my large backlog of draft posts in order to stay in something of a regular schedule….without being too silent.
But life has been taking so many positive turns calling up some of the most unusual experiences. None of which I am nowhere near being able to put to word. 

Synchronicity keeps turning her mystery wheel in order to show me just how arranged, timed, and scheduled this life can be. There was a time when just mentioning these odd occurances would put a stop to them….for a while. Now, finally aware of their deep connection to our own inner matrix’s of energetic purpose, they barely skip a beat. They come bidden through simple acts of intention (think it and it happens). It’s just that now they occur with a clarity and alignment to this life I am growing into, through, and out of. Minutes or days instead of months and years. 

But life is also unbelievably busy with multiple projects all pointing me to a new chapter in my life. Now, with this freedom to be, I have had this lively shift taking place that shows me how I used to take on other people’s discontent as though it was my job to bring people their joy or peace, or security. With my life moving so far from all of this, the dysfunction in others could never be more apparent as their own. And my issues, I joyfully get to embrace them and dig painfully into these mysterious places within that are now like mysteries needing illumination. Without it, society remains discontent. I’m busy setting up a new stream to be in life. The pain upon discovering them is now an opportunity to release them. When you find the pain, you hace found a moment to clear and re-learn in a new way.
On one front, I am moving and setting up a studio space where I can have ready access during all hours if need be. On another, I will be testing new materials in my creative work expanding out of utilitarian objects to fine art. I will begin working to produce sculptural works that speak to my experience with awakening by addressing identity in relationship to nonduality. I have so many ideas that need to be worked through and developed. All the while, I will be developing work in clay for some trial balloons. If successful, the work will take me where I most want to be; swimming in the seas and oceans to capture visual material for the sculpture I will be developing.

I have interviews that are all typed and edited with some interesting people who were willing to sit down with me to talk candidly about their lives and how things changed for them once awakening came along. I hope to be getting those ready for publishing later this summer. I will be devoting a new page to these interviews so those of you who are interested in adding to the base of material can take part by preparing writing prompted by a series of standard questions that I provide most people taking part in this effort.

On other fronts, I am considering the idea of receiving formal training in massage and body work in order to bring my gifts forward for the first time since entering into a conscious awareness of the human energy field and how we can heal through it by considering the whole individual. As yet, it is more an early “intention” without any manifestation….yet. I began to consider it was time after finding a flow of energy my being through me spontaneously that I later read about that is called reiki, which is laying on of hands or energy healing. During the same period of time I received a gift of a reading from a dear friend with essentially the message that it’s time for me to get moving with my gifts. It’s part of why I’m here. I know it sounds vague, but it’s not intentional. Once I form the bud of a thought, events begin to take shape around this idea in a way where I don’t actively seek out the opportunities, they instead come to me. So I’m in receptive mode keeping my eyes and ears open.

I’ve been having some experiences tied to a set of ancient Christian texts involving what may have been a past life that involved seeking to preserve these texts by hiding them.I have two chapters written about how Christian dogma was changed early on in the process resulting in a huge loss of esoteric knowledge that Jesus was teaching his inner circle. It’s the greatest story never told. I’m hoping to have time in my evenings to do more work on that project.
Probably sometime next month, after I am more settled and I have completed a second renovation project at a new location, I will do my best to begin conveying more about what has been happening this last month. Until then, I will continue plucking more writing from the vault….

I hope Summer is great for you!

-Parker 

Healing 101

Your energy body is a perfect reflection of the totality of the universal truths of existence. The seven major chakras represent seven major aspects that make up the seed of all creation. In you are seven major chakras which are like an octave, a totality. When you can clear these seven chakras of all of the shame and guilt and repressed emotions, you can begin to really know by direct experience what creation is because it has been seeded in you. This is the “divine spark” the Atman, the higher self. 

