Baptism As The Path To Awakening

Jesus’s Baptism by Giotto

While we do not know for certain why, John the Baptist showed signs of being at great odds with the ruling elites of Jerusalem in the Jewish temple. John was himself in the wilderness, we are told, and showed every sign of living the life as an ascetic: he wore simple clothes and subsisted on honey and locusts. A man like this would be freed to some extent from having to work in order to survive. This would have afforded him more time for contemplative prayer and meditation. Ascetics like this often were mystics, people who sought to know the thoughts of God. There is evidence that John was just this, that he became aligned to the divine compass that rests in all of us. How so?

Baptism as it is practiced today was very different in John’s time. Today we sprinkle water on a child’s head and say their sin is forgiven, their path to heaven is promised. But baptism by John was a different affair. We know through the disciples of Jesus, which took up baptism as an important precursor to discovering the kingdom within that it was imperative that the person want to be washed clean with all their heart

And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is the water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? (37) And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest.

Acts 8:36-7

While in Acts the baptism was couched in believing Jesus as the son of God, baptism was developed as a critically important way to free people from the division that previous sin, that which separates our hearts from the heart of God, could serve as a mechanism of release for people. All you had to do was to buy into it (believe). John was doing this in order to remove sin. John was setting souls free.

One important step toward awakening is cleansing the self of those things which divide us from the light that shines upon us, in us. In every way, Jesus explained that all of this was found within. It begins like a smallest of all seeds, the mustard.

Ritual cleansing baths are an important part of Judaism. John, I note, took the idea of cleansing one step further and created a way to free people from the burden of their past. What is remarkable is that John broke with the temple practice of blood sacrifice as the way to remit sin.

By whose authority did John do this? In his day John would have pointed to God. As any prophet, mystic or seer can tell you, this God is found within us. By John’s own perceptiveness and his desire for a better more peaceful way, he invented baptism. His own authority stamped the method with effectiveness. Yes, just saying it could even make it happen. John and Jesus both understood the role that belief or faith had in the work they did. Anyone employing methods like these understands the role belief plays.

People think there is magic in baptism, but it is entirely empty in truth, it is instead entirely filled by ones faith in it. By the same rule, baptism can be a hollow act if you don’t approach it correctly. There is evidence in the scripture to show that the early ones knew how to do it so that achieved its desired impact. One’s own faith is what works the magic. Does God forgive the sin? No, instead we do. God is always ready to forgive, but it is we who must prepare ourselves, to make our minds and hearts right to be forgiven. At any moment this can happen because of the abundant love that God has for all. We must be able to empty ourselves of the coarse stones that hides how ever-present this love is, how all-encompassing it has always been.

This would easily be counted as heresy today, but that is just how far the faithful have wandered from the core of these rituals. We think there is magic in just doing them, but that just isn’t so. If drinking the wine doesn’t make you feel closer to Christ, it’s your fault. You really have to let your imagination take you for a powerful ride. You had to be ready to give everything up to receive the power of baptism.

It’s important to understand how baptism was performed. In the earliest days a person left all of their garments and went into the water naked. This is one reason why there were furors over women in the early church baptising people. It was considered scandalous for a woman to be performing this with people who were naked. Women did, however, perform baptism. Sadly, baptism has been altered from its original form where one strips away the covering, the guile of the self, to come to God utterly naked. This ceremonial stripping away of what protects and hides us was an important ingredient to the process.

Being naked served to do two two things: it helped a person to surrender to the ritual. It is hard to hide your soul and heart when you stand naked in the water. It also emphasizes how the body will be washed clean of sin. If you believe it will happen, then it will. That is the true magic of baptism, which relies on belief. But who really is letting go of the sin, the burden? You, of course. Most people think of baptism as the method that works it magic. Baptism was a mechanism to help bring a person to a state of surrender: the grip on what needs to be let go is softened, and if the heart is ready, it goes. The more you let go, the less you have standing between you and God. We have forgotten these principles today. In fact, every baptism is done fully clothed. Besides, what’s the big deal, really?

Something happens to a soul when it is unburdened by the weight of the inner division that divides us from the divine; we suddenly are relieved of that which had been weighing us down only moments before. This adds buoyancy to the heart, and brings one ever closer to the divine presence. It is a trapdoor into the soul and its connection to divine presence. Release the right block or stone holding up the dam and the whole eddifice can come tumbling down.

Humans are made up of a series of these blocks or “stones” that serve to keep out the light or the water of life. All awakenings proceed in the same manner: surrendering to the powerful force that undoes us, that, like a physician, removes those things that keep us from the divine light. You didn’t have to be a Jew, you could be from any faith, from any walk of life. The church created the impression that you had to become Christian if you were to enjoy the benefits of the true light.

It’s quite possible that John was in the wilderness because he was not accepted by the temple priests as legitimate. While his method of baptism was drawn from tradition, it also departed from it. There is no mention of John taking money for his services, which would have been different from what happened at the temple in Jerusalem. This may be why he was in the wilderness. It may also be that John saw the corruption there and chose not to participate, we don’t really know for sure. What we do know is that John developed this method on his own and was offering it to others, which stood as a method that bypassed the temple methods of tithing and sacrifice that were filling the coffers of the temple.

It is worth mentioning that during this time the temple priest began hoarding the Jewish coin used for tithing to the temple. This was called the half shekle (also shekel), as no coinage from a pagan Rome could be accepted. This created artificial scarcity and drove the value for coin up. People from the region would come for yearly blessings and religious observances, bringing a bushel of grain or chickens, doves, or other valued resources which would get converted to the shekle. Under the hoarding regime, what took a bushel of grain could end up costing two bushels, later. That’s some pretty bad corruption for you. And who of conscience would want to deal with a system like that? This was the world that John and Jesus found themselves in.

Jews weren’t the only tradition to practice a cleansing of self for reaching the divine, however. The Native American sweat lodge or inipi is an important precursor to receiving divine guidance. One had to cleanse ones self in order to be closer to the divine and to be able to receive its guidance. The Hindus describe a process of cleansing energy channels where they knew past emotion can be stored, a process that also achieved a closeness to the creator. Much of yoga is concerned with this process of cleansing.

Now you might look at this and say, “This has no similarities to baptism!” But you would be wrong. What is key here is psychology. All of these methods work as psychological triggers….if you buy into or believe them. Under the skin, they achieve the same thing.

Rumi once wrote that people argue about the light saying one is better than another when all is light and none better than the other. All of these cultures knew and practice a similar method because it works because of how all people universally divide themselves from their heritage of children of the creator.

When I awakened, I clearly had released a long-standing issue that had me at odds with myself and the universe. As soon as I let it go, I began having symptoms tied to awakening. It was as though a path had been cleared for me where my awareness was freed up to know the fundamental truth of my being as tied to the divine. I didn’t reach this because of a belief or any expectation of any return from having done this work. Likewise, the work of John worked just as much for Jew as Gentile in his day. Jesus’s work and message worked for all-comers. Jesus saw the benefit in John’s work and began to employ it because it worked when done correctly.

To me, this method reveals the compassion that John had for the spiritual suffering of people. He went out of his way to do this work. Imagine this man, holding you and pushing you gently into the water and pulling you back out, pronouncing how you had been washed free of your sin. To do this, you had to trust John, you had to bodily place yourself in his hands. You had to be ready to let go.

Something powerful happens when you are with someone who has achieved this same type of release, also, which has been a well-known principle in many traditions. A teacher is more effective when they embody the knowledge of how the method works? You better believe it. Each person whose heart is open and ready can feel it since it is a deep spiritual truth, and that truth actually has a life beyond just the teacher (as long as followers don’t fall away from the core principles of the method). It was so powerful a method that Jesus went to be baptised, and when he did, his own connection to the divine was in that moment realized.

