I am beginning to accumulate some interesting material having to do with how we are in other times and places. This type of material has been accumulating for some time now, but more recently more information has been piling up. What has been happening has been allowing me to observe how other lives have been in the past, as well as the future, and what may be dimensional in nature. Having several of these memories and experiences already I am finding just how powerfully certain patterns have tended to emerge when it comes to people I have known. Being able to know these people in several instances has been eye-opening. I am going to give you the Readers Digest version because the other versions were much too long just trying to tease out all the details. And boring.
In one case there is someone who believes they have known me in many lifetimes even though I have no lifetimes this person has described. I have thus far mapped out lives lived for the last five centuries before our own today and all of the time has been accounted for. It was curious to me why this person has thought this. When I look at the pattern that has existed recently and the pattern that I saw in action during the 14th century when I DID know this person (it was a passing encounter of a person brought into a court room where I was a magistrate), it helps to underscore how it is possible through one chance encounter that we can create karma that is then worked out later (with the actual person). it is also interesting to see how that person then came to believe that they had had lifetime after lifetime with me dealing with a particular pattern in our relating (when it turned out that it was actually that person’s own pattern they were working out). As I scan through time I simply haven’t known this person except for that one time in our local time line. In that encounter the person had been involved in acts of slander and fraud and was being brought before the court. It wasn’t a pretty scene. There was this feeling that the person had that he was being unfairly treated. It was so strange and such a distorted view that this person was taking that it led me to having very little patience with the person. I just wanted him out of my courtroom. That person was taken from the court room yelling and screaming invectives at me and everyone else. And the karma for me? I just didn’t want to hear it. I passed the sentence that was required. I showed no compassion, and that was my hook in the karmic drama and then the karmic draw that would result later. To the person who was being taken out of the courtroom in such an unceremonious way, he was simply misunderstood, all the while ignoring how their own actions resulted in where they were at the time. That was his karma and how I responded to the spitting and sputtering angry ball of rage in the courtroom was mine. It wasn’t any more complicated and no more involved than that. In the current day, this version of that person was involved in slander and deception, too, something that was directed at me over and over (like it was some strange habit or a complete inability to control themselves–weird). What it has revealed to me is how little, sometimes, things change. Patterns. How do they rule us? How do we break out of them once and for all? I know it might be easy for me to say how I have been able to break long-standing patterns by simply awakening, but I have had a front-row seat to be able to see how these have played out with the people in my life.
I get that patterns are the challenges that each person faces, so I am not ready to act as judge this time around (although that experience was pretty dreadful to be honest). I had an experience with a dimensional aspect of that person, though, in this life, and it was very telling. This dimensional aspect was encountered while in an altered state and it happened long before I met the person that was the reincarnation of the man (now a woman in this time) in my life today. The being was not human in this case and while the context was itself a bit bizarre, the pattern that emerged was identical to the one that would play out with this person in my current life here on Earth. In both this life and in that dimensional aspect, both counterparts were involved in forcing an energetic connection. In each case the result was the same: the connection was forced. You might wonder how this is even possible (I know I didn’t think it was) and I will touch on it a little later. I haven’t discussed this with that person and I haven’t written about it because it is so strange and hard to believe but it happened. It is because of my experience that I don’t believe much of what is said about “twin flames” and the “twin soul” concept. It is a lovely idea if only it ever really held up to any amount of scrutiny (which is to say there is none—it has been held within a lovely vessel called belief and little else).
In another case I was able to know both a present-day self, a past self, and what might be an extradimensional aspect or a past life in another location other than earth (I honestly am still working on figuring that one out). It is kind of interesting because this is almost the same kind of arrangement as the previous individual. By seeing what was told to me by one aspect in a series of discussions that were part of an experiment to communicate with this aspect which lives off-planet, I was able to see how that life and being compared to the earthly version of itself. What is so interesting was how a certain deception that took place during the course of the discussion phase with the off-world being showed up in a more mild way with the earth-bound self alive today. I can’t say that the pattern with the counterpart living on Earth is as difficult or alarming as the one that is with the off-planet one. But what is interesting is how certain aspects link all three together. In each case there is this issue of not being completely forthcoming in regards to their position in the current time, although after seeing a hint of it in one I pressed the issue with the other and found a raft of things communicated that hadn’t been communicated before. Bingo.
I wasn’t sure up until I tried to press a few buttons to see if there would be a reaction, but it can be easy to find out if you understand the patterns and have a good enough sense of what might cause aspects of those patterns to rise to the surface. It was enough to help confirm to my mind that what I had read in the person in their other aspects that it was fairly consistent in the present day here on earth. Once that was done, it was clear that yes, the person in question was aware of what I had been seeing from a distance. It was actually a relief to know and it provided me with a clear path free from karmic material that had previously been hanging around in an odd sort of way. It was great to know for sure what was what. It isn’t often that you feel relief when someone moves on. Interestingly I have found relief in both examples.
We all have these patterns, native to our own inner journeys down through time. In some cases patterns are resolved and they do not crop back up again in later lifetimes. In some cases those patterns can be like a deep groove in the heart and soul, difficult to erase after countless lifetimes bearing those same traits. I know that these patterns can be healed or erased, but it takes being willing to do so and it also takes some pretty radical self-honesty in order to do it. I know how hard it can be but I also know how easy it is once you are ready. But you have to be ready. Once you get there the idea that we are going to forgive the “other” winds up being ourselves. Buddha had something to say about this which is that no one “makes” you feel a certain way. it is all about you. This is an inside job made difficult in our current environment when many people are shifting into a world where we are so careful about not upsetting anyone that we wind up not being honest about where our reactions actually come from.
While I think patterns rule the roost in our lives, I think it is also important not to make your mind up in a definite way. I wasn’t able to paint an accurate picture until I received confirmation from one of my examples I have discussed thus far. In fact, I spent months being unsure whether that person was even aware of the material that I was picking up on. When people aren’t aware of things like this, telling them will tend to be met with resistance. Sometimes they are unable to hear you. It just isn’t part of their awareness toolbox. So this has been an opportunity to just sit back and observe to see whether what I was picking up on would rise to the surface.
I don’t know why, but knowing this has given me a great deal of peace. It also serves as a lesson to me for how I might have friends or acquaintences that might not be the best for me in my life as it is today. It is like being able to see the future in a way, but by creating a triangulation effect. Does that mean it will always be that way? Could it change? On both sides, certainly. However, so many of our “draws” are karmic in one form or another. It isn’t that we are here to work it out with them, it is that we are here to learn to undo our responses and reactions that caused it in the first place (our choice of reactions). In my case every single karmic issue involved me forgiving myself for feeling something less than divinely aligned. Anything less than that often points to karmic issues….at least that is the view so far. And things just keep getting easier and easier as a result, too. Quieter, calmer, and less chaotic or turbulent. It is easy to get addicted to the intensity of an earlier awakening, so much so that it can serve as a kind of handicap, a velvet prison sometimes. It isn’t that everything goes bland, it is that when the alignment increases, the energy that is experienced is simpler and more direct. All of this is a work in progress now a decade and a half in.
What I can say though that reflects into my own life is that more doors than I could imagine are opening once I catch the scent of my own soul purpose. The thought that someone who doesn’t really know themselves could understand who I am resolves into one of those important light bulb moments. Gone is the need to be known by others and here is the growing desire to gt to know that part of the authentic self which I have spent the better part of this lifetime getting around to knowing. It isn’t a short cut, no, but it’s the fastest way that I have yet to find. That is hopeful. I don’t know that I would have gotten to where I am without awakening. It isn’t for everyone, but such is the nature of the tail of the cosmic tiger.
Sometimes we just want to sleep without dreams to feel more rested in the morning. Sometimes, though, it can be incredibly interesting to find yourself in a lucid dream, directing your actions instead of just reacting to the content of the dream. In this way, you can take the material that comes up naturally from your subconscious and work with it in a more purposeful way. So what are some of the advantages of lucid dreaming?
There are a number of benefits tied to learning how to lucid dream. Here are a few that often get touched on when others in the field discuss this particular experience:
Work out problems that have you stumped
Work through fears
Nightmares
Possible enhanced physical healing
Personal development
Solving Problems
From time to time people have been able to solve difficult problems in the dream state. With lucid dreaming, you can direct your mind to a problem if you can learn how to work with the powers of the dream state so that the natural problem solving qualities that can often be found in the dream state. It was in the dream state that the Soviet scientist Mendeleyev conceived of the Periodic Table of elements. In Mendeleyev’s Dream: The Quest for the Elements, novelist Paul Strathern describes what happened:
As Mendeleyev’s eyes ran once more along the line of ascending atomic weights, he suddenly noticed something that quickened his pulse. Certain similar properties seemed to repeat in the elements, at what appeared to be regular numerical intervals. Here was something! But what? A few of the intervals began with a certain regularity, but then the pattern just seemed to peter out. Despite this, Mendeleyev soon became convinced that he was on the brink of a major breakthrough. There was a definite pattern there somewhere, but he just couldn’t quite grasp it… Momentarily overcome by exhaustion, Mendeleyev leaned forward, resting his shaggy head on his arms. Almost immediately he fell asleep, and had a dream.