This “seed” has within it the power to know truth (crown chakra), see the truth(third eye chakra), speak the truth (throat chakra) love the truth (heart), be the truth (solar plexus), feel the truth (the sacral chakra) and create the truth (the root chakra). When these centers are clear, you no longer repress the truth but experience it cleanly. As long as you have repressed emotion in a part of the light body, so too will the truth be hidden from your direct experience. Clearing these centers is an act of clearing karma. You might think karma is tied to your actions, but I ask; what is the root of your actions? This is what clearing karma is, and it closely aligned to the concept of sin (which means anything that harms your soul). It clears away bad memories, bad knee-jerk behaviors that keep you in a cycle of pain and spreading that pain to others. It clears you so you know who you truly are beneath that mountain of dross. This is the true freedom, it is true peace. 

When you reach this place, you see clearly that anyone behaving in anything other than their highest is simply acting in accord with this mountain of things. And while we are human, and imperfect, we also can step into, and remain, in a fully integrated self that calls on all aspects of the self, including the super self. Yes, the world is imperfect, but to bring perfection it is incumbent on you to reach it first for yourself. This can only be done through a process of inner inquiry, observation, and radical self honesty. You have to want truth more than you want the mountain of things.

How you do this clearing work can be found on this blog by using the Search function with the keywords “clearing blocks.” There should be more than 30 posts that speak to the techniques that are most effective for doing this work. There are techniques for clearing this blocked or stored energy using TRE, movement, breathing, and eastern methods like Qi Gung, just to name a few.

One if the biggest blocks we have as a species is in our root chakras. Here, our ability to give and receive nurture exists. It is where our creative fire is initiated, whether for creating new life in the physical or for that next new idea or way to help create your day in a new way. Creativity is so much more than an artistic pursuit as it is a way of being and living.

We are all so tied up with root block, and it shows! It shows in how we have so little regard for creativity in our culture (save for technical pursuits). It also shows up glaringly in how we treat sex. It is pushed down, made dirty by taboo and “kinks” in our being. As a result, we never get to experience our creativity as the wildly powerful thing that it is. We regulate, control, and turn it down because we think it’s inappropriate to ooze with it, or let it fill our life with its vitality, wonder, bliss, and the awe it brings. It is our collective shame that most everyone here is faced with dissolving and letting go. It is our shame that literally attenuates or blocks our full experience with the divine within. The divine does not move with these kinds of shackles. 

Getting to the root is substantive work that when cleared makes the rest of the work easier, but it’s most often the last center to clear in people. Why? It is so foundational. It leads us to what we are: co-creators. Most don’t want that kind of responsibility, so we shirk it by saying our problems are because of our parents, our loved ones, our society and its institutions. But ask any co-creators and they will tell you, your misfortunes are all entirely self made. It’s because this is so hard to face that many don’t, preferring instead to blame an event in childhood as the cause. But it isnt the cause, it is a symptom.

I know this is hard to believe or trust us true, but if you apply this awareness to your life, you will progress much quicker and be much happier.

This is why it is only a symptom….

You chose your life and your parents. You chose them in order to set up events that would challenge you to both create and to heal. No true learning comes by way of a mental understanding of how bad something is that needs to be healed; you have to know this through every inch and atom of you. No exceptions. This is how the divine is; it is not a half measure of itself. It is a full measure. It only got to be that way by not falling for anything but the best of itself. It has made itself and it is unwavering in this. This is why when you try to heal and reach into the divine that you are that you can feel a lot of tension inside building up. You are dragging your mountain of things into it, and you can feel the chaos and tension and difficulty with just trying to remain in that superstate. Eventually, you are destined to “fall” from that grace over and over until you learn that you cannot enter your heaven with that baggage. When you awaken you can visit there for longer and longer periods, but your fall is all but promised when you still have work to do. Once you clear the baggage, you naturally and effortlessly are able to remain in this heavenly state with ease. And to be clear; this is a process, so most often, ease comes gradually, piece by piece as the blocks are removed. Its because they block you from something that you really are, deeper down. 

We get tricked into thinking that we are victims of our past or our upbringing as a way of not having to dispense with our brokenness. But the events in your early life are the result of a soul that exists prior to each lifetime. It is a glitch already in you that is creating how you are. No one makes you do or be anything. You choose just as you chose the conditions of your birth. You are here to clean it up. So instead of playing the victim, play the role of the responsible creator-in-training that you truly are. If you adopt this attitude, it will straighten all that is crooked in you. It will make you strong. It will make you more honest. Now be ready to work at it each and every day until it becomes a part of your thinking and feeling; this is true empowerment!