We often want to think that Jesus was different, but what I see is a man who wanted his own inner sin to be washed away. No one bothers to look at this, though, within the church. It’s as if, as how the institution has portayed it, that baptism was somehow different for Jesus. The elephant in the room is that people were finding relief from what had them divided from the divine. It is entirely reasonable to think that Jesus sought out John as the physician of his heart and soul.

Division within the self serves to hide or obfuscate our deeper, truer, nature. A person not burdened by unresolved feelings of anger, frustration, fear, or guilt, is much more able to understand and glimpse their deeper fundamental nature as a spark of the divine. The same appeared to be true for Jesus, since in the moment as he emerged from the water, something powerful had happened. It may have been more effective for Jesus than others, and this may also be why he adopted baptism as one of the ritual practices that now make up the Christian faith.

While my awakening wasn’t initiated with a baptismal event, the event that took place was, I suspect, identical to how baptism worked in the old days, which was that I was given the opportunity to unburden myself of an inner tangle of emotion about a past even that I hadn’t been able to resolve. I had a slow burn of frustration, guilt, and anger that had been burning a hole in the pocket of my soul. This angst was as much directed at myself as it was the universe for having sent a challenge spiritually that I felt I had failed in the face of. What was so interesting was once this initial release and subsequent shift took place, the challenge completely resolved itself. It could be said that this challenge to my system set up the conditions where enough pressure was brought to bear to serve as the force that would break through the wall seperating me from the depths within. Once I was able to just let it all go, everything changed from that moment going forward. For me, this one stone removed from that wall I had built caused the wall itself to weaken, ultimately allowing the water of life to stream into my awareness and initiate the changes to get me to a better place. It resulted in years of removing barriers I had erected to the divine.

These stones, all of them, were knots of emotion that only served to drown out or hide the soft flow of life-giving water/light of spirit. This all began with one initiatory act, and I suspect that this was also what John, Jesus, and many others were doing some two thousand years ago. Baptism washes away the lower so that the higher may be better glimpsed. It’s not a guarantee of awakening, but one in a series of steps that can work to bring a person closer until they can see the Christ or saving grace that is in us all.

Paul, in his letters explains it as not something that came from without, but as the Christ that was within. He said that God showed him this in his road to Damascus moment when he was struck by a bright white light. Paul wasn’t a believer at all, and was actively persecuting Christians. He waa shown this Christ within himself. Only then did he become such a vocal proponent of the movement. It’s kind of beautiful when you think about it. A tent-maker going around persecuting followers being baptised in the spirit of the Holy Ghost. That’s what happened to Paul. It was so sudden a transformation that he was blind for three days. This could easily have been a condition we call hysterical blindness. If true, it was because Paul needed some time to catch up with the new reality he suddenly was facing. Blindness can manifest it times like these when you are still unable to comprehend the about-face that happened. This underscores just how sudden his awakening was. This is not unlike many awakenings today. It’s quick, really in a glimmering of an eye and there it is. Boom. Say goodbye to Kansas.

This kind of experience was often spoken of in terms of dying to the old self in order to realize a new life, which was the Christ. Paul wrote of dying daily as he came nearer to Christ, a process identical to awakening.

This was one reason why the esoteric strand or sect within Christianity which we call Gnostic today took Paul as their hero. It was this esoteric strand that was best positioned to understand and convey the very keys to this kingdom, which rested on inner seeking and then discovery of a spark which could be kindled into a great light and a realization of the divine hidden within us all. These descriptions were incredibly similar to those found in other cultures which describe the process of enlightenment.

The conspiracy to destroy the Gnostic sects, which contained so much understanding of these and other sacred rituals by the Orthodoxy (that came later) was a conspiracy of ignorance. Within several generations this more secretive group of sects were driven from the institutionalization process we call Christianity today.

What John, his disciples, Jesus, and his disciples knew was that one of the most important aspect to the work they were doing rested on belief in an important way.

Today, we refer to belief in scientific terms as the “placebo effect.” While we tend to denigrate the power of belief in our modern culture by renaming it with a “sciency” moniker (placebo) belief, regardless, remains an important power of mind. Sign up for, say, a drug trial, where you are a subject who might get a new type of antihistamine as part of a study, and you can glimpse what this power of mind can do. It is known that a certain percentage of participants who believe they are getting the drug and not the sugar pill (the placebo) but do get the sugar pill, will often exhibit physiological reactions as if they are actually getting the drug.

While the placebo effect has its limits in terms of how it can heal, it is a significant enough of a response to begin turning the tables for many touched by it. It helps to show how belief can drive the power of the mind for positive change.

John and Jesus knew about this and even explained many times (Jesus specifically) that it was a person’s faith or belief that had healed them. In first century Judea where access to medicine was nothing like what we have today, the effect of their belief made a huge difference in how people felt.

The Orthodox sect of Christianity claims that the books of the Nag Hammadi Library are heresy, but what interests me is how sophisticated the teachings are and just how probable it could be that they represent, in part, a private teaching by Jesus and his followers. Scholars seek to attribute some of the writings to a man named Valentinus who had a vision of the risen Christ and lived in the first century. Valentinus wrote about how he had visited a direct disciple of Paul who explained to him that Paul had both a public and private teaching. The disciple, named Theodus, taught Valentinus about this inner or secret teaching. While this itself does not prove that Jesus had an “inner ministry” there are indications in the synoptic gospels that Jesus did not teach openly to Gentiles, preferring to teach in parables in order to veil the meaning of his teachings, which happened in Mark and to a degree again in Luke. Every tradition on Earth that has had an esoteric wing which hides certain teachings in order to protect the uninitiated from what could prove to bring awakening before the student was ready for the experience.

Baptism was the beginning, one step in a series of passages to free the self of the burdens that exist in a person’s heart. This today would be called “release work” and it plays an important role in luving closer to the divine presence and allowing ourselves to be transformed by it.

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Plant Medicine As An Ally In Meditation

Copyright, Parker Stafford

I was given weed recently as a result of my describing what took place this Summer where weed had made me more psychic, something I wrote about here at WTI.

Alone finally last night after the holiday goings-on, I decided to get ready for bed and go through a meditation after using the weed I had been given.

I used a very small amount, about a pinch, about 3/4 the size of a pea (if that). This amounted to two regular puffs and one fraction of a third. This was a very low dose, although the version I used was described as being a strong hybrid version. I put on my headphones, pulled up a Monroe Institute Hemisync program from the Gateway Experience, and listened with headphones. This particular audio helps to induce deep Theta states, and while there are directions for relaxation and breathing, most of it is designed for your own inner work. The audio lasts about 45 minutes, just enough to get you there.

Everything happened very quickly. Before the narrator/guide began his first comments, I already felt a presence of a male who was speaking to me in this bright excited voice who seemed to be positioned above me who extended his hand saying, “Take my hand and I’ll show you all the places you can go!” At this point I was already dissociated from my body and traveling through what looked to be outer space. I remember having an experience like this before many decades ago where I moved out of my body and began seeing a starry sky and feeling that the stars were actually consciousness. The sensation at the time was overwhelming and it put an end to the projection because of the state of overwhelm I invariably would fall into that kept me from further projecting. This time, I thought about this and as I saw all these stars, I didn’t feel overwhelm but instead felt a stirring warmth in my core where there was only love. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I acknowledged this love as the next step in my evolution and the evolution of everyone on the planet.