Imagine working on a problem and then going to sleep only to glimpse a solution to that problem. That would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it? Since you are already in an altered state of consciousness, parts of your brain that normally are tuned out in waking are now active and can lead to enhanced problem-solving capability.
Resolving Fears
Perhaps you keep dreaming a dream that has you upset or fearful but you don’t know why. Maybe the dream is dealing with something in your waking life that you haven’t fully processed or worked through. Perhaps you are afriad to do something in waking life and you want to work through the fear in the dream state. In dreaming, you can often find novel approaches to resolving fears. Could it be that simple? Sometimes it is. The waking self, when walking in the dream world, can often clear up fears quite easily, choosing the send signals to the subconscious that it is time to dispense with a fear. HOW you do this probably needs to be in the language of the dream self in order for it to “take.” What this means is using imagery that can communicate to the subconscious self that everything is okay.
In the movie The Prisoner Of Azkaban, the students are taught how to deal with a being called a boggart that would manifest as their worst nightmare or fear. The students were required to imagine something that would turn their fear into something silly or ridiculous, which had the effect of disarming the being of its power over the individual. It is tricks like this that the dream self understands and can work with in a creative way to hep resolve the fear.
Nightmares
Nightmares work much the same way as fears, by being able to disarm them in a creative and visual way. It is also possible in lucid dreaming to offer a suggestion to your subconscious to show you what the source of the nightmare is and then wait. The subconscious does not always respond the way that the more literal logical mind does, and the mind also does not respond the same in a theta dream state as it does in a beta or waking state. Sometimes you have to seed the land of your mind with an idea or directive and then be a little patient. You could also visualize the dreams that were most troubling to you as a cue to the subconscious to begin focusing on whatever the issue actually is, but then be prepared to work with it visually and in a unique and creative way in order to trigger the resolution of the root fear that has been causing the nightmares to begin with. Bear in mind, though, that while the imagery can be quite ornate sometimes, the nightmare always comes down to one main root cause, which is fear. So? It helps to be brave and be willing to face your fear. In doing so, this is often like deflating a balloon because most often the fear itself is worse than the thing that you fixate on. It is more about the unknown, and by facing it, you make it a known. There, now that isn’t so scary, is it?
Physical Healing
While some physical conditions are the result of environmental conditions, some are caused by imbalances in the endocrine system. This part of the body is subject to feelings and it can be turned around quickly by sending your body the right signals that you want or will feel better. In sleep there are a number of important processes that take place whereby the body goes into overdrive in helping to detoxify blood and to rid itself of waste built up over the day. This can be a great time to spur greater vitality by sending the body the signals that will help boost immunity (which is known to be closely tied to our mental and emotional health as much as it is to environmental conditions). The formation of emotions, for example, the chemical side, are made up of a series of neuropeptides that literally begin to mirror emotional states. It is like the way the body creates the signs of emotion in the body. If you can hack into this system in dreaming it is sometimes possible to trigger conditions that lead to better health. There is an exercise that I used to give to my students when they felt stressed out (the spectrum of epinepherine, norepinephrine, and adrenaline) that was incredibly simple: hold your hands on your hips like Wonder Woman. Do you know that stance? It has the curious effect of combating fear and uncertainty. The body is being tricked into thinking that you are feeling confident and as a result, the body starts to flood the body with the chemical equivalent of confidence instead of fear. See how that works? It’s a hack, literally so, and it can go a long way in helping to change not just your feeling state but your body chemistry. So in a similar way, you can use images like this in the dream state to also change the outcome of those kinds of dreams. You have to think visually, which is the key. Along these same lines, being able to visualize a different physical state is important. You might imagine seeing your blood as suddenly carrying life-giving nutrients all of a sudden, perhaps a special substance causes them to glow, you don’t need to know precisely what you are after, the imagery will help to trigger those changes deeper down.
Personal Development
There are all kinds of thing that you can address from the dream state. You might want to use the dream state to try and do astral projection. I have used this a number of times and I was shocked just how well it worked. Following a suggestion that Lynn Andrews, who wrote the books Medicine Woman and Flight Of The Seventh Moon, she said that providing yourself with a hypnotic suggestion prior to sleep could be helpful. She said to say to your ego, “Ego, I want you to fall asleep and drift off for a bit so I can do some work in sleep that I want to do…” In my case, I wanted to use dreaming as a spring-board to projection. I “awoke” in a dream to find that a Mayan serpent was floating towards me as I could hear the thoughts inside my head telling me that I needed to project my consciousness into the body of the serpent. Amazingly, I found that I somehow had this ability. I began to feel as if these massive wheels inside of me began to turn, a giant machinery went into hyper drive as I felt the inertial forces building inside of me like a rubber band being slowly pulled back that would be released, shooting me into the serpent. I had some issues that I hadn’t worked through in regards to the concept of this Mayan serpent in front of me and called the experiment off out of fear (I should have worked out the fear, oy!). However, this was a potent example of how the dream state can be used for doing things that you haven’t done before. You can learn to get over performance anxiety by pretending that you are speaking before a large audience, or you can work on something that you feel like you aren’t very good at in waking in order to be better at it in the dream state. There are all kinds of novel “hacks” that you can employ to develop more creative ways around all kinds of challenges. You might want to take a vacation, to visit a sunny location, go to the ocean, or fly over the ocean to another country, for example. In a dream, you can do that. In a lucid dream, you can direct more of what happens.
Techniques For Lucid Dreaming
The first technique for helping you to lucid dream more often is to simply become more aware of lucid dreaming while you are awake. You need to know how it works when awake if you are to bring it into your dream state. Another method is to think about lucid dreaming several times each day and do this consistently over a period of about two weeks time. You are seeding your mind with the idea of lucid dreaming as a thing and this needs to get into the right area of memory so that it has a better chance of being activated while you are asleep. Just thinking about it often greatly increases the chances that you will have a lucid dream soon in the future.
Before going to bed, tell yourself that you would like to have a lucid dream, that once you go to sleep and begin to dream that you will awaken within the dream. Another method that works with the REM sleep cycles is to wake up early, around 4:00 a.m., spend some time thinking about lucid dreaming and maybe even reading about it in order to fix the mind on the idea, and then after having awakened, go back to sleep. When you awaken like this and at about this time in the sleep cycle, your body is still craving sleep and it will be easier to go back to sleep but with the suggestion of a lucid dream on your mind.
Finally, there is a device that is supposed to monitor your REM sleep cycle which will send a series of lights into your eyes as a cue that you are now in the dream state. If you can remember that the lights that you see in your dream are coming form the device, it might be enough for you to develop just enough lucidity to wake up in the dream. This device is called the Nova Dreamer. It has since spawned a number of similar devices, and the reviews on them are mixed. While the Nova Dreamer is no longer being made, there are still similar devices like it out there. The reviews are mixed to negative, but some fans of lucid dreaming have had some success with the devices that can detect rapid eye movement, provides a period of time to get the dream state started before sending a light signal to the dreamer. Will it wake you up? Will it serve as the type of signal that you need for inducing a lucid dream? I have never used the device, so I can’t say. What I do know is that there are a number of devices on the market now and I suggest that you read the reviews and read the specifications closely in order to get a device that will do what it purports to do, that is, if you think using a device like this is for you.
So there you have it. Lucid dreaming is something that when you do it enough, you can get the swing of it over time. We also go through cycles in our dream states where we sleep the sleep “of the dead” with hardly any dream activity while in other periods we have vivid dreams and lots of them. It may be that timing with your cycles could be a helpful way to begin to take a step into this very interesting world of the dreaming mind. Sweet dreams!
There is one thing I have learned from my years of studying psi ability and it is this: belief trumps ability.
If you don’t think you can, you wont.
If you can suspend that belief, or clear it out, then you can.
I am a Westerner. I don’t buy into the idea that there is anything inherently wrong with psi ability. In the East they often waive their hands saying, “Don’t pay attention to those things, they represent a cul-de-sac in the spiritual journey.” Indeed, this can be true, but this is not an absolute. If you can avoid allowing these inner senses from causing the ego to become inflated, there is little cause for concern. Keep up your good work on yourself. A sense is a sense. Just because we have as a race tuned out our native psi ability does not mean there is anything inherently wrong with them. They are not some evil ghostly thing, child of the “occult.” Whether saint or sinner, people have used them down through time. It’s just that when “we” use them, it is a good thing but when “they” (the “other”) it’s not. There is an important side to these inner abilities that bears repeating, though.
Psi ability is a product of consciousness. How you use your consciousness makes the difference between good results with your inner abilities and getting misses. It can be said that there is little worse than when you are convinced that your psi ability is real and always on the mark. That, my dear friends, is a belief. Psi ability can be subject to your emotions, your biases and beliefs, forming effectively a kind of lens through which you see. These can blind you and also distort information. What I am going to propose to you, based on years of experience, is that they work best when you completely empty your mind and do not allow your inner mind to try and fiddle with the results.
Very recently I did a remote viewing exercise. I have been growing my followers on social media and I have been doing this in a pretty aggressive way as of late. As a result of this, I never know from one day to the next what my number of followers is at. I hadn’t checked this stat in almost two weeks. I have had days where I have grown followers by anywhere from 24 to 40 people in one day. I am just not at a point where I am even keeping track at this point. I have been busy getting out orders for the Valentine’s Day “holiday” too, and realized that maybe now would be a good time to remote view my current number. I have done similar experiments with items that I had no way of knowing, and I realized I hadn’t checked it in a long enough while that this would be a good target. While I knew that my followers were a little over 4k on social media, that was all I knew. Could I get it right?