It is for some an inconvenient truth that there are two forces working to make prana and these two are described as yin and yang, the Shakti and Shiva. They are in Jungian psychology the anima and animus. In ancient Christianity they are the father and Holy Ghost (which was considered the feminine aspect before orthodoxy came and obfuscated it’s true meaning). What we are looking at are two forces in us that we experience as archetypes in our lives and our cultural and religious institutions, and eventually they merge into one in order to fuel both awakening and divine union. In awakening, we can experience them as the “lost” sides of ourselves, our twin (a karmic relationship in awakening) or as a side of God that allows us to experience ecstatic union with the divine. This is all there to help us learn not to feel shame about sexuality and spirituality existing together in an unbridled and free way. This happens when the self becomes less divided and more whole. 

Once free, dysfunction is healed. Sexual “kinks” go away, and a desire to use sex for control (men and women both do this in different ways) and what replaces it is nothing short of relief and freedom. Your creative energy expressed through all seven centers (the seed) is free to be.

To get there, though, requires diving deep into the matters of the root in order to acknowledge what’s bent, broken, and limiting you. You can’t feel the divine by doing this intellectually. You can’t do it by leaving any single part of you behind. You can’t know the divine until you ARE the divine, which has no compunction about sexuality or ecstacy as one channel of the seven major rivers of experience which leads us to that one great ocean. To be whole, the whole must ascend together bearing no more falsehoods about itself.

I realized that I was a tantric when I began recognizing that my sexuality had to come along and be okay with complete and total surrender and flow of all that I am. That means, no shame with sexuality. So I have worked on healing this shame and it has helped me to be more grounded, healthy, and happy. I am at ease with my riotous creativity. I also no longer hang out with people who don’t understand or value my creative fire and the vast abundance that lies bubbling up from deep within me. Whenever I have been able to dispense with people who are limited in their own hearts and minds, I tend to soar on skies that I know are my own. It isn’t that I study tantra or even practice sacred sexuality,  because the truth of tantra at its core is this idea I have been telling you about, which is being healed and more fully integrated so there are no divisions within who you are. You are free to feel all aspects of yourself as bliss and the love behind it that supports the universe.

 I promise that dissolving your deep-seated shame will also dissolve the appearance of divisions in the self.

This healing is a critical first step in the awakened experience. Nothing substantive can be done before you clear the dross within. Deprogram, cleanse, heal, and you will find the you you knew existed within you.

Yes, cleansing is a process. It might take years to go through all the levels, but by clearing them, it is rare to go back and reinstitute them. My experience is that some blocks go fast and easy but there are others that are deceptively hard. You can’t B.S. your way through this, you just have to be honest with yourself when you continue having a problem cropping up; you haven’t cleared it yet. Be patient, and be ready to continue doing the work. This is not a race. Give up your misgivings because you created them. 

The conditions of your life are only a symptom that comes from your own inner origin that you have come here to clean up. Once you do, the events and conditions that were in that old life will be gone forever. A more accurate set of conditions of events will prevail. If you espouse the value of “ascension” then this is the process that will get you there.

Until next time….

Anatomy of a Chakra

You can’t see a chakra, so how is it that I am using a term like ‘anatomy’ to talk about it?

Invisible to the naked eye, the chakras are beyond visible perception but have been studied for thousands of years. Chakra is a word from Sanskrit that means ‘wheel.’ While the concept of the chakra never entered into the lexicon of Chinese Medicine, the Chinese mapped the lines connecting the chakra system with such precision that their maps are used to locate and identify the gateways or points in the subtle body system that can be pressed or “needled” by acupuncturists to help release the blocked energy the Chinese call qi and the Hindus call prana. The specifics differ due to cultural inclinations, but they are both describing the same thing, as well as different parts of the same system of energy.

The anatomy of the chakras has been done by those sensitive enough or those most willing to tune into them using energetic awareness and the third eye. For as ancient as the knowledge is, there is still more to discover.