I was interupted by the narrator of the audio a number of times as he made suggestions for how to breathe and relax. I was there in seconds, I was ready instantly and kept having my meditation interrupted by this voice. It didn’t trip me up completely though, it was more that I paused my meditation and waited for the voice to complete what it had to say since it pulled me out of the “broad mind” state as I felt pulled into a more linear language-based state (rational left brain). I’ll have to work more on that in the future. I found myself back at my body after expanding outward through both space and dimension, which all took place very quickly.

I noticed during this whole experience that my third eye had become very active. This time, though, I could feel the third eye pressure at the bridge of my nose. My third eye is now a vertical band that goes from my nose all the way up to my hairline. When it activates, it is usually felt as a large dot on my forehead with a sense of energy and even something that feels akin to tightness of a sort. This tightness isn’t inhibiting in any way, it signals that my third eye is activating in a strong way. It is more that this tightness is the result of these bands of energy that flow around it and out of it. When this happens, it is a sign that I can begin to see clearly beyond the physical if I focus my mind correctly with the third eye center. The two work together in bringing information through. I was aware of information streaming into different parts of my brain which would get routed to the third eye as the lens used to see into the realities that these intuitions represented. Likewise, I was aware that the third eye could see into the mind to pick these things up. It was a fluid dynamic system where informatiin flowed both ways.

As I thought about this, the third eye energy shifted up into its usual place which was mid-brow up to the edge of my hairline. The whole area constitutes the third eye for me, which is akin to a long extended flame of awareness and sensation. The Hindu seers who paint the tilak on their foreheads are using an image of how I experience the third eye. Two vertical lines with a cental line in the center all corresponding to the Ida, Pengali, and Shushumna nadi. The Ida and Pengali merge in union and balance in the Shushuma, the place of boundless bliss. Below is a photo of the tilak as it is worn by mendicate monks. There are variations of the tilak, so the one shown below is just one of a handful of versions used.

I was also met by a small presence that I can only describe as dwarfish that spoke and moved excitedly as it began showing me the energy lines in my legs. I had gone from standing on a beach to being up in the hills in a tropical location atop a flat-topped roof of someone’s house, which was where this being began pointing out the energy lines in my legs.

I was in this kind of environment because the hemisync audio uses ocean waves as part of its audio. I naturally found myself standing on a beach, and later moved from the beach uphill into the mountains above where I landed on a slightly sloping rooftop. The being was showing me where the energy lines crossed in my legs when the narrator broke in and it made it hard to continue. I will see about going back to this in another meditation. I knew or could feel how others had mapped the energy body in not too different a way in the past in meditations much like this one, and I thought how easy it was, not the arduous task as I had originally had thought it was.

I was keen to get into the leg chakras because I could feel how there was some blocked energy that resided at the junction of the torso and the legs. It was curious how this energy trailed off behind me, right around my behind and extending out like coat-tails behind me. This awareness has always been one of the great gifts conferred by awakening, and the awareness itself has been enough to dissolve countless blocks in my field. At one time many years ago this awareness would make me feel defeated by the sheer volume of material present to still clear. Now, though, it existed more as a remnant, a trailing bit of material near my lower back.

What is worth mentioning is the back trouble I have been having since November. The week of Thanksgiving was where it came to a head after driving to see family. It was so bad I couldn’t move from a sitting to a standing position without the use of a broom handle which I used for about a week to get up from my couch. Luckily, I somehow managed to keep working even though all I wanted to do was to lie flat on the floor. I have been slowly rehabilitating my back muscles so I can move more freely. What would have taken weeks if adjystments by a chiropractor I was able to do on my own and now the sore muscles are in a much better place with slow and gentle stretches. It was I think not a coincidence that I was having this tightness along with the enhanced awareness of the stuck energy near my bottom in this meditation.

I soon decided to drift off to sleep after this took place. I revisited the idea of telepathy before going to sleep but every person who I put my mind to seemed much too vivid and in a tangle for me to even try another experiment along these lines. I did however find a part of my mind aware of one person who I kept feeling like I was communicating with during the meditation, like a quick check-in contacted me and there was an important message waiting for me from tat person when I checked messages this morning.

I say this only as a reminder about the things we can explore, learn, and discover. We are all inheritors of a noble light that is supportive and loving. We go and experience things that are part of our present “set and setting” and experiences are part and parcel of where we are at any moment in time.

I will note that up until this summer, I have only ever used natural methods for reaching accelerated states of being and awareness. I have also been an advocate for this approach for many decades (using it myself exclusively) since my early twenties—in the late 1980’s. My experience this past summer made me rethink this approach. After being able to reach these ecstatic states naturally, I have considered what some substances might do to help further expand both awareness and experience. While I have no interest in being a heavy user, I am considering this as one wrinkle among many in this entire process.

If weed helps me to hone in on the remnants if blocked energy, then I will consider future meditations using very small amounts to assist in sharpening that awareness. I don’t sense that weed opened my third eye, that initiation took place in a meditation in late 2006. Rather, my intent to do this meditatiin was set on “finding out what I might see ir discover” with my third eye dutifully responding to that intent and also aided by the much more fluid state I found myself in as the weed began to take affect.

The goal for me is to learn how to emulate these states without outside substances. I will mention though that even the food that we eat can have a significant effect on our physiology not unlike weed has done. I have found states of bliss after eating cantaloupe and other melons because it served to modify how my body responded to the energy of the awakened state. Just being well hydrated can change how I feel. Taking vitamin D has had dramatic effects on how I experience bliss, for example. So weed? It may well be one of many plant helpers that I can use to help open up my cognition and awareness to valid physical and nonphysical states, not as a distorter of experience, but as a liberator from an inhibited state to one that is not as inhibited.

I hope you are getting a break and have enjoyed the holidays. If you don’t hear back from me, happy new year!

A Quickie…

The Mind Of Matter -Mind Over Matter

Two years ago, while learning a new glass form in the studio, I made a wrong move and got a serious burn on my arm. A curious thought arose just as the pain began to barrel into my body. The thought went like this: “it wont hurt…” In seconds, the sense of burning pain ‘flipped’ to become a sensation of coolness, not pain. It remained that way as the burn scabbed over and then healed. It amazed me that I could get the result that I did. I mentioned this event in a post in the Fall two years ago here at WTI. It was one of the first hints that mind could convince the body and brain to change how signals in the body are interpreted. On the one hand, having signals read as pain serve a purpose, but on the other, they show evidence that they can be mediated by the mind when the need arises to change them.

Two days ago I was working in the studio making a piece for an order. In walks some customers. Feeling rushed, I didn’t slip on the protective wear I normally do to protect myself from radiant heat burns. The piece I was working on had to be extra hot in order to properly complete a certain step in the making of the piece. With glass, it is in the range of 15-1900 degrees F. inches from the hand, so even without touching a hot object you can get burned if your skin remains too long in close to the heat source.

I know how crazy this sounds: why would anyone keep their body so close to a heat source that it burns? The answer, my friend, is a glassblower does this often. Normally we are aware of the kind of exposure to keep from getting more than a heat rash or a sunburn-like condition. You learn the difference between heat that will cause discomfort and what will result in burns (and as a glassblower I reach that threshold many times in a day). Normally. I felt my hand and arm burning, and by the time I was near to being finished, the damage was done. Like Icarus, I had flown too close to the sun. Then the piece didn’t turn out either. I was slowly getting caught up in frustration…which is never a good thing.

Putting away the pipe, the severity of the burn became apparent to me. It was the worst radiant burn to date (after 25 years of working with glass). Whoo, boy! I shifted quickly into customer mode and rushed into the gallery to wait on my customers before the burn became unbearable.