I sat down and calmed my mind. I let my mind go blank. Numbers began showing up in my mind. As I watched, those numbers kept changing. It was almost like some part of my mind was trying to get it, but some other part wanted a certain result, like a child in a toy store looking at all of the red wagons, each one a little different form the other, “Oh, I want this one…..no….maybe this one! Oh wait! I want this one!!” So the numbers ping-ponged around in my head for a bit. I realized that some part of me was trying to choose something. That was the problem, though. Some part of my mind seemed to be running the show here and wanted to find a number that felt right. I wasn’t so sure that part of me really knew what was right. But wait. I know that this has nothing at all to do with what I think is the right number or result. When I get these kinds of things, they come without any sense within me of “Oh yes, this one feels right…” It just comes. It is just very straightforward. Usually. And to be clear, I don’t always get hits. I do, though, try to learn from my misses.
The results were all over the place and so I calmed my mind and asked for all of this activity to cease in my head. Then the numbers settled down and I had one number. Was it right? I jotted the number down and then went to my stats. I wrote down 4,537. The stats read 4,530. Two weeks ago my followers were around 4,300-ish. I was not hitting the bullseye, but I got it very close. Yes, two weeks ago I knew I have about 4,300-ish followers….so the question in your mind may be “wasn’t that just a very good guess?” It may very well be, in truth. The only way to know is to continue to gather information, to do similar kinds of tests over and over in order to gather more data. Yes, you can have a “lucky guess” and so this is why I advocate for gathering more and more information because as the data piles us you can have a much better view of what is at work. If I got correct “guesses” half the time, that isn’t as impressive as getting them 72% of the time with thirty attempts at the same type of experiment. I agree, it can be doubtful at first about whether this is chance or something more. So for this particular attempt, I will be doing this more when I can and when I know I don’t know my follower number (when I have not checked in about two weeks, which is more than enough time for my follower base to grow beyond the numbers when I last checked).
The mind can get in the way of the inner senses. You can get parts right and other parts wrong. I have over the years paid attention to people who have considered themselves psychic and watched what they told me that they were picking up about me. To do this requires me to be very honest, because after all, they could be seeing something that I myself cannot or will not see about myself (beliefs and inner bias about myself at work). What I find so useful about this exercise is how it can teach me a lot about how we can distort what may well be a clear stream of information. What gets distorted in these cases is always something that has to do with the person doing the sensing and their own inner story. They are in essence picking up things form within themselves and adding it in. It is also just as helpful to see what they get right, too. So when I do this inner sensing work it helps me to be aware of how my own blindsides or beliefs that I might have about a given target or scan could influence the outcome. I have also found that when I have given them feedback on what they got wrong, I tended to come up against resistance, which is another sign that this is an inner dialog that the person doing the “reading” has within them. I have only met one gifted psychic who has been largely without these issues, and she was born with these gifts and describes how she lacks the basic filters most people do (which is a double-edged sword for her).
Doing this work is very helpful when you can be completely blind on the target. You might know a person, so trying to delve into what you think they are going through might be littered with minefields for you because you think that you know them and you could be inserting narratives that just don’t fit. So much of this can be subject to more than what is real as it is our own take on how we think we know that person. That is the minefield, you see. i remember one person who used to day “Energy doesn’t lie” and I had to chuckle as I heard a narrative that literally had nothing to do with me when that person claimed to be reading me. No, energy doesn’t lie when you are being completely clear. If you aren’t, you can very easily be reading from your own inner script and it could have little to nothing to do with the “other.” However, if you take someone that you know but do something like seeing exactly what they are doing at a given moment in time (subject to telling yourself that you don’t want to be able to see anything that might be private for example) then something like this would be the best way to test your ability. You sit down and all of a sudden the first thing that comes is your friend is sitting in a chair with a lamp on a small table and they have a book in their lap and they have a cup of something hot…..tea, not coffee….in their hand. You see them turn their head and as they do so you see the person that is speaking to them. You take note of this and you note the clothes they are wearing. Then what you have is a very good way of testing your ability because by noting the time you can contact them soon after and ask them if they would take part in your experiment. You can have an easy way to then hone in on what details you got right and which ones you might not have gotten correct. So far in tests with civilians, it has been found that anyone can do this with varying degrees of results.
A number of years ago I discovered my remote viewing ability when I began getting very vivid images of the place where someone I knew, but whom I have never met (and had only known for a short while and only tangentially on an online forum). I kept getting very clear impressions with a great deal of detail and specificity. I contacted this person privately and asked if she wanted to take part in an experiment where I would provide her with the impressions that I had and she would tell me whether I had hit the bullseye or not. Out of 24 distinct details, all but two were completely correct. The remaining two were partially correct. I had viewed that her door in the hallway had one more door beyond it, placing her at the end of the hallway. She explained that there was one more door beyond her door but that door was in the center of the hallways because it was the door to the stairwell. The kitchen that I knew existed but which I could not see visually, was in fact a kitchen that most people who entered her apartment would not be able to see because of how it was hidden from view. I was incorrect in placing the kitchen but partially correct in the notion that it was hard to see. I will emphasize that when it comes to remote viewing it is known that anyone can do this as long as you do your experiments blind (everything about the target is unknown to you). The less you know about the target the better so your own mind does not try to interpret or “fiddle” with what is coming through to you. Additionally, remote viewing my leave you cold. it might be a different way of approaching this kind of work might suite you better. You might go about it a very different way, and the thing is, just as consciousness is itself unlimited, so too are the ways that you approach this type of work. Maybe you need to surround yourself with white light first, or you might need to listen to music or maybe you need just the right scent wafting through the air. Use all of the things that you feel helps you to get there, and once there, don’t stress over it and don’t second guess yourself. You can see when you second guessed yourself, you can also see when a later impression might have been the more correct one. You can learn a lot about how your own mind works when doing this type of exercise. For one person it may not always be the first impression because maybe that person’s mind might still be ping-ponging around even in the midst of the exercise. Another person might be able to calm right down very quickly, get the right answer, but then second-guess themselves because the impression came so fast. The best way to know is to experiment to see how you operate in a moment like this. And to be clear, stressing over whether you are right or wrong can cause you problems (if you are anything like me). It helps to treat this so you have nothing invested, you are just playing and having fun. Athletes also find that they perform the best when they lay aside their stressors and allow themselves to just “get in the zone.” It is a very natural unencumbered state. The good news is that a little meditation can help with a mind that is “encumbered.”
I used to test my ability like this by viewing the pressure gauge on my propane tank. I know that this sounds weird to do but her me out. The tank was located some distance away from the building and the pressure gauge will slowly go down on the “volume” side of the tank, which is the only part that changes. I didn’t see the gauge on a daily basis, only when I would go out to look. It was always a moving number. The gauge could also go up in warmer weather, not just down as the volume dropped, which was a wild card that made guessing the gauge position difficult. It is very hard for me to guess where this volume gauge is exactly. What I want to do is not guess, but actually see right where the gauge is. When I did this the first time, I saw the image of the gauge and I saw in my mind the needle on it going wildly from one range on the gauge to another. I just lay there, eyes closed, and waited for the needle to stop going all over the place. I suspected that this was my mind trying to insert a guess. I didn’t want to guess, I wanted to accurately view it form a distance. Finally, the needle came to rest. I noted where it was, and the next day I went out to my tank with my written results in hand. I found that I was just a couple of pounds of pressure off from what it actually read. What is important here is that when the tank is full, the tank has many hundreds of pounds of pressure, indicating the volume of the tank, and this changes slowly over time until the tank is empty or near empty. It had been weeks since the tank had been filled. I found that by letting my mind go blank and stop my impulse at trying to grab for a result, I would tend to get very accurate results.
Another test that I did was I would take a book, open it so that it would open away from me, then lay it on a shelf with the book open but pointing down so I couldn’t see the page it was open to. I would then attempt to remote view the page number. You can do lots of tests like this to see where you get it right and where you get it wrong. A deck of cards can also be a good way to test yourself, too. Sometimes, I find that I don’t do as well with a target I don’t have a connection to, so a deck of cards often doesn’t work well for me for some reason, but I have been amazingly good at seeing details of where a person I know lives who I have never visited, for example. Pay attention to what you get right but also assess what you also got wrong. After a series of efforts you can begin to see what details you are better at getting and the ones you might have a “blind side” about. Those details are a sign for what you need to refine later. I got my follower number very close, but there is still work for me to do. I need to work more on clearing my mind even more. It might help me to spend more time quieting my mind and not letting additional material to intrude (I was a little focused on needing to get into the studio earlier so my mind was not at a dead stop). You can also try to read a person and then ask them to asses whether what you picked up on was a hit or a miss. Pay attention to both and also bear in mind it is possible you might have picked up on something that they are themselves not aware of. But it is also just as possible that this could have been a miss on your part. The trick is in finding out which it is. Often time will tell.