In 2009, I was visited by an angelic being who placed his hand into my heart chakra in what I describe as a form of “surgery” where he pulled out a “skin” or body of old psychic material that I had in my energy body. As this was happening, my system went from feeling like it was running on a 220 volt system to a 10,000 volt system. Everything lit up, my entire being was suffused by a love of God so incredible I had no idea such an experience was even possible. During what only took a moment, a series of extremely rapid communications took place. I realized that I had entered into a superstate. I am telling you this to point out that whenever I have had these transcendent experiences (I actually don’t go beyond—I feel that I am enhanced or consciousness has accelerated), my perception and awareness also is enhanced right along with everything else. 

One thing that I noticed was that I was focused on my heart chakra and saw what appeared to be a beautiful thousand-petaled flower form that emerged into my mind’s eye awareness. As I watched this flower that I knew was my heart chakra, I noticed that behind the flower was yet another flower. As I looked at this, information streamed into me letting me know that the flower in the front of my chest coincided with yang or positive “male” energy in consciousness while the other flower or chakra corresponded to the yin or “feminine” qualities in consciousness. I use quotes because this has nothing to do with gender or sexual orientation, just a quality in all of us. It is also what connects us to the divine, to superconsciousness which is native to all of us and not separate from any of us. It is the yin/yang and the father/holy ghost. These two build the full compliment of superconsciousness also known as cosmic mind, the Christ, and others (described in every major culture).

This second flower was guarded, protected, really, or so it seemed, by its masculine counterpart.I thought how lovely that was, but I also thought that this idea seemed new. I had never heard of two heart chakras before (and I’ve studied energy for years), so what was going on?

This experience led me to inquire more deeply within to see if I could find out more.

What I came up with from my inner study was a little hard to grasp on the surface but easy to grasp in totality. So here goes…

Since the chakras correspond to the physical body, they have the appearance of a given location and form, with two complimentary channels of energy moving through and aiding in the activation or flow(yin and yang). At the same time, the chakras channel this energy called prana which appears to not be tied down to a regular 3-dimensional structure only. As a result their placement in the body, while consistent, also has a few odd inconsistencies attached. For one; it exhibits nonlocality. This means that a discrete particle of energy can be anywhere, or, theoretically, everywhere simply because while it is here in space/time, it also exists outside of it. This correlates with some theories in quantum mechanics which give physicists a hard time sometimes.

In the body there are Ida and Pengali channels in the nadi or meridian system. The Ida carries what is generally thought of as a negative charge with the Pengali carrying what we refer to as a positive charge. These run in parallel along the spine. While this is so, the feminine aspect of the chakra appears to be situated towards the back side of the body. It seems as though this might be an odd bit of “spooky action” at a distance.Perhaps when the energy from the Ida and Pengali enter the chakra it gets “turned” somehow so that this orientation is perceived as being front to back.This is the forward edge of energetic understanding since no one that I am aware of has delved into this issue. It’s curious and I’d like to understand it better because I think it could reveal a hitherto unknown characteristic of the energy that might provide us with a new wrinkle in also understanding ourselves and the super consciousness that “invented” all of this.

Now as I say this, I know that it could also be that nothing is as simple as it seems. It could be that we only feel this orientation due to how our own personalities or Psyche’s are structured. It is possible that I feel the receptive energy more in the core of my being because I am a heterosexual male whose sexual alignment is masculine/hetero while I have a non-dominant series of feminine traits that are more subtle in their expression. Would a woman feel an inner masculine that resides within, situated so because those traits are not dominant? Or is this just how I am oriented? I do note however that the Seraphim when telling me his name showed me his nature in a visual image. It consisted of a tall masculine man with a softer interior. Hard on the outside, soft on the inside. This is very much like how I feel myself to be…so I do wonder how others experience this….