I was also feeling preoccupied with how stuck I had become in both the frustration and the pain as I entered the gallery. I explained this to my customers, apologizing if I was not acting my best. I lifted my arm to take a look. My forearm was speckled red with some small blisters forming. The side of my hand had a blister about the size of a nickle. I stayed stuck in my frustration as my customers took their time. All this while, the effects of the burn continued to develop.

After a bit, I was back in the studio facing this situation. This wasn’t good. I imagined that I would be out of commission for a few days as my arm and hand healed. Then I remembered what happened with my burned arm a couple of years ago and how I was able to do what I did back then. Why wasn’t I able to make the pain go away this time? Why wasn’t I immune to it now?

While I thought about this, the realization arose that I hadn’t tried to change the outcome yet. Oh right, I need to go down into it first. I had to find that place in my mind that acts like the operating system for the body. I had to tap into the autonomous nervous system.

First, I quieted my mind despite the physical pain. I do this by considering it’s possible that I can create a place of calm seperate from all of the sensory hubbub going on. I reached into this bottomless calm that is always available when I can get my mind right. After a few moments, I then regarded the pain. As I did this, there came my own presence of mind along with calm accompanied by the pain. I simply thought how I could make the pain go away. I sat with the pain and calm at the same time. To do this yourself, there is no magic to it except that you are willing to consider that both states are possible. It only becomes possible when you do it. I suspect that when you can be calm and not wince at the pain this is a dignal to the deeper part of the brain. It’s like you are behaving as though it doesn’t hurt. I suspect that when you do this and come to the brain with this kind of state, the brain is susceptible and willing enough to take that as a signal and makes the change. I am the first to admit that it isn’t easy to do this in the face of pain of this sort. If you can not act as though you are getting caught up in the pain signal, you can actually make it go away or “shift” it. It will likely feel like an imperfect alliance of stark contrasts. Still, you can tell yourself that anything is possible, much like I did.

In turns, the pain ebbed away, and then came back, before retreating again. While I observed this I saw that the pain was behaving the way it was because my thoughts had not been consistent. The pain came along because I was expecting it to. It was the most curious effect watching this happen the way it did. The pain came because of a deep natural belief that it would. I had momentarily wandered into both the fear reaction along with a resistance feeling put up against the pain, and these two identifiable elements tracked along with the experience until I was able to get better command of the situation. Both were keeping me in pain, I realized. I let those go using intention and imagination: I imagined what letting it go might feel like. While this was a kind of pretend, added to a deep inner calm and ignoring the pain, the situation began to resolve. I hadn’t jumped on this immediately, so there was now more to contend with, I realized. Then a few unexpected things happened quickly after I was able to shift the pain…

The red rash on my forearm went away very quickly. The line of small blisters went away also (in minutes). There were now only a series of red spots (those haven’t gone away). The blister on the side of my hand then began to subside. It had been filled with fluid moments before. Within an hour, the blister reversed itself. That had never happened before.

The blistered skin knitted itself back to the dermis the following day. This was new in my experience. Now a second day later, the area that was the blister feels and behaves like regular skin. Normally, the skin dries out and becomes a bit like a scab, which then peels away after about a week. The upper layer of skin isn’t drying out. There is some discoloration, a darkened area that looks like it is on the lower layers of the skin. I know, too much information, huh?

Since beginning this experiment my burn -while discolored slightly – is behaving normally, now a week later.

I mention this with a degree of caution because this hints at an area of inner work and mind/body connection that while beneficial for how I have used it, is not without risks. I am reminded of an interview many years ago by NPR where a group of Chinese monks who had learned to gain control over their autonomous nervous system. They demonstrated their abilities by going out during the coldest night of February (during the full moon of that month) donning nothing more than wet sheets, which they would dry by controlling their body temperature. The journalist described how the monks wrapped in the sheets, would open and close the sheets while their bodies seemed to be unfazed by the low temperatures in their environment. They came down from the high mountains having dry bed sheets. Later, a monk when asked how they achieved this, explained that he could not explain precisely how it was done because, in his words, “You could kill yourself.” In this case, this feat of control had as much to do with being able to slow heart rate as ramping up body temperature.

You need to go carefully into this kind of work, and this is one reason why I have not gone further into it with trying to slow my heart rate, for example. That said, someone at some point discovered this and developed it at one point without the benefit of a teacher either. My suspicion is that this was very carefully investigated by going very incrementally into this area of mind/body control, and anyone doing this should also consider this reality that could lead to harm for anyone who acts foolishly. This work, I suspect, opens the door to ALL controls over the body at a level that we are not accustomed to.

The converse is also true, though. It is possible to effect change that is positive for the body by helping to regulate chemistry that may have been run by subconscious material rather than conscious intent. It is possible, when carefully and incrementally done, to shift body chemistry to ranges that benefit the body instead of tearing it down. Fear, and its corresponding chemistry of adrenaline and norepinepherine, could be controlled in order to break the looping cycle of fear and wean a person off what may have been an instinctive pattern over many years to always go to the fear response and an unhealthy dose of adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol. This alone can lead to better health and a body that is in a more balanced state (without pharmaceuticals which never solve the root cause but only address a down-stream condition of result). Sadly, and understandably, there is no public instruction available on how to achieve this type of work.

Now in typical Parker style, I am going to toss you what might seem to be a curve ball. Stay with me though, because I think it will hint strongly at our potentials as humans.

In a town called Varhinga in Brazil, there were multiple sightings of ET beings out in the open. There were multiple witnesses from local women to a physician who worked for the military there to fix a broken bone in an ET who had been captured by the military there. If you read about this incident in popular media, it sounds like a “nothing burger” but it wound up being one of the most amazing encounters in ufology. Robert Leir, who was known for his removal and analysis of implants many abductees have wrote a book about his findings about the events surrounding the case. In it, he interviews the attending physician who says he worked on the being. During the procedure the being communicated tellepathically with him. The ET also took control of the physician’s body in order to get him to perform the surgery in the correct way. He recounts that the being told him many things, but he also said he would only tell the author about two of the things it had said. He described the information as hitting him in his head like a hammer, coming in fast, and left him with a feeling of nausea. He said the being said that it felt sorry for humans because they could do what this being could do, but didn’t know how to do it. It also expressed sadness that humans didn’t inquire more inyo their spirituality, giving him the sense that humans had little clue about what was possible with a better awareness in place.

SOURCE: Leir, Roger. UFO Crash In Brazil, 2005, The Book Tree, San Diego CA. p. 78-82

Now that might sound way out there, but there are other encounters reported that tend to reveal ET’s stating similar sentiments. We are a bit like the planet of the apes to them when we could be much more evolved and more in command of ourselves. The mere suggestion of tellepathy, which every ET race has exhibited an abillity for is a subject that will instantly get the hackles up of the average man or woman on the street. While this is changing bit by bit, we stand before a kind of conspiracy of ignorance that keeps the past replaying itself in regards to humans being able to glimpse their inner potential (and their inner senses). For as strange as this may sound, it is pointing us in a direction many are discovering in our current day, which is evidence of inner senses and a broader capacity we have as humans which was only thought to be the domain of the yogis and adepts, locked up in a vault of secrecy, and the ignorance that always leads from such embargo’s of how things could be different. Reversing pain is just one hair on the tip of the tiger I think.

So there you go. The reason why I mention this is to make you aware that if I did this, so can you if you are willing to give this a try. Being able to cancel pain in this way can be very helpful. As for changing heart rate and blood pressure, that remains to be seen and absent a monk being able to counsel me on this, I will offer great caution going forward.