How we feel, what we think, our beliefs, all can become unrealized mitigators in our psi work. What works best is when you can successfully lay aside your filters when you do this work. Having a way to test your results also is important. Consciousness itself is the portal through which this sensing flows, but consciousness can be compromised with what we think, prefer, or believe about the target. So it is important to be as clear and as blank as you can be. This takes work because while doing this work is incredibly simple, it can be too simple for our minds to accept as the real deal. When clear psi results come they can often come with this feeling of, “Oh it can be that, that came through too fast…” Often, though, you can be right on target. We second guess ourselves, too. Don’t. Just sense and see whether you were on the mark. If you got something wrong, maybe only a cluster of items, think about how you can do better next time. Perhaps you saw our friend in my earlier example sitting there with tea but she wasn’t actually speaking to a male friend. She might, though, say, “I was thinking about my friend Ted and was thinking of calling him to tell him something I had been thinking about while I was reading my book.” Sometimes you can get parts of the truth. So often we will glom onto a result and decide it is the right one and go no further, but I would suggest that you keep at it and step back after your first dive in and try another view….and another. The trick here is not to prejudge what you are seeing or use your mind to change what you are seeing.
The method is to let your mind go completely blank and think of your mind as a projection screen upon which images will just come. Don’t try to make up images. You can sometimes feel when you are the one doing this. Focus on how it feels when you do this and at the same time, with enough practice, you can begin to associate your hits from your misses. It is just as important to pick up on how you feel when you get a hit as how you feel when you get a miss. It might take repeated attempts in order to focus on your mind state to determine the difference between the two. You can, though, do this, it just takes repeated efforts so you can stay away from the feeling states that wind up muddying the waters for you.
The best state is feeling nothing and not letting the stuff from your day to intrude. When I say “feeling nothing” I mean to be as blank or clear in your feelings as you are with your thoughts. Feelings are as potent as thoughts, and they can be equal opportunity “distorters” for our experience in the vast realm that is our field of consciousness. There is nothing wrong with feeling a sense of excitement, but be mindful of the state of mind that you go into when you do this work. When I have gotten the best results they have always come when I have not created any expectation in my mind for what the result will be. Being able to cultivate this “open-mindedness” is crucial I think for greater success going forward. Edgar Cayce explained that when he read the akashic records during his thousands of readings while he was alive, he explained that, “anyone can do what I do.” He then said something very telling. He said that he did it by going forward without any expectation of an outcome. He kept his own thoughts and feelings out of his work. The more that you do this work, the more it has a way of showing you your own biases or beliefs, so this kind of work has been known to help a person improve along spiritual lines as well as learning the type of control over thought and feeling that is required. I also want to emphasize that once you get into these states necessary for these abilities to come forward, you will likely feel all sorts of things, most of them will be like joy, excitement, wonder, perhaps even awe. Going into them, you want to have no expectation but once you are in you may well feel a stream of something moving through you that feels….more than just your localized self. Feel that stuff. But going into it, try to be neutral and quiet. In a very real sense you are changing or shifting channels in your mind and consciousness and some of them may be new “channels” to you at first, so being able to observe quietly how you go there can be helpful for next time. All of this advice is based on my own experience, so your mileage may vary in terms of what it is that gets you there or keeps you there. I am always interested in your own experience and what worked for you (so let me know in the comments).
I hope this helps you because becoming aware of your own inner superpower can help you to become more comfortable and aware of who you are and your capabilities as a being here on the planet. And who knows, you might just be able to help those you love.
In the past week we had ourselves a nice snow storm here in the mountains. The temperatures have dipped down low enough that it has kept the snow melt at a minimum. There is a feeling of so much that is on hold, and I don’t mean just getting out and running errands or doing things that I might otherwise be doing if the snow wasn’t there. The snow has a way of muffling sound with its soft powder acting like a noise suppressor or absorber. It does close things in, and many things come to a halt. It is in such a place, a few days ago, where I began working on a project that I have been researching for a decade and a half. In fact, the project is as old as my own awakening process is. That project is about the ties that earliest Christianity has with the phenomenon of awakening. I have gone through this, through all of the books available to us now, the history, the archeological digs, what we know about kundalini from other cultures which used to be knowledge that was only known to a select few. We are in a different time now and the doors are opening. I need to get started on this.
I already have an unwieldy manuscript that I began writing a couple of years into awakening that I felt could serve as perspective on the experience, a kind of memoir of sorts that was started before this book concept about early Christianity was begun. The problem for me with this first manuscript was that at the time I was trying to write it, I was so deep into altered states, doing release work, and being swept away by this powerful force in my awareness, that it was really hard to write a book that had a cohesive feel. It grew to 750 pages…..I spent months editing it down to 180 pages, only to find I had lost the heart of the work. It was frustratingly difficult. Then my friend and gifted intuitive Ali said when I was getting ready to gas up the car on the way to the airport, “Don’t you have a second book, Parker?” As I was getting ready to get out of the car to gas up I quickly said, “No I don’t.” She did that thing she does which tells me she is scanning something. She looked out across the lot to the road into the distance with that look. Ali is never wrong. I know it is tricky when we speak in absolutes, but Ali’s ability to dig into something she knows nothing about is astounding. I know that might be hard to believe, but it is true.
At the time, my mind wasn’t on another book, my mind was on this book I had been wrestling with, this memoir. She added while she sat there musing, “My guidance is telling me that you have a second book…” I knew what she was talking about, but I wasn’t thinking about it as a book. It was an idea for a book, something I hadn’t told anyone else about. The last thing I wanted to do at that point in time was to start a new project. I then admitted to her so her own inner intuitive abilities wouldn’t be jammed up in her head, “I have an idea for a book, but it isn’t anything I have started on.” She continued looking out into the rain as we sat parked under the canopy of the gas station, adding, “My guidance is telling me that your second book needs to be your first.” When I heard this, I was stuck with the idea of getting this first manuscript into a better state before I could begin contemplating this concept which I hadn’t even started on, beyond just research. “I don’t feel like I can begin another project right now, I have so much to do on this first one!” She took in a breath and steeled herself a bit, she knows how I am. I am hard-headed and I can be difficult to deal with when I get in this kind of space. “My guidance tells me that this is THE book, Parker, that it needs to be the first one, then finish your second one later….how about you just put this book you are working on aside for a bit and give this second one they are telling me about a try?”
I was dismissive and impatient with all of this. I was stuck wrestling with this first project that was at that time in front of me, which had so many arms. I wish I could have been more patient with her ideas, which she was getting in an authentic space where she nearly always hits bullseyes. What I did do over the next nine months was I promised myself that after digging into a major edit, I would try to put it aside to see what would come up in regards to this second project. One edit turned into about half a dozen, and this process took nine months. I have close to a dozen variants of that project saved on my computer. I finally just walked away from it, cleared my head and forgot about writing at all.
Only after I did this, did ideas begin to slowly filter in about that second project. I didn’t put word to paper for years but instead immersed myself in study and research into a field that most Christians think they know a lot about and have some very strong opinions on. I’m not a historian on the subject, and while I have spent a good deal of time in academia both as a student as an educator, I didn’t get my degree in divinity. I had a lot of work to do, a lot to learn. Luckily, I was able to begin learning what the last hundred years or so have turned up since archeology became a serious field of study. The earth has given up her secrets and we now have more information on the history of Christianity than we have ever had, short of the documents that the church has held in their collections (which has formed most of our thinking before this period in our history). The problem though, with what the church has held and what the earth has offered up, is that what we keep finding are not books or fragments of books that are Orthodox in nature, but heretical ones. Additionally, the more work that is being done on this front, the more the subject of heresy keeps coming up in the historical record, and not in the way that the church has used it, which has been to put down any story that it felt stood at odds with the standard they were bearing. I am not using “heresy” in this case to mean what is not true but what has been labelled by the church as not true. You perhaps can see where I am going with this.
What we know now is that essentially the Orthodox church chose books that it agreed with, that it understood. It put those books forward….but there were other books. While it is true that there were many books that were deemed by the church as non-authentic, such as stories of the early life of Jesus clapping his hands and making something he made out of mud turn into birds and fly away, there is the issue of a body of work that was completely suppressed and nearly destroyed in order to keep those stories from coming forward. The church will say that those books were heresy and this is why it acted as it did. However, what scholars are seeing in this last century is that this was more about choosing what stories you wanted put forward in order to formulate doctrine based on those narratives that the Orthodox wing of Christianity thought it understood. There were some very important books that were simply dismissed out of hand because (I suspect) they were so poorly understood. They were poorly understood because of the nature of the writings themselves and what it was that they were intended to achieve. What this body of work did was to pull back the veil on consciousness to reveal a capacity that all humans have for realizing the divine within. As I will show in my book, what they were on about was revolutionary for the location, the religion that it came from (Judaism first, then Christianity later), and the culture from which it sprang. It wasn’t a bunch of incoherent gobbledy-gook, however, despite how some have received these newly discovered texts and gospels. In some important cases, these books represent some of the most sophisticated writings having to do with how to reach enlightenment and to achieve a full activation of awakening, something which the Hindu call kundalini and what the Taoists call the Golden Flower. It doesn’t help that the scholars who first examined these books (Thomas and Philip to name a few) were not versed in world religion or philosophy because they described them as being influenced by Hermeticism. To say this is like saying I was influenced by the Hermetic teachings because I had awakened even though I was completely unfamiliar and unschooled in that strand of philosophy that emerged in Egypt. But the fact that these books were found in Egypt doesn’t mean they are Egyptian in character. The only thing the discovery reveals is that the dry desert of Egypt helps to preserve documents on papyrus very well (as many texts that are not Christian that have been unearthed there attest to). There is a lot to cover in this book, the least of which is how Orthodox Christianity developed ideas over time which appear to us today as having always been there. No, Christianity evolved like all religions evolve. It was the Orthodoxy that put forward the idea that what they had to say about Christianity and Jesus himself had always been from the very beginning when in fact this was not the case at all. Rather than trying to tear down Christianity, I am seeking to correct the record using historical evidence, archeological discoveries, studies of the texts both within the so-called Gnostic strand as well as the Orthodox strand of the same religion. While that will be looked at askance by many, there is evidence that now exists for why this second look is necessary if we are to understand Christianity and how the victors in the battle of the “truth” got to tell their story while another deeper story didn’t get to be told until 50 years ago when the Nag Hammadi Library began hitting bookstore shelves after a protracted period of translating the codices.