I also found that what I was feeling was that one side of the chakra turned one way based on its polarity while the other side, to the back, turned a different way. That is, the movement felt like it was opposite or complimentary. This created the feeling of two lobes of the same object turning together but using or being affected by different “ends” of the energy. To be more accurate, there was a feeling of this being a torus form where energy would flow out and then back into the center which is the “zero point” where all energy reached no-charge. Positive would turn into negative and negative would turn into positive. The torus itself maintained a magnetic alignment that gave it a sense of solidity, form, and consistency…much like how the physical body maintains consistency even though it is made entirely of energy (E=MC2)

I was pleased to find that the drawing I made back in the day to illustrate this is a nearly perfect representation of images Barbara Brennan has had illustrated in her books about human energy and healing. 

Don’t take the drawing as literal, however. It leaves a lot of subtle material out and is meant to present the idea. It is highly simplified in order to make some principles clearer. The image is below.

And for that matter, this image of a torus viewed on its side (think of a donut shape) could be used (below).

For those interested in learning by doing, or helping to expand our knowledge base, I encourage you to use the minds eye to see the energy body. I know that what I have done is the same perception used by the Chinese that led to their meridian maps or the Indian system of the basis or energy channels.

Once when I was in a deep restful state with my masseuse and energy worker, I found my third eye activated and I was able to look at my body as though I was looking down from my head to my feet. I saw how along one meridian there were a cluster of other points, each coinciding with a chakra in another part of the body. What’s more, my masseuse was about to press her finger on that meridian line and as she felt for it, I saw one of the dots around the meridian was dark. I told her what I was seeing. The point was so small, her finger covered the cluster of points but the very center of her pressure in her finger was about an 8th of an inch off. So I told her which direction to press into, and as she pressed, she also moved her finger over the fascia of my skin just enough to reach the one point exactly. She pressed and I howled in pain; she was worried and I said to keep pressing harder. And boom, just like that, two memories popped into clear view that involved my trauma with the ocean-once as a child in my life now and as a Polynesian. While the details aren’t important here, the fact that I saw something that had never been described before in any manual on energy medicine sure seemed very important. Instead of viewing the energy system front-end, I was looking “down the pipe” (top to bottom) as I call it and saw this cluster of dots that when pushed, cleared energy from another chakra in another part of the body. The pressure point was in my shoulder but the center that released was down in the hip or root chakra region. When I guided her finger to the exact point, it was like releasing a long forgotten memory and the emotions that went along with it.Interstingly this cluster of points looked just like a flower with dots for petals. Each petal, a channel for bliss-filled energy. The implication in my vision was that each chakra is energetically present at every other point. Let that sink in for a while.

You might think if you see a chakra as a flower that this is its literal structure. It isn’t. A chakra might feel like a flower but look like a cluster of meridian lines. But the chakra feels like a beautiful unfolding flower. It’s poetry, you see, a way to tell the truth when faced with something in our world through colorful interpretations based on the association’s we have with objects in the world. The image tells the truth through dreaming.

Dream imagery achieves the same thing; it conveys how we feel about something because our response and our experience are in no way separated from the phenomenon. When someone misperceives me,f or example,  I feel it as a tightening, almost always, because the channels of energy are being affected in that person and I can feel what they feel when I tune them in.  But it is they who are shutting down their energy, not me. I can still feel it. It might seem real to them, but is not real beyond what the energy is doing (constricting) and I know that it is in this constriction that people pull into their own limited story lines about what they think is true instead of what is. So they dream a story and believe it to be real. I do not dream, but feel the restriction. So likewise I saw the chakras as like a peony with endless petals. Beautiful and poetic, with the male “covering” or protecting the female. But this was just an image that I saw that sought to interpret what I was able to grasp in the moment. It was beyond beautiful… it was cosmic… so a peony with its riot of petals opening helped to convey this opening that happened in me with the angelic seraphim. 

To that end, it is an image that describes a spatial and non-spatial phenomenon all at once (something both physical and nonphysical all at once).

What am I saying? I am saying that truths use images to express themselves, but we are the ones choosing the images. The clearer you are inside, the clearer the transmission is. Don’t take images in the mind as the literal truth because there is more for all of us to learn and know (myself included). I’m just showing you whatI have seen, hoping others will get curious and want to do their own inquiry to help move all of us along in our understanding. 