Is Kundalini Really A Libidinous Force?

I am a guy who is fascinated by how things work. Most of all, I have had a long-term interest and study of consciousness, brain/body connection since I was an adolescent. Once awakening took hold, I felt like I was gifted with insight into the potentials we have as human beings which the process of awakening conferred. While I knew little about the phenomenon before this happened, the returning mind we are gifted with in awakening gave me what I thought were important insights which very often wound up being supported by recent discoveries in neuroanatomy, physiology, and physics. Sounds like something someone who has no idea would say. But hang on..

One of the common sayings or thoughts centered around kundalini is that it is a sexual energy. Not wanting to ever dismiss things out of hand, I have rolled this around in my present experience for years now, and often with changes on how I think I relate to that energy. I have thrashed through this before in previous posts where I thought I had it figured out. Understanding, along with awareness can evolve.

I feel lucky to have a “lab” (my consciousness) where I can go in and run experiments whenever I need or want to. I can ask questions, and sometimes I get answers. I don’t always get it right, though, because as has been the case since day one, my awareness and knowledge keep changing.

To summarize my past writing I would say it goes like this: “It’s an energy alright, and while it may feel sexual, it is much more than that. I’d say it is a creative energy and as a result, anything that involves the creative tends to shoot the energy to the moon. Sex is creative since it makes babies and it can serve as a deep linkage point for people in relationship. But is it primarily a sexual energy as some seem to assert that it is? I don’t think so.” I just saved you many posts and years worth of time searching my blog.

One interesting outcome of a recent meditation that I wrote about related to my relationship to abundance, seems to have cleared a path for relating to kundalini differently than before. To be clear, I had known that this energy kicks off very strong sexual energy, but after the meditation and release work something appears to have come into view more clearly than ever before. Let me see if I can explain it! (It’s really simple)

Instead of prana or chi (qi) being the force that brings bliss (orgasmic sometimes), it is instead a new “arrangement” whereby the body is experiencing a higher than normal level of electrical activity. How this actually happens isn’t completely clear, although we do have very good observations written about by many who experienced it directly over hundreds of years. It seems the simplest explanation for prana and chi is the way consciousness helps to shift how the electrical flow moves through the body. Until awakening (kundalini specifically), how the body handles its electrical energy is limited. I don’t think prana or chi is supernatural, but is instead natural and can be understood naturally. Our electrical production is what plugs us into the universe, which, I will point out, is energetic. Most of us are plugged into our world and don’t even know it. This is a huge story, with mindblowing implications for those who are awake and aware of this energy. I will add that the way you become aware of this isn’t through the rational mind but through the feeling or intuitive mind. But I digress..

In both the Indian and Chinese models, this energy runs through nerve-like channels that aren’t actually physical but are more like very consistent circuits that remain in place with every person (such that it can be mapped either as the naddi in the Indian system or meridian in the Chinese). These are energy channels that currently have not been studied to any significant degree by Western science that I am aware of. In the East, it’s a different story. When you look at an accupuncture chart you can get an idea as to both the sensitivity of the seers and the awareness necessary to draw the lines and the many points that make up the system. It’s a significant kind of work, to identify the points and lines of flow. Invisible, these seers had to use multiple testing methods to identify all of the points including understanding what opening or activating each point brings. Additionally, this system is tied to our emotions as the “gates” or meridian points can become blocked by emotion. When you can master your emotional state through cleansing the system of blocked emotional energy, the system runs much more effectively with greater vitality and physical health resulting. You can’t achieve this state through the rational mind but the feeling state or side. This is why I insist on the importance of being in touch with the feeling self. It seems many try to control themselves via the rational mind, but since it has no real emotional intelligence, the best that can be done is akin to keeping a lid on the garbage within. This is a poor excuse for dealing constructively with this stored emotion. But as this material is seen for what it is, the electrical body begins to operate more efficiently and with less emotional strain than before.

I keep coming back to the electrical hypothesis because it seems the simplest one. I also keep going back to it because of some interesting evidence that points in this direction. My question along with my thesis is does a low level of electrical potential, but higher than among those not awakened, create the bliss effects that are tied to kundalini and other “transcendant” states?

Just recently I heard about a device that a Doctor Maloy used on patients in North Carolina for moderating pain with electrical currents which was found to induce instant orgasms in women. This device has been dubbed the “orgasmatron” and it works by placing electrodes at the base of the spine to stimulate the body’s electrical network. Here we have a low level current that causes orgasm in women (sorry guys, I haven’t found whether this works on men). An article in Wired describes both the initial device as well as a newer one made to stimulate women by adding a low current at a known accupuncture/meridian point: two different devices using electricty that has similar outcomes. The original device involved electrodes to stimulate the spinal cord while the other is at the ankles at an accupuncture point. The article does read how you might expect news of a new sex toy might in the popular press, unfortunately. I’m interested, however, in the coincidence of electricity and sexual energy. This article covers the device originally designed to relieve pain by Dr Maloy.

There is also an account of Nicola Tesla meeting Mark Twain who visited him in his lab near Colorado Springs Colorado where Twain reported how Tesla showed him a new device that Twain was able to experience. When he stepped into the device he felt an extremely pleasant bliss move all through him. The common thread? Electricity. While we don’t know exactly how the device worked, what we do know is it operated on electricity and very likely used a specific electrical potential (volts) most likely in a specific frequency (although we don’t know this for sure). What we do know is that Tesla understood frequency to create a broad range of effects (even antigravity using electrogravitics since his assistant Carr went on to test antigravity devices in California).

There is also a healer who works with sexual energy to help women to heal from past trauma. His method has been to use his own field of energy to induce states of orgasmic bliss in women. He moves his hands over his clients but the effects are felt without any touch. He trained a woman named Sasha Cobra to do the work with men for the same purpose. Nityama, the originator of the method, has stopped giving healing sessions explaining that he was coming under fire by people who have tried to paint his work as somehow taking advantage of women. Sasha continues her work without so much as a blink from the public. What is interesting to me is that both healers agree that it is their energy that does it, that and knowing how to charge and stimulate the field of their clients, a process that leads to release work. I suspect kundalini achieved similar results IF the individual learns the art of surrender. It is interesting that Nityama’s work came under fire while Sasha’s did not (they are the same modality). It seems for now women will have to do the work on their own.

When you consider the power of the energy of awakening to clear blocked emotional energy through a process involving surrender I don’t think it is hard to see the role our sexuality can play as a potent healing force (if you avail yourself to it). In my experience when sexual energy is sublimated or used for healing in higher order energetics, the results can be dramatic. Refined sexual energy? Or is it creative energy that can be turned to a variety of purposes?

Unfortunately for some, the association of healing and sexuality brings up shame and guilt. But when these issues are surrendered, the power in awakening can be used for curing a broad spectrum of blocked emotion (in my experience). We need only learn how to drop our role as victim and embrace our own native healing potential. All of this can be done alone with the presence of the energy as the main catalyst and change-driver.

Huh…

While these examples would not rise to the level of evidence for peer-reviewed research, it does seem to point in the direction of how the body interprets and responds to electrical activity within the right range.

How Electricity Is Made In The Body

Electricity is created at the cellular level through a process called cellular respiration. Ions of sodium and potassium pass each other, respectively, as the cell “breathes” in nutrients and expires waste products, with a small microvoltage resulting. This electricity is used in the body for the neurological system for information processing.