This book will be a story about two competing camps and how their perspectives were very different. One was an outer understanding stripped of a deeper knowledge and carried elements pointing to this deeper knowledge, while the other was representative of a deeper knowing, both of who we are and how the divine works in us. The two diverged in degrees over time until the two were only partially related. When you look at the two camps today, they look almost completely unrelated. Neither camp had writings that were “perfect” in the sense that there are transcription errors, or deeper doctrinal issues that keep scholars busy at work printing books on the subject. They are both, though, speaking to the same phenomenon but with a different understanding. It is a bit like holding a piece of string that is white on one end and blue on the other. The two look completely different at their most extreme ends, but they are in fact all the same string. One camp, the Orthodox one, fought very hard to dismiss this other camp and did so by flatly stating that what these so-called Christians were on about was sheer heresy, nothing more. The Orthodox church had books that proved it. But what was actually going on was a war over ideas and values about the very foundation of human spirituality. The Orthodoxy won out and they continued to choose the stories that agreed with their particular view, and they had the resources to press their view, making their imprint on humanity appear as though it had always been the view, and never-mind those dirty heretics. This is the perspective we still have today as codified by the Orthodox view, and it only looks like it was always that way. Billions of believers think so to this day. It wasn’t always that way, however. Not by a long shot. Yes, in light of what Orthodoxy has put forward, this other camp which got buried in this conflict looks very strange and incompatible….heretical, even. Like I have said, though, the earth keeps offering up her truths and we have learned a lot in a pretty short time.
Many cornerstone concepts of Orthodoxy were created. To the casual observer, this isn’t obvious at first. The effort will be to show what new knowledge we have from our most recent discoveries and see how it compares with the historical accounts and what Orthodoxy has put forward, at least in part. An example of this is the divinity of Jesus as the son of God. This wasn’t something that was known about from the get-go. This only came along later, it was a development that grew with each generation. We know enough about when the synoptic gospels were written and scholars today can trace the development of the ideas surrounding Jesus’s divinity and identity as human, as God, or as someone who was adopted at God’s son (these ideas were all existing at the same time early on) for example. Some of the synoptic gospels don’t mention Jesus being God. This was something that the church came up with and put it into the belief system and then said “world without end, amen” and that was that. You also wont know the full story if you don’t go looking, but given how belief itself works, who is going to bother to question their beliefs or what they perceive is the foundation of their faith? This is one example how doctrine was formed and how human a process it was. There were other ideas that some take as an article of faith today that are just like this.
The camp that lost out was a group of Christians who formed the esoteric wing of the faith which we call today the Gnostics. They didn’t call themselves Gnostics, though. If you asked any one of them they would have said that they were Christians. These people and their teachings seem strange to us today in large part because we have been fed a steady diet of Orthodoxy, the outer-most understanding of the deeper principles within Christianity. Some of what the so-called Gnostics have on offer cast new light on our spirituality and they also reveal discrepancies with regard to the Orthodox view. One example is that Orthodoxy essentially says that you need to accept Christ into yourself, to accept his act of sacrifice in order to be saved. The so-called Gnostics, however, pointed out that Jesus was teaching his closest followers how to BE Christs. Like all esoteric traditions, though, they veiled the teachings in order to make them inaccessible for all but those who were in the process of being initiated into the deeper teachings and experiences that led to an innermost realization which they called gnosis, or knowledge. For these Christians, you didn’t need to believe in the crucifixion and what that meant, instead it was the knowledge that would save and free people. What is so interesting about this process and these teachings is that they describe in identical form, but using different vocabulary, identical concepts contained in other esoteric traditions the world over. There is no evidence that suggests that there was contact between the cultures of India and Judea during this time. While modern scholars suggest that the Gnositc texts have ties to Hermeticism, I suggest in my book another possibility and it is informed by my own experience with awakening.
The book will do its best to make the case for the Gnostics and why their work deserves a second look. It is a story about how the kingdom was found, then lost, within a century or two. Part of the book will be my own experience, notes taken from my journal in those first weeks and months after awakening happened and the observations that I made at a time when I had no idea what was happening to me. I will show how what I observed as the central symptoms of the experience match those in the Gnostic texts as well as parts of the Orthodox ones, and how this then reveals at the least that the Gnostics had grasped something that is incredibly rare and difficult to reach for the average person. It will show how a school sprung up around this knowledge which was later put down by the tide of Orthodoxy that came after the “heretics” came onto the scene, not before. We know this because of careful research that has been conducted by numerous archeologists, a linguist, and other researchers. I will reveal that while the early church had these heretical teachings at its earliest core, the look and feel of the church was also very different in its earliest days. The beliefs were different, too, as the ideas that would become the Orthodox view would evolve over time into what many of us know today.
Concurrent with the later tide of Orthodoxy came an effort to marginalize the role of women in the church. Hand-in-glove with this effort was also an effort to marginalize knowledge of the true source of the Holy Ghost as a feminine quality of the divine. As above, so below. I will show that the early church was a very different animal from the one it is today, and how it is that we are all poorer for it. The book isn’t out to seek converts but instead may well be a cautionary tale about what happens when we allow an authority who is less capable than ourselves to call the shots. Augustine, who was one of the early church fathers, once said that he would not believe anything unless the church itself said that it was true. Most people just want to be told what the truth is without ever really examining it and doing the vetting themselves (“The kingdom is within’). The Orthodox story is a great one but it isn’t the only one and isn’t the whole story given how much that we now know. It is just one strand of comprehension about a drama that played out while Jesus lived on earth. We now have evidence that women served as bishops in early Christianity. So much for the writer of Timothy (which most scholars today explain is a forged letter attributed to Paul) telling women to shut up in Church and submit to their husbands. For Timothy, a woman could save herself by bearing a man children. Yes, the early church was a very different animal than it was just two hundred years later.
I am not writing this book in an effort to fuel controversy, however. My purpose is to show how the Gnostic texts are tied to an authentic phenomenon in consciousness and how it fuels a transformation of the personality and self. It will also show the discrepancies that are contained in the Orthodox view and how what it said does not mesh with the facts. Many Christians believe that the Bible is a perfect document given from God. That notion itself is simply not true and I will show how this is so. From miss-translations, to outright forgeries, the story has been massaged and changed in key ways in the Bible. The book will be an effort at laying out the facts instead of resting on just what those in Orthodoxy have said was the truth (“trust us” they have said, “what we tell you IS the truth!”). Trust but confirm. The book will be about how two different camps were addressing two ends of the same string and that both have something to tell us about ourselves and our ability to reach the divine that is found within (“The kingdom is within you”).
What I will also be doing with the book is bringing contemporary voices into the divide to help illuminate how awakening is the same thing that early Christianity was teaching about privately to those who were prepared for it. My hope is to add enough voices to help to paint a picture and make the case for why the Gnostics had something important going on in regards to understanding the Christ drama. My hope is to be able to assemble numerous first-hand accounts of contemporary awakening stories. To that end, I am interested in your story should you be interested in contributing to this project. One aspect of this book will be to point out that awakening does not require belief in any religion in order to achieve it and that those who were on to this rare phenomenon were themselves probably not well understood in their day and that much of the deeper teachings of Jesus were lost for a very long time. It is my sense that awakening was precisely what Jesus was speaking to when he was quoted in both Philip and Thomas and that he was showing a way for a person to know themselves better and their place in the divine drama. To that end, accounts will not be tied to the religion as much as they will be tied to the phenomenon described in the Nag Hammadi Library and how this was fed into the ministry of Jesus. I understand that for some people, there is a concern about remaining anonymous, so any material that you provide me will be treated in the manner which you have requested. The effort here will be to shed new light on an old story and how Christianity as we know it might need a second or third look. If you are interested in finding out more, you can contact me, Parker Stafford, at info@staffordartglass.com.
I am currently working on a manuscript about awakening and the experience of the transcendent. While a part of the book will involve my experience, I am wanting to reach out to others who have had experiences involving transcendent states in the hope of building a base for illustrating how these states are being experienced in our current time. What I would like to have are others’ perspectives and experiences in order to broaden the discussion in certain portions of the project. The book is part look into earliest Christianity and another part look at other traditions. A religious belief is not a requirement nor is it a detriment, as both sides will be welcome.