Strange Fire

After months of work and away from blogging (I have published drafts!) I find myself settling into this sense of deep devotion to God, for want of a better term. You see, having touched this presence, I don’t know how anyone would dare call it a person. It is so vast. How do you? I can only grasp it when I surrender so deeply that my own inner ability to feel this love is what builds the bridge to that state.
But tomorrow, as I ready my house for sale, I will be meditating all day on the sacred three, the original Trinity.

But I ask you, do we in Christianity really understand the Trinity? I will tell you that no, we don’t. And why is this? The great hint is the Holy Ghost. Originally it was not part of an all-male identity. Doubt that? You need to begin digging into those books that early Orthodoxy didn’t want anyone reading….

I will be meditating on that for my tomorrow as I go about my day.

Focus On The Third Eye

©Parker Stafford

I remember feeling that dot activate in the center of my brow even when I was little. It was maybe the size of a pea. Okay, maybe half the diameter of a dime, a little bigger than a pea. It always came with this curious sense of pressure there. Like something was just…resting there….a dime, a pea, really it could have been anything. I would wonder if my third eye was activating.

But then I was jettisoned into an awakening, and it began, in part, when this voice in my head told me to close my eyes and focus my eyes along the center-point of my brow line. That changed it for me. It sounds impossibly simple, right? This has been one method used by many people across time and cultures to activate life force so that it flows at a higher level (Egyptian Mystery Schools, early Christians, Hindu, Taoists, and more). I slipped past the mirror and began a journey into a world within that was expressing itself through myriad lives here on earth….atoms, trees, fish, stars, and the ten thousand things.

That dot transformed. I felt it as it changed, grew, then spread across my forehead. I didn’t know that this would lead to awakening, I was trusting in the inner voice that was urging me along. I drew a picture of it as it felt on my head. It was just that vivid. It was no longer a dot, but a double channel of yin and yang energies fueling my inner sight. 

Bands of energy radiated outward horizontally and wrapped all the way around my head. The pressure was intense, but it never hurt. It was an ethereal energetic pressure, and it felt like it was cracking my head open like a nut.

The dot, a seed, really, had sprouted and grew each night as I sat down in bed to meditate before going to sleep. I watered the seed with my attention. You don’t have to think magic thoughts, you don’t have to do anything when you turn your awareness to it. In fact, it seems like you are doing precious little. It is like flipping a switch. But be aware what you are in for. Are you ready for a relentless process of realignment, cleansing and release? Are you ready to go forward one step, crossing a threshold from which there is no return? “Buckle up because Kansas is getting ready to go bye-bye.” There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. But when you are ready, you are ready.

“Please come take me,”  I wrote in my journal that night. “I am not afraid of you, I know you do not mean any harm. I know you want to open me like a lover opens his beloved.” Unashamed, unafraid, I knew that this was how this had to go. I was to be lit on fire by the Holy Ghost, the Cosmic Fire, the Kundalini. One part of me was the initiator and another was being initiated by this new fire of life. And it happened so effortlessly, like I had come here for this. My ticket had been reserved aeons ago. It was going to happen. 

This is a full third eye awakening, my friends. I thought I knew, but I knew only the tip of its tail, that pea-sized dot. The dot is the seed. Nascent, full of promise, but not fully activated. Maybe that’s why they paint the bindi on their foreheads I thought. They do it because that’s how it feels to them.

When the third eye blossomed in me, it was so radically different, you see, that I had to draw it, recording it both so others could see it and so I could look at it with my  physical eyes, too.

It led me into undescribable bliss. Like a rocket, it took me there until I learned how to reach that pearlesent bliss on my own. It taught me that I had to work to clear my baggage. This took years. I wish I could say it was easy, but it wasn’t. But the inner presence that woke up within me didn’t care; it offered me endless chances with no judgement. While I would feel defeated by my stumbled, it seemed to smile as if to say, “This is how you learn. You stumble, you fall; you get back up and go farther each and every time.”