Bruce Lipton recently famously asserted that this means that the body has trillions of volts (because the average potential for cells is about .46 volts) because we have trillions of cells in the body. The problem though is voltage in this case is not cummulative. It’s goid that it isn’t because in Lipton’s model with that much voltage the body would die very quickly. No, the body doesn’t have trillions of volts, but it doesn’t need to. All the system needs is what it is designed to handle. My guess is that what we call kundalini is a relatively small spike in our normal electrical function. Not enough to fry our bodies, but just enough to create stimulation that some of us interpret as sexual. The electrical potential is quite low, but the electrical potential that exists in the physical universe on average is often low also (except for planets with atmospheres generating electricity and stars producing charged plasma). Empty space itself carries a charge, something which Tesla proposed tapping into for energy. I propose that our weak field interfaces with another weak field which is the universe.

But wait, there’s more….

It appears that we can to a certain extent regulate this energy with our consciousness. Awakening is the switch that gets flipped that causes a range of effects from light, sound, or vibration being very common in the initial “rising” event of kundalini awakening or activation. What follows are classic symptoms ranging from joy, fear, bliss, and even depression (depending on how the person responds to the energy and the clearing or cleansing that begins to take place).

I will add one observation that was part of my awakening experience that shows evrry sign of this being an electrical phenomenon. When I awoke I felt a serpentine energy that felt just like a snake moving up through the trunk of my body. I can very easily see this effect as a kind of mild electrical seizure where the energy tightened and released alternating muscle groups up through the trunk of my body. At each center there was a curious sensation of the energy piercing and opening chakra centers in the body, which seemed to open my energy system to carry a new flow of energy.

I will finish with a quote from Jane Roberts who was one of the most well-known mediums for a personality named Seth:

“The universe actively loves itself and all of its parts. The world loves itself and all of its parts. It is not true that energy is neutral or indifferent. Energy is active, positive, propelled by what can almost be called an instantaneous pleasure with itself and its characteristics.”
—The Way To Health, Chapter 3: March 20, 1984

Astro Journal 2022 is available Now! — Jessica Davidson

Astro Journal 2022 is now available in paperback and on Kindle at Amazon! 🎉 I had planned the launch for the end of this week but my plans are in shreds because Uranus is in charge, apparently. Well, it is sort of his book since he features so prominently all through next year. My proof […]

Astro Journal 2022 is available Now! — Jessica Davidson

I thought for those interested that THIS might be just the ticket! ~Parker

Intuition Or Trauma?

Learning about this has been one of the most formidable lessons in my awakened life (and it got me into plenty of jams before I got the memo). ❤

ET’s & Awakening

Years ago as awakening rustled for the first time I was in the midst of trying to answer some questions about a series of close encounters with what I presumed were ET’s and ET craft. I became a member of an online forum of experiencers and contactees in late 2005. Before I departed the forum I knew personally of five people who I either spoke with at some length or later met who had awakenings. I also saw signs of awakening in others who described what was happening to them at the time. I thought it curious that these things were clustered in a community like this.

Parts of my awakening involved an encounter with an ET who I knew was a “counterpart” of someone who I would develop a tellepathic connection with a couple of years later.

I keep bumping into people who describe anything from “gallactic consciousness” to outright ET encounters of the tellepathic kind in the context of awakenings.

Then there were my recent discoveries of how I was able to remote view and then carry on fairly indepth conversations with an ET stemming from a visit I had in the early 90’s which I posted about in the last year here on WTI. While there was no real way to confirm that my conversation contained real information, the ET did point out that it had a “counterpart” alive on earth who I knew. This ET pointed out this person and I later contacted her telling her parts of my initial conversations. The truly unbelievable part to this was what the ET told me that “she” did as work. When I wrote to this “counterpart” she confirmed that she had memories of having been an ET and that she did the exact same work that the ET had said she did. At no point did I have any conversation with the earthly counterpart about her off-earth memories.

A few years ago I had a dream that showed me that I had a life on another planet and that my work was in a marine environment. A year later I would have an experience of speaking tellepathically with an ET while floating in the Pacific off the island of Catalina California (which took place after some release work that my friend Ali Neville helped me with). It felt like lines were opened in the wake of this healing work that she did.

Curious, I have become part of a newer online forum on the topic of consciousness and the ET issue, whose thesis is that most of the phenomena we term “supernatural” tends to sweep psi, reincarnation, NDE’s and the ET issue as part of a spectrum of related elements (awakening to my mind—a more awakened state). I have also seen the same “coincidental” relationships between the ET’s and accelerated consciousness. Many people (more in the past) haltingly admit that they were or are aware of having been an ET. Many report abductions that appear physical (implants have been recovered from a number of them) while others describe nonphysical abduction-type experiences. A recent regression revealed that a dream in 1977 where I was on board a craft was itself one of this nonphysical “astral” abductions, a phenomenon I had never heard about but which a reader described in the comments section of a recent post about this experience. I have one friend who says, “I’m not into ET’s” and yet she communicates with them and the suggestion is she may have been one in another life.

This begs the question, are we beginning to see greater awareness about humans as ET’s and might this be one way that we will seed earth with a sense of how normal the ET’s are as part of an expanding awareness that we are not alone in the universe? Or is it that it might just be a consequence of how an expanding awareness reveals lives lived not just on earth but elsewhere.

I’m not suggesting that everyone who experiences awakening will always experience the ET issue. What I am interested in is who else may have had experiences along these lines and what do you think about it?

I will toss in one other item for your consideration, which is how the early Christian Gnostics have books, recently discovered in Egypt (1945) that describe a type of being that fits the modern grey ET perfectly. They describe how they look, they describe how they take people and how they try to breed with humans. They are described as being like gods but really aren’t (can move from place to place quickly and can work what seem to be miracles (but aren’t)). What the Gnostics do is they dig into these beings to a considerable degree and make them into a spiritual presence as much as they are a physical presence as well. All of this clustered around a teacher that is put forward as being Jesus. Jesus himself, no matter what side you come down on in regards to his historic reality, shows signs of having been awakened himself. Other documents in the Nag Hammadi find of 1945 show a group who were well aware of awakening (and kundalini in specific). There is a lot of debate about what this may mean for Christianity’s roots and it’s future. Believers dismiss, scholars argue, and I wonder…

Let me know your thoughts and experience because this is one that I puzzle over a great deal.

~Parker

Ramana…

The Case For A Private Teaching By Jesus Gets Stronger

One outcome of my awakening experience was my personal discovery of books from early Christianity that had been largely unknown until a large cache were discovered in the desert of Egypt in 1945. One book purported to be the secret teachings of Jesus to his innermost circle. What I realized, or thought I did, was that these books were describing awakening with a pretty high degree of specificity. It wasn’t only that, but how they appeared to veil the teachings in many cases by using descriptions that made it difficult for anyone not having the experience to even know what the writers were refering to. It was to my mind like a way of coding the teachings just enough that it made it hard to understand. This may have been intentional, but it could also have been the result of not having a specific enough vocabulary with which to do the describing.

This might sound strange, but let me give you an example for what I mean. Not long into awakening, me and a person who awoke along with me (a country apart, didn’t know each other, this all happened from a distance) we both referred to what was happening to us as “it.” That was how sophisticated our vocabulary was. We had no reference point, no context, nor a teaching to guide us. Overnight, innexplicably, we had a tellepathic connection (which was proven numerous times each week). “It” fit though, because how on earth would you describe “this” (we used that term also)? It also kept what was happening to us from prying eyes and ears since who would understand or believe it? There was no real context in which to put it in. When that’s the case, you create a language or vocabulary for it much like people who are dealing with it do today (witness the use of words like “downloads” and “portals” to refer to aspects of the experience). You create your own vocabulary to help describe what is happening to you.