While it would be helpful to be able to use your name, this is not necessary for contributing to this project. I will have a survey and some focused questions to direct discussion initially, but I am open to your own observations in your own words. I also will be able to provide you with more details on what the book will be about with greater detail to the degree that I can at this early stage (there is a lot of research still ongoing, so what is found will also help to form the content of the book).
If you are interested in contributing to this project, or know someone who you think might be, feel free to share this post with them. You can contact me, Parker, at info@staffordartglass.com.
So far, these are the main means I have found for facilitating the flow of the energy called prana or qi (chi). There may be more, and I would be glad to know of the ones you are aware of. This comes from someone who has no practice or teacher and is from a Western perspective. I used the simplest of methods and listened to my inner guidance that came as the river of light opened more and more within me. The one observation I have made after raising kundalini was that all of this is not difficult, and nor should it be hard to understand. All of this is about being human. Do not attempt raising kundalini without adequate preparation, however. Learning the art of surrender is one very important prerequisite. The main ways of facilitating the flow of prana:
Quieting the mind
Feeling
Breathwork
Movement
Quieting the Mind
This is not as simple as it seems. One goal of meditation is to quiet the mind, but as is often the case, we sit for some time waiting for all of our thoughts from the day to settle before we can begin the innermost work that meditation can bring us to. And then, once the thoughts do settle, what is the point? It has been known that when we quiet the mind enough, there is something that arises from the substratum of consciousness that can begin to show us clues to the deeper nature of consciousness as energy. Thus, as a result, for as simple as it is, meditation has been used by many cultures as the way to get to this point where the normal “monkey mind” is stilled. This takes work. It takes discipline. It is very helpful to do meditation the same time of the day each day if possible. I always meditated before bedtime because that was when the house was its most quiet and I was able to drop into a much quieter relaxed state. In the East, early morning (say, 4:00 a.m. for example) is often chosen as a good time to meditate because the body is not busy with digestion, and the mind is quiet from having been in sleep for a number of hours. By having a schedule your mind will be able to go into a quiet state must faster. Many years ago I practiced projection of consciousness and I was able to have some limited success with it. I practiced this each night as I went to bed. I was able to go immediately into an altered state and then “switch on” the astral state automatically whereby my astral awareness came to the fore. Before this, it took months to develop this state. My brain and body had become trained and it seemed to know that when I directed my attention along certain lines, it would follow along much quicker. Meditation is the same thing. If you train yourself through practice to reach a certain state with regularity, it becomes a snap to go into that state later once it has been practiced. The benefit of meditation as it relates to prana or chi is that you can begin to become familiar with the energy. By simply watching it or observing it you can find that it reacts simply to your act of observation. It is also possible to inhibit it as well, depending on how you respond to this activity. The best way is to try it. Prana will feel like the tide or flow upon which your consciousness moves, so they are very closely bound or connected. Feel “below” the thought to what is supporting your thought. What is it that is animating it? What is that quality that is making me alive, vital, and that gives my consciousness this presence and vitality?
It can often help to quiet the mind by keeping it busy with something else. I found a meditation technique very helpful in this regard where I placed my hands together and then put all of my awareness on the point where my hands touched. I held my attention there as long as possible. If my mind wandered, I didn’t beat myself up, I just went back to imagining I was looking at the point between my hands. I put myself there between them. After a while, I found that I had this very open and vast state begin to open up within me. It came about not by focusing on how it was happening. Being aware that it was happening using the “I” awareness caused it to stop immediately. It was at first a very odd sort of state I was reaching, but it was a prelude to a full blown awakening. It was very similar to never focusing on anything in particular when you are using your eye, except in this case it is your inner attention. There is a defocusing that seems to be happening in this other state. If you begin to focus on anything, becoming self-conscious, anything that was happening would immediately stop. I was dragging in my sharp focus of ego-awareness (left brain activity) into a state that was much more broadly “focused.” The usual way just didn’t work. The wave of cosmic consciousness would collaps and I would be left grasping at straws. Over time I found that a lot of energetic phenomenon began to happen once I entered into this defocused state, along with suddenly being suffused in a brilliant white light. After that encounter with the white light, things began to change. I began having more and more prana-based events, and not all were known to have been prana at the time. But being able to enter into what is called a state of “presence” helps to still mind by training the mind to be more and more quiet. This could take a good deal of time to achieve even moments of silence or relative quiet, but the brain will learn to fall into a meditative state when you train it through repetition, and then it will be easier each time. The point is not to do anything when there, the point is to feel and to be aware of the energy that is present in you. It is possible to train the mind/brain to enter a deep state through just about any trigger, really. It is all about association and the mind needs that association to remind it where it needs to be. Sitting in a certain posture can do it, even. Music or a certain song can also do it. Routine.
Feeling
Feeling is the other side of the coin. It is also the one aspect that gets discounted the quickest by most folks. Prana is an intelligent energy and it communicates through feeling as does the intelligence of the cosmos. It is the rational mind that then takes the stream of information and assembles it. This is also how remote viewing works, by the way. So much of our capacity to feel, which is an important part of our capacity for awareness, can be hijacked by a rogues gallery of buried emotional material that can crowd out deeper feeling into the flow of prana. Pick something that inspires you, and there you will find your prana being released. It doesn’t matter what it is, but most often it will be something that makes you feel good in an authentic way, that makes you open up as you feel more and more expansive. Does a painting do that? Music? A certain line of thought? Thinking of someone you love also opens up channels for prana. Watch yourself when you feel this energy. Do you feel how effortless it is when it begins to move? That is its secret. Prana flows naturally and does not flow as well when we shut down. It Prana shuts down when we are self-conscious and opens up when we aren’t. Just don’t try and force it, just be present with it, watch it and learn what you are thinking and feeling when it does flow. Can you feel how different those two states are? In one state the valve is closed down and in the other it is open wide. You might think that there are all kinds of technical diagrams that you have to memorize, but no, it is much simpler than this, so simple a child can do it (and children do this naturally as they are less shut down). Walks in nature, the beach, your favorite places. Can you feel that shot of energy that goes from your pelvis up into your heart? That is prana moving. You can learn all about prana by learning to be exuberant. Gratitude does more to boost prana than any special meditation technique. You see, while you can focus prana with thought, prana responds to how you choose to feel in the moment. This is amazingly simple, and hopeful.
It is true that one reaches the highest state in samadhi through feeling. It is less what you do than what you don’t do. Any wonder why it is so hard to reach? Also, it is a unitary state that sparks kundalini awakening. This unitary state is where the two sides of the self come into unity and spark the generative force to move through the body, no longer “stored” in the base of the spine. People have spent decades studying it and attempting to get it to rise. The secret is that it is how you feel. Feeling moves the two opposites together so that nothing can stand before what it can do when joined together. Much of what kundalini has to teach you will be based less in rational thinking as your capacity to feel and then release stored emotion from the past (which kundalini does in its process of cleansing). This is not a rational process. Placing your hands together like I explained earlier is a form of this unitary state, and is a good start for being able to feel what energy does in your body. But do not play with trying to raise kundalini. Once it rises you are on a roller coaster. Learning the art of surrender is of singular importance. Whatever kundalini strips from you will be what does not serve you. People can “lose it” in a process like this, especially those with little appreciation for or understanding of how to work with this energy instead of against it. It is a great disrupter, all for the better in the end, but you need to ask yourself if you are up to the task, which will be life-consuming.
Breathwork
It is often said that prana is in the air. I find this a little funny because when tracing this down I see that people who say this go on to explain that when you breathe in the air, you can feel the energy. In my study I found that there is something about the act of breathing itself that is actually the thing that is stimulating prana. If you quiet your mind and settle in and take long slow breaths, holding them at the top and bottom of each inhale and exhale, you might find that your body begins to feel buoyant, calm, peaceful, and lovely….blissful, even. I sense that when we breathe like this we are telling the mind that we are calm and the mind and brain work like a loyal servant and begin putting out the chemistry of calm and bliss. Learning to keep the mind still and not running lots of thoughts, will make your ability to feel this energy beneath all of this easier to perceive.
Breathwork has evolved into a complex science in India with the practice of pranayama. You can hold breath and still the movement of prana. You can move prana through breathwork, too. The best way to be aware of how it can move in you is to do the simple types of breath exercises first to see how well this can work. You can wind up feeling so good sometimes that it can further train your mind to prefer those states where you can learn how to be much more simple minded, or single-minded. Again, this is not complicated. Keeping your field of awareness quiet and still might be the hard part. But this is something achieved through feeling, wanting that feeling more than you want to grab onto a thought. Don’t beat yourself up when your mind races ahead. It is natural. Bring it back, each time you teach yourself to be calm and quiet for a few moments longer. Moments turn to minutes, minutes can stretch into half an hour. Breathing has the power to quiet the mind and help you to forget the worries of the day. What I found and which was supported by the science on the parasympathetic nervous system is that when you breathe like you do when in a relaxed state, like sleep, this sends s signal to your brain and body that you are calm. You can sometimes even feel the shift or change in your physiology as you do this. Full and deep breaths with pauses at the top and bottom are veryeffective in calming yourself down and slow the monkey-mind. I have had students use breath work to calm down and to stop feeling stressed. it is not uncommon for breathe work to be so effective that within minutes of doing so when stressed, you forget what you were even worried about earlier. A different part of the mind is now being used instead of the part that “grinds” away at the things that you cannot control.