Some refer to it as “the helmet” some as “a vice.”  I wanted to study it. My little secret is that if you bring your fiery love of awakening with you, unashamed, into the moment and come to your wanting to know more about something, something in the universe opens inside of you, like a blossom, a riotously wild but free blossom that contains just what you want to know. The universe opens its “secrets” to you. I don’t know who is being seduced more, me or God. But it works so beautifully. Just silence your mind and be ready to let your imagination build the images or words or smells to give you it’s truth and meaning….because when you do, you naturally can become the thing you are after to know. What better way to know something than to become it in your heart.

How do I explain to you that you fall in love with the Universe? How do I explain that while this intense live flows, it just gives all of itself to you in the process? It responds to the seductive power that is the human spirit. This spirit, gifted through God, is a spark or piece of God and thus our own desire is God’s desire. How do I explain how when you feel this love you lose who is you and who is God? The gift is that in this live beyond all our loves, all secret hidden things become plain as the scales of our earthly condition fall away…or can…if you can give yourself completely to this love. 

It is this way that I have learned so much. No teacher, no guru, and no need to wade through what parrots have to say. But this was how I began to learn and how I use my third eye as a sacred instrument of knowing. It is. It is part of my inner temple. And we all have that temple in us, that place where we meet the divine. My third eye let’s me see what is important or most immediate in my life. It’s force spreads across my head, a reminder that it’s there. The secret is to keep it simple. Our rational minds stumble and fall in its advancing presence. No, you have to be able to let yourself think and feel in an impossibly big way.Are you ready? It is like an amazing dream, impossible for it to be real, but is. 

I was pleased to see that what I had drawn matched perfectly the Tilak that yogis paint on their foreheads. They too were just drawing what they had felt. Maybe some were just parroting what others had done, not realizing that this was how a fully awakened third eye felt like. Shiva has it always painted on his head. The yogis sometimes don’t have the horizontal bands on their Tilak. Some do. Some have a series of dots with those horizontal pressure bands. It’s all the same, I know, different versions, varieties of the same experience. Below are some images of the Tilak, so you know, so you can see that it isnt just decoration, not merely a ritualized marking; it is an illustration. It describes something. Something real in us…

Look at my drawing again….

So look for this, but do so carefully because if you are feverishly seeking awakening, no one will keep you from it, but it’s good to prepare. It makes things easier. But if you are going to be taken by God, it’s just going to be. This third eye is how they got there. The yogis describe it, Jesus even taught about how to activate it (few even realize that he was teaching about something so esoteric), and anyone who knows where it is that his teaching on the third eye shows up wins a prize! I will give you a hint; it is in one of the canonical Gospels! Verily I say to you, it is true! Let me know if you can find it…

You can travel with the third eye, you can. I was taught by “it” this broad inexhaustible divinity in all things, how it’s to be used (or how I would use it). You can step into worlds through it and glimpse wonders. If that sounds too impossible to you, just remember; it’s already been done, and I do it whenever there is enough of a need. It’s always about something I either need to know or would love to know. Either way, it’s always juicy and perfect. It’s also teaching me how to live my life on the narrow path….which is in truth how to balance between shadow and light so that I might know the depth of love and bliss right here and now. That of course freaks out the fundamentalists, but is understood by the esoteric, the mystics: the shadow we create through our actions does not dissolve until we recognize and heal it (“repent and sin no more”). Until then, it haunts us, taunts us, until we can call on the grace that we are that is God-given, a lifesaving, soul-saving gift. We can be saved, but not until we repent…or recognize that we were doing shadow work to begin with. 

I Ask You….

So how does the third eye feel to you? Has it given you wonders, has it been a curious thing, a mystery? Have felt pressure there? Does it seem inconsequential to you?  Is it a mystery? Do my words seem impossible?

 Know the mysteries. Like stars, they beckon us to adventure. How does it feel, this awakened third eye? Is it a dot? Does it spread across your forehead? Where has it gone? Did it open to you, was your life changed? Has it been hard? Did the hardness show you the way into supreme bliss?

I’d love to know your story…

Sorry to be away so long; so much is afoot right now for me. I’ll write about it later. Meanwhile, how does the third eye treat you? I would love to know.

Swimming in bliss…

Idle Hands

A little handmade humor for your day, courtesy of WTI!