How could it be, I wondered, that these books were described as heresy by certain people within the church when they so clearly revealed a sophisticated understanding of a very rare state of being?

When I first found these books and realized they were pretty clearly describing my state, I considered that it was a conspiracy that they were not just shoved aside, but that in many cases, the books that were part of an unnacceptable take on Christian thought were destroyed. Now however, I am realizing it was little more than a conspiracy of ignorance…and an easy trap to fall for by anyone who was not in the know, who hadn’t had the experience, or wasn’t initiated into the system.

Was it as many scholars have asserted, that these books were jibberish, mere speculation, and could not be tied to Jesus at all? Was it true that as some Orthodox apologists have said, that these people, called “Gnostics” were late-comers? Were they forging documents, slapping Jesus’s name on them in order to give their own “wild speculations and fantasies” more caché?

I have learned that the opposition will say just about anything in order to put a good man or woman down. Maybe this speculation was right, and my initial gut sense was all wrong. There were times when this certainly appeared to be the case.

This question put me on a 15 year journey where I made myself familiar with early Christianity. I didn’t spend years in seminary getting my doctorate in divinity, nor did I learn Greek or Hebrew. I knew next to nothing about the field and I just couldn’t square my sense that these early Christians were on to something of immense importance versus what those in what would become known as the Orthodox church had to say about these teachings. Something didn’t add up.

I have realized that while I lack the background in the history of early Christianity that many scholars in the field have, I have something most (perhaps nearly all) do not: I have the experience of awakening with all of its dizzying effects, signs, and symptoms. I have read at length even scholars who specialize in the Gnostic texts speculating about the meanings of the gospel of Thomas or Philip. My sense from the beginning was that these Gnostics were the real deal, and that these works constitutes a “lost Christianity” as Bart Ehrman has described it. Having said this, I will also say that they go far afield from the words of Jesus as we have come to know them. The difference between an esoteric system and an exoteric one (the Gnostics as we refer to them ate esoteric) is that esoteric systems have much greater production of documents because the followers keep having experiences and writing about them. In the case of these early Christians, they believed that the Christ was revealed to be within a person (some Gnostics considered Paul to be a bit of a hero because he writes in his letters that God revealed to him the Christ which was within him when he was struck by a blinding light on his way to Damascus). For the Gnostics, then, the crucifixion lost much of its importance because they found salvation from the awakening to the indwelling Christ.

I ask you: what teaching by Jesus ever made anything appear to be outside of ones self? The kingdom was all within one, and seeking was done inwardly. Those who “seek him” were seeking a quality that was already there. It is worth noting that this is precisely what most Eastern traditions that describe awakening say. It is also a completely different story that Orthodox Christians have put forward since about 100-130 A.D.

I will say, however, that there were times in my work on this subject where it looked like the Gnostics were a later “invention” or movement and could not be definitively pinned to Jesus. I was, for a time, considering that for as insightful as they were, there just wasn’t a connection to Jesus’s life. I got used to the idea that these were amazing people who spun their own insights into what the Christ was all about. Maybe they were a seperate development that still managed to “get there” even though they came later.

That was before I found out about the work of Walter Bauer who did a study or survey of documents from earliest Christianity, who, in the 1930’s (and before the discovery in 1945 of this cache of early books in Egypt) determined that heresy came first and Orthodoxy came later. Orthodoxy, based on Bauer’s work, placed Orthodoxy a hundred years after the heretics (give or take a decade or two). Source: Orthodoxy & Heresy In Earliest Christianity

Heresy has always been described by the church as that branch off of the “main vine” that represents a divergence from the central truths of the dogma (see church father Origen since he originated this concept). This begged the question: how could this be so in light of what Bauer found? This may have been the result of the church, a group within it, seeking to hide the truth about how things were in the early days of the movement. It could have been as simple as ignorance by another group who didn’t have the deeper teachings (and thus could easily not understand them even when they saw them).

Then there is the troubling reality that Bart Ehrman points out in his book Jesus Interupted which is that most of the discoveries we have made in the last 100 years of Christian documents are nearly all Gnostic (which is used to describe this group of Christians today—gnosticism meaning ‘one who knows’ or who has inner knowledge not attained through books or instruction alone). Ehrman asks pointedly, did the Orthodoxy not have anything to say that there have been so few new discoveries of Orthodox books or letters during the same time period? It is plausible, then, that Gnosticism was far more robust, engaged, and involved in the matters of Christian thought than the early heresy hunters would have us believe. The historical record is certainly showing us this in spades in this regard. In Bauer’s work he points out letters that show that the church gave up trying to convert Asia Minor because the heretics were so numerous and resistant to their message. It would be easy to just say they were deluded and utterly lost, but it hides the fact that this was a situation that had always been described as no big deal by those in the Orthodox wing of the church, something more like a few flies that needed to be swatted away as the Orthodoxy has tried to represent it as. No, “heresy” was much more developed than Orthodoxy was, and at a very early period. It begs the question as to which tradition was the original or earliest one.

When I think about what happens to our leaders today it is easy to see how each side in a political campaign seeks to demonize and dethrone the leader who is in the opposition. Those with the loudest voices wind up being heard and believed. We are well aware of the sentiment that the winners of a war get to tell the history as they want it told.

Orthodoxy won the war of ideas not because their thinking was superior but because they were more worldly and systematic in their willingness to take down what they considered an opponent. You can easily see just how harsh the rhetoric was by reading the writings of these noted antiheretics like Tertulian, St. Justin, and others like them. In fact, we know a lot about early Christian “heretics” because the diatribes about them were so long-winded (and detailed) by those who were opposing them. Christians don’t like the idea that there may have been a larger story here because they have lived with a version of a story they have come to know and love. But to say that a belief system is right simply because we have lived with it for 1600 years or more is not evidence that it is necessarily right or the final word. It only means that one group stamped out another group such that their knowledge base was silenced.

Yes it seems strange and foreign, and yet this is just what archeology has revealed and the voice that was silenced was showing us the very keys to the kingdom. These keys as I call them are a suit of methods that appear in the so-called Gnostic writings mostly found in the Nag Hammadi Libray but that are also found in documents discovered earlier like the Pistis Sophia. These documents describe the same phenomenon as those in Eastern schools of though which describe the process of enlightenment.

I am not suggesting that these people went to India, but managed it on their own and that the “ressurrection” of the soul was achieved by attaining a quality that one culture called Christ while another called it Buddha. As such, this knowledge wasn’t predicated on belief alone, but pointed to a universal quality that every person has regardless of race or creed.

Rumi, the great poet and mystic once wrote about how we all squabble over the names of things and that we try to differentiate the light falling in one place as fundamentally different from the light falling in another when it is all the same source, the same thing. I think Orthodoxy tried to do this in an effort to carve out its own seemingly unique niche when in fact it had discarded important elements along the way that would have enriched it tremendously.

The Mar Saba Discovery

Then along comes Morton Smith in the 20th century. Morton Smith claimed to have made a discovery of a book in Mar Saba near Israel in the early 1960’s that contained writing by Clement, a figure from early Christianity. Clement quotes lines from a book that he calls “Secret Mark” which was, as he described it, part of a private teaching Jesus gave to his closest followers. Clement emphasizes that these teachings were never spoken before the uninitiated, a situation Jesus cautions about even in the synoptic gospels when he refers to swine and pearls, those who were “without.” In this case, Jesus was pointedly obfuscating his teaching so the Gentiles could not understand lest they be saved. The book was intended for the “perfecting” of those who were followers of this Jesus.