Another very effective form of breathing is alternating nostril breathing. You begin by holding one nostril closed while taking a long deliberate breath in, holding it for the count of three, and then exhaling. You can then close the other nostril and then do the same type of deep deliberate breath the same way. You can also take several breaths with on nostril closed and then alternate to the other nostril, making sure that you keep the number of breaths through each nostril balanced. You can begin to meditate, turning inward using breath work. Use it for as long as you need to reach deeper and deeper states of calm. Then, the only thing you will have to guard against is falling asleep! But what is the harm in doing that? None. Perhaps you need sleep. Try again the next day or next time and don’t beat yourself up about it. Eventually, you will be able to cultivate this quiet calm while being alert. Again, it is all conditioning. Like a body builder, this takes time and discipline. If you fell asleep in meditation, try next time to be as relaxed but try not to fall asleep. It is being alert but not busy in the mind. It is at this place, as you meditate, that you begin to feel your energy. It is really just that simple, because it is at this place where you can begin getting aquianted with your true nature.
Movement
How you move can help to open you to prana. Sitting in rigid postures will be less effective as more opening postures. How you move through space can have an effect on your awareness of prana flow. Ecstatic dance or any movement that feels particularly good to you will work. Prana responds to thought. Thinking that is hard and harsh will wash away a lot of the flow of prana. That said, intense emotion can release prana, too, but the emotion itself may be shaping the prana into forms that may feel less natural or organic. Many of the Chinese disciplines of Tai Chi and Chi Gung (also chigong) are designed to move prana or chi in the body, although tai chi is often described as more of an exercise using mindfulness over energy movement). It can release trapped emotion and it can also free up energy in the body. All good things.
Chigong works by focusing movement with attention on different areas of the body in a routine that seeks to open up awareness and the energy in each major part of the body. Energy goes where your attention is, and this discipline focuses it through movement as the hands move through the energy field and are used in a way that places or focuses energy in some areas and then others. Your mind follows the movements while having very little happening with the mind. It is cool trick. White Crane qigong is a very good system to follow and you might be surprised at how it helps you to feel. The movements are slow, meditative, and purposeful. There is an order and purpose to all of the moves since each move works on one area of the qi field. Like making sure you alternate nostril breathing in a balanced way as I told you earlier, the series of movements in a “set” is important to follow.
Qigong is itself like a moving meditation. It is good to do chigong with a teacher who understands what is being achieved for each movement so they can explain what the point is, but you can also follow along watching a video of a qigong practitioner. Is there magic in getting the moves exactly right? This is a system developed over centuries. Estimates place the age of qigong as being anywhere from 5-7,000 years old. Qigong stimulates the same points in the body that acupressure and acupuncture also stimulate. Qigong masters were often great healers as well.
In similar but different ways, yoga does achieve some similar results even though it is from a different tradition. The idea of bringing mind and body together is an important first step in any inner practice. Many of the stomach pumps that yogis do help to open up blocked energy in the body, for example. Also, by focusing on your body movement the mind is naturally quieter, so movement in this way has a great benefit in this regard. Over time as you become more and more aware of the flow of prana in the body, by placing different fingers into position with your thumb, you can often sense if you are sensitive enough (quiet mind), how those finger positions can route energy through your body in different ways. These positions are called mudras and each one achieves a different result. I can remember the point where I tried mudras at a time when my mind was quiet enough and I could feel the difference in the flow of energy. It was very much like how one might direct the flow of water to different parts of the body. Most often, when my mind is very busy, I cannot feel this flow of energy with the change of each mudra. I need myself to be very attentive, mindful, and quiet.
Finally, having your body worked on by a body worker who understands energy is another way to free up prana flow. Acupuncture achieves this, and deep tissue massage also does this. Observe how you feel after a good session with an acupuncture practitioner or a message therapist. You know how “out of it” that you feel? That feeling is what happens when prana is opened up in the body. The more this happens, the more effect that it can have on your consciousness. This state is excellent for meditation work, too. You can also learn or identify this “out of it” state this way and then look for it in meditation work. The problem is not feeling “out of it” but being in too focused of a state, having to do with the rational mind. It is precisely these parts of the mind that are best able to relate to energetic effects and that part is also the feeling side. Are you getting it? I tend to think that most people are naturally inoculated against feeling this way because it goes against the active “doer” that is seeded into the Western mind. It is very beneficial to let that sense go in your work.
Now this might be the hard part. Trust yourself and listen to your intuitition. Is breathing better to do first or will meditation get you right into the baseline state? The best way to know, if you have no idea where to begin, is to experiment. Intuition improves with greater pranic flow. It is possible to begin to hear the voice of your inner guidance begin to direct you. Or maybe not. It all depends on what your proclivity in this direction is. What is clear, though, is that a greater flow of prana or qi aids in better health. The entire endochrine system is stimulated and this has a benefit for healing and even slowing down the aging process. I am the second to youngest sibling in my family and while all of my other siblings have long since gone grey I am still holding on to my dark hair. A fluke? I noted prior to the awakening of kundalini that I was beginning to show some grey, but after awakening that process quite obviously stopped. It went onto pause for about ten years and has only recently begun to slowly advance. That, and I don’t get sick like I used to. Colds and the flu are all things of the past pretty much. That isn’t to say that when it is time to go that I wont get sick, but by that time, I will be ready.
You can, though, bear these main points in mind and use each of them in an effective way to tap into your own wellspring of energy. You can use breath to calm your mind prior to meditation. You can then use feeling in meditation to use that to explore more deeply your capacity to feel energy. Once you do these things well, you can begin to incorporate movement in a conscious way in your day to day to begin opening up the body and also feeling its native vitality as more energy begins to flow. Those are my tips and learning the art of becoming inspired is the single most important driver for being able to feel life to its fullest. It can be said that when you are able to cultivate gratitude in your life it has a way of washing away regret and any negative tendencies as you begin to see the good that is there waiting for you there. Prana responds to this kind of mental and emotional landscape. In a sense, like breathing, prana responds to saying “yes” to the abundance of life that is your birthright. This can become, with practice and exploration, and the cultivation of greater levels of prana, the path of ecstacy.
The mystique of enlightenment tantalizes us with promises of a new world, a new mind, a new way to be. I sought, never really knowing where it might all lead to. Perhaps what the mystics and yogis had said, had whispered about, was an inaccessible realm for only the chosen few. What I know now, though, is I had forgotten what had graced my spirit upon coming into the world.
It remains a mystery to me why it took as long as it did. Was it just that I had some very real-world lessons to learn first? Did the mundane trump the transcendent? While there have been answers, questions crowd them out in greater number than ever before. It’s as if in seeing the “iridjuel,” a transcendental object existing at the end of time only serves to deepen the mystery. That may just be the point and the way of things. For myself, I am surprisingly more content now with the motley crowding-in of questions over answers. It is a bit like how poetry is. It never seems to give you a solid answer, it teases you along with still-greater possibilities, a greater inescapable reality. Like poetry, maybe the whole point is to be inspired and not answered. Perhaps it is better to have an experience over answers. And yet, along the way, answers do come, but they come about through a very different process than before. These answers, though, lead to a more informed kind of mind and heart filled with greater humanity and kindness, perhaps a sensitivity that appeals to the Shakti in each of us. Fiery, alive, but gentle and sensitive to the needs of the All.
What is so interesting is how we all come to these in our own way. I’m not suggesting that it is the same, though. Many paths, many arrivals. The moment that I think that there is a hard and fast answer, a path that is clear, I see so many other paths that weave in and out of my own and down into parts of the forest that I had never considered before. What is clear though is I can see how there was a single substantive move from the laser-focus of the logical rational mind to that of another which was its opposite which led me to this shore and the end of time which is like Terence McKenna’s “iridjuel,” the transcendental object at the end of time.
Was it just as simple as activating the power of the more feminine side of our brain, that right hemisphere? So much of what I saw happening in meditation when the lights came on was about this shift. If it weren’t for how the meditation technique was designed, I might have missed it. It appeared first like a giant empty room. I had been there countless times before. I might have dismissed it that time, passed it by and gone on to more active pursuits. But I stayed. I gave it time. Instead of a focus, it was the opposite of what I knew was that laser-like focus which we all had grown accustomed to and comfortable with. It was a focus, but without the usual sense of focusing. It is, in short, precisely what the non-dual crowd calls “not doing.” It was the opposite of “the doer.” It was observing but it was not aware in the same way. It was as if my mind had been switched off and a giant seemingly endless expanse opened up. This I think is what so many call the “void” and many back away from it both in fear and unknowing. It was in that darkness that the brightest of pure white light flashed before me, subsumed me for just a moment before receding, after which everything began to change. You could say it was my “journey to Damascus” moment.