Morton Smith took photographs of the document and when he returned later to examine the book again, it had vanished. It has not been seen since. Here’s the thing: forensic examination of the photographs themselves have established that the book is an authentic document of the era. Christian apologists go so far as to criticize the writing as being “too Clementine” which to me may well be enough to prove the point. The writing style is consistent with what historians know about Clement, who has many writings attributed to him. Those within scholarly circles who are Christian apologists set upon Smith in attack after attack, however.

The letter was about one thousand words and had been copied onto the endpages of a seventeenth century book which no one had ever mentioned before. The find shook the scholarly world, although it’s existance made hardly a ripple in popular Christian circles because the letter denounced the group involved as heretical. That seems to be enough for any reasonable believer of the faith, but it raised important questions for many who find the discoveries of this kind to be suggestive of what Bauer had found to be the case and which continuing discoveries like the Nag Hammadi Library texts had done two decades prior, which was whether we have been told the whole story. Here is an excerpt from an article in The Nation about the discovery:

These heretics, as Clement and Theodore saw them, claimed that they possessed a secret version of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus, they believed, had taught his followers that they were freed from the law and could do whatever they wanted without sinning. According to one of their Christian critics, Irenaeus, they actually thought they earned salvation by “doing all those things which we dare not either speak or hear of, nay, which we must not even conceive in our thoughts.”

The Nation, Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith, January 8, 2009, Anthony Grafton.

It is worth noting that as a result of scholarly research we now know that it was Mark’s gospel that was the earliest of all the gospels. While Clement denounced the teachings in Secret Mark, he did not say that this Mark didn’t exist. Here we have a proof that books like Secret Mark were later destroyed by the Orthodox church, with copies that have yet to surface. Consider what would happen if the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of today were against you, what would you do? Would you perhaps hide away the books that you do have in order to preserve them? If your books were unapproved of, they would be destroyed with fire.

While some scholars like Ehrman have suggested that the Nag Hammadi find may well have been an effort on the part of local Christians to free up space in their libraries by burying the collection several kilometers away, I am reminded of an email from Elaine Pagels recently that the burial of the NHL documents is well within the same time frame as the letter by Bishop Athanasius, written in 365 A.D. which spelled out what books were to be acceptable for use in the church. Every book Athanasius mentioned in his list is contained in the New Testament today. It was Athanasius’s letter that would set the die for all that would follow. Anything else would come under scrutiny and risk being remanded to the flames. Remember, before the printing press, books were copied by hand in what could take many months to complete. Burning one book or two could end an important thread within the early movement. Back then, in the first century, stories abounded about the life of Jesus, an oral tradition, that was only later written down after Jesus’s death.

This article is helpful to gain the full scope of the issue about how the New Testament was formed.

My thesis has been and continues to be that Jesus was a man who attained awakening. The books attributed to his private teaching happen to also describe what is known in India as kundalini. While there isn’t compelling evidence that Jesus had gone to India, there is no good reason to suggest that in order to awaken he would need to study under an enlightened guru either. It’s possible he got instruction locally from John the Baptist, or the Essenes. We just don’t know because for as a man as famous as Jesus is, there is a huge gaping hole that is unaccounted for in his life in terms of time. I never studied under a guru and managed to trigger the first initiatory steps into awakening on my own. Likewise, it is quite possible that Jesus did the same. All he would need would be a quality of intense curiosity and a drive to seek. I suspect that this is just what Jesus meant when he said seek and ye shall find. He sought, and he found. But what did he find? He described it as a world that was within each person. At no point does Jesus ever say that his kingdom was outside of himself. All of this was an inside job. So meditation would have been part of it, something Jews of the time were well familiar with. The right kind of meditation would do it, nothing fancy, but something that would serve to achieve a first release of inner emotional material followed by inner inquiry.

It turns out that I did precisely what the heretical Jesus prescribed, which was to remove what keeps one divided within the self. This is actually a prescription Jesus mentions in the gospel of Thomas and mentions in the gospel of Phillip. The way I achieved this was through a conversation with a holy man when I felt a long-standing frustration guilt, and frustration with the universe, afterwhich everything began to change. I unburdened myself of a giant knot that had me tied up for decades, it was almost like an insurmountable impasse for me at the time.

I suspect that the story of Jesus’s baptism was like this or served a similar purpose for him because in the Gnostic texts he is teaching about how to attain the kingdom by resolving what divides you within, and a teacher always relays to his or her students how they achieved it themselves. The elephant in the room is if Jesus was God why was he going to John to have his sin removed? Why did Jesus need baptism? He obviously felt like he needed it, and instead of seeking the God, according to Orthodox scripture, which had always been within him. It’s a huge leap around the question that Christians never seem to ask. I think that it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask and actually makes loads of sense once the private teachings are known and taken into consideration.

With John, who claimed he could relieve the burden of sin through ritual washing, or baptism, Jesus was relieved enough of his own burden for the first flashes of “the light” to begin showing through. Jesus also spent forty days fasting and praying in the wilderness near where John was located. I will point out that this is the same approximate time that the Taoists prescribe for awakening the secret of the golden flower, their take on the awakening process. Similarly, in Hindu practice the number of 40 to 45 days comes up a lot for a time frame. It takes some effort to break through the veil of the earthly self to attain to the “heavenly” one (regardless of what tradition you ascribe to). Orthodoxy glosses over this precisely because it knows nothing about these practices. Then, when presented with the very means to do so, they cried foul heresy. The kingdom thus was found and then lost within a few short generations. The apostolic era came to an end not because of some God-ordained event with dubious reasoning but precisely because people no longer had access to the teachings that would have kept the era chugging along nicely. All of the signs of the holy ghost, and of awakening, were gone because the knowledge had exited the building.

If Jesus had awakened, the libertine attitude shown in the works of some of the Christian mystics like the Carpocrations that Clementine was speaking out against in his letter mentioned earlier has a very good chance of being true. Awakening pushes you beyond the normally accepted mores of the time by virtue of the fact that the energy of awakening vivifies and stimulates the body in new and novel ways. The Hindu describe it as a libidinous force, a creative current that leads one to new levels of bliss that are experienced and described as orgasmic. It’s not that it is literally so, but that this is the only way to aptly describe it so it can be halfway understood. Awakening absolutely impacts the master glands of the body resulting in high outputs of all sorts of hormones. Kundalini a sexual energy? I have always felt that the energy of awakening stimulates all sorts of things, including libido. Kundalini does much more than just stimulating libido.

Many people who are awakened know about the futility of skirting issues. No, the energy seems to push us to leap headlong into the cleansing fire that is the holy ghost, the feminine aspect, what in India would be called Shakti or the Ida current. All of this is consistent with awakening, and there is no reason to think it wasn’t the case with Jesus.

The problem with the Orthodoxy was that none of the secret teachings made any sense to them. How was it possible that by finding the savior within, the Christ, one washed away ones shame of human sexuality? Or guilt, or any other issue that represents stored emotional material that awakening can help the person to clear? Awakening can do this, though. It cleanses and returns you to a renewed mind and state of being. It is a salvific force.

It is now more likely that Jesus did have a private teaching and that the synoptic gospels represent only a thin slice of a larger picture. While Clement railed against this “Secret Mark” as heretical, I ask the question: says who? On whose authority? Why should I pay any attention to someone who was never included in the private teachings of a realized master? Even when Jesus says “No one comes to the father except by me” Christians don’t consider how that statement could mean something significantly different than what they assume it does. In Jesus’s day he was the only person around who had attained to the level that he had, so yes, Jesus was the only game in town. Like any great teacher, if you wanted to get there quickly, you studied under him like any teacher anywhere who had a grip on the esoteric or hidden things.