I stuck with this new form of observation without a single-point because I found it novel, a new challenge to my mind. Curiosity had the best of me. And maybe I had tried so many different ways before this that I kind of shrugged and thought, what’s the harm? It wasn’t that this void was really empty. In it phenomena would rise and fall based on how well I didn’t drag into it my old focus, that old comfortable and certain laser focus. It invited me to open, open, and open still more. The more I did, the more it would show me. I considered the possibility that the void was perhaps just a gulf between two selves, one of which was incomprehensible to the other. If the other side to this new form of “focus” was apprehending, then this was a very different acquisition altogether. I didn’t catch a bird, I observed it through its very essence, whatever the object of my interest was. A window opened in my forehead and I saw images from a great distance. A hallway, an apartment, the windows, the arrangement of the furniture, the bedrooms and other things. I was lucky, I knew the person to whom these scenes belonged….I just didn’t know it at the time. Coincidence or synchronicity saw to it that its import was made known to me and I was placed on that person’s path. I was able to see that for as fantastical all of this was, for as seemingly self-created it could appear, what that window revealed was in fact images from a world away. I corresponded with the person to whom these images belonged, who was able to tell me how correct or true those images were. It was as if I had caught onto something that had been hidden in a seeming void, images shelved behind darkness that might never have been found had I remained incurious and remaining in my old ways. It all seemed impossible, and yet there it was. Over and over I tested this seeming novel capacity, always with a high degree of accurate results. If this was mere imagination, there should have been results that reflected that reality and I would have seen more misses than bullseyes. Somehow, it was as if my mind could imagine what wasn’t there before and could show me what did exist through some unknown capacity opening up within me. And surely this is what happens when we open our minds in this way. Psychics often describe how they seem to lack the filter that keeps such access to this phenomenon at bay. While it isn’t that important to have these experiences, it nonetheless is a symptom, a sign, of the change that is taking place. It turns out that this is a universal symptom regardless of your religious belief or school of thought. The Christians have it as “gifts of the spirit” and the Hindu have it as “siddhi.” They all come from the same precise phenomenon but go by different names.
If the old way of being was achieved by way of a linear progression and its laser focus, then this was a compliment to it. It emerged seemingly as if it was a divine compliment, for surely it was just that. It looked and smelled and felt like the simplest of tricks, a simple key in the lock that turned the tumblers of time and everything else with it. Yet, holding a key or grasping a lock alone would lead to nothing. The world remained as it was; as appearances only. Both were impotent apart, but both were suddenly potent when brought together. Together they opened up secrets, the unknowable, the impossible, and yes it all seemed like a fantasy at first until I found that no, these were very real things that I was seeing. I didn’t see them from the outside, but rather I felt them from the inside out. Everything was in reverse. I considered that I was sick, perhaps suffering from some brain malfunction for about two weeks, that is, until I realized that no, there was a basis for what appeared completely implausable. This is perhaps why the concept of union over-arches this experience in all of its forms. Left brain and right brain, always out of sync, always putting out different frequencies, now line up and are on the same page. They then create a third mind, a meta mind, which then opens its window into the world beyond the senses. Like a ladder adding to itself, it leads us into a new way and a new world within ourselves. It is apt calling one side the masculine and the other the feminine, for that is surely how they seem. The one caveat is that regardless of whether you are male of female, we all have the same two present in us. Like the rails of a ladder, when we bring them together with the rungs, we are able to climb up into the transcendent, into what science says isn’t possible. It was in the practices of shifting into the other lost rail of the ladder of our mind that I found the way upward. But just as it showed me the way upward it also showed me that it also goes downward and into the realm of shadow where if we release those old ghosts of our fear, we can continue higher with fearlessness and wonder.
It has helped to show how all people matter, how it is that different turns of mind are important as we reach the end of time and its realm of appearances. It always seemed as simple as hitting a whole new gear. We just didn’t know that this gear even existed. So simple, so broad in its implications.
I began to see how, through time, just as we had subsumed the inner Shakti within ourselves, so too did we subsume the Shakti’s in the world. As above, so below. Was it ordained that it be this way? Or was it just inevitable given how we had limited ourselves? More, every once in a great while there would come some person who was a teacher who would pass on something that would yield a brief period, a kind of renaissance of spirit, whose words would fill a scroll or book and we would be left scratching our heads wondering what or how they got to where they were. Like a tide, knowing would come flowing in and then after a time, it would flow out, seemingly lost to human comprehension and the limits it had placed on itself. Always a teacher to light that fire, fanning the flames as best as he or she could. Over and over, we would fall back into forgetting. Not all of them would, but the most worldly of them had an amazingly short half life.
That is why this time seems a completely different iteration of past events. Waking up as we have, without a teacher or any knowledge of the secret practices of yogis or mystics, perhaps millions may have already reached this further shore. Will it make this iteration different? Will it last? Is it a new wrinkle whose very presence will change the pattern for all time, or will it be just another tidal phenomenon, subject to the larger forces present in our cosmos and thus our own bodies?
While the left brain says “Aha!” It is the right brain that brings the myths which tell truths that facts cannot. So Shakti dances in a wreath of fire and beckons us to her mystery. Perhaps this time we can see the two impulses as not mutually exclusive, but capable, when brought together, or forming a window into a larger understanding of what those two sides represent when brought into union. It is why I think that both, set apart, will only offer up what they think they know instead of a larger view of what is. It seems nature has a proclivity toward having us learn how to cooperate between our disparate inner nature if we are to reach the prize. And what is this prize? Is it a definite object that we can know in a concrete way, or is it instead both mystery and known quantity that mystifies as much as it informs? Is it the gift that reveals how important it is to see both sides of things, which pulls us along in our curious journey to discover what has not previously occurred to us? Is the answer as much how the meta mind is created as the object at the end of time is composed? And as such, will that object always defy our attempts at grasping it, but remain like a ball of wool, indistinct, random, but from which, with the pinch of our mind, can grasp a small part of its incomprehensible nature and spin it into a coherent thread? And will those threads always be just one small aspect of a still larger whole? I tend to think as much, but I also observe that anything that you might ever want to know can be found and teased out in just the way that I have described. This represents the exact opposite of how we are taught learning can take place….and yet the transcendental object at the end of time remains, enigmatic as ever, urging us forward into some new understanding of ourselves and the cosmos itself.
I might never have thought that this was possible had it not happened over and over to me. Had I been less prone to digging in and seeing how the fantastic seemingly self-imagined objects I saw behind closed eyes were, I might not have seen that they were supported through fact and independent experience. And it isn’t even that doing such a thing is that important, it is I think, a signpost along the way that we are now in new territory. It says: The Transcendental Object At the End of Time Up Ahead.
A hundred years hence what I have considered may itself be seen through the tunnel of time as only one small wrinkle in a still larger unfolding. And yet, still, I cannot help but grasp that bit of air with my mind and pinch with my intention to spin out threads of coherent thought and discovery from the object that seems surely to exist at the “end” of time.
Shaktipot or Shaktipata is the process by which a teacher aids the student in stepping over the last barrier that divides them from an ordinary state of being and the expansion of consciousness that takes place with kundalini. If used incorrectly, it can awaken students who are not yet ready and it can cause problems. It can also not “take” because the student is not sufficiently prepared. However, it is possible to use it correctly when the teacher has a discerning mind to aid the person to step over that last barrier.
The great yogi and teacher Swami Rama speaks to this issue in a way that I think is one of the more enlightened and balanced ways of any teacher I have ever had the chance to listen to speak. Swami Rama also has many other teachings which have been recorded and are available online to watch. I have found that his approach has been the most sound and the most balanced.
For example, he points out that kundalini is not a goddess only, but is instead a fusion of the opposites of those qualities which we consider to be masculine and feminine within our consciousness. This is important to understand if you wish to understand what is at work with kundalini. Most say it is a goddess. If you know why that is, you might understand how “masculine” we are in our thinking and being. This in no way takes away from the experience the importance of the feminine, but it helps to show how kundalini is itself an act and phenomenon that seeks balance. I will say that what we term the feminine aspect in all of our consciousness (men and women both) is normally dormant, and it has as much to do with the “cosmic egg” resting at the base of the spine as it does with the two hemispheres of the brain.
For anyone who has experienced awakening you may have felt how a very feminine quality has suddenly come online. Have you ever considered why this is so? Could it be that as a culture and a species that we have favored the rational, linear and logical parts (and thus “masculine”) of ourselves more than the nonlinear, holistic, emotional (and thus “feminine”) aspects of ourselves? I consider kundalini to be a way whereby the two powers of mind are now brought into a unity, which then leads to the generation of a “new” mind which we call cosmic consciousness. If you take one away, the wave of awareness collapses. Both are necessary to produce this kind of mind I call the Meta Mind. It also shows us in our own lives how all of life matters, how all people matter. If we lose sight of this kundalini becames one-sided and our minds become one-sided, too. I know that I digress a bit, but sometimes these small points are important for helping iron out confusion.
Kundalini will clear the self of blocked emotion, and this is itself the imperative that kundalini has, which is to bring the person to greater balance, not drama or intensity or just “cosmic” experiences. For a time it feels dramatic as the kundalini is clearing out the blocks, but once this is done the energy settles down. The ancients describe how it becomes smooth. No ripples, no disturbances.
As a result, there is an entire generation of awakened people who have gotten used to its “intensity” when in fact it is kundalini doing what it does in the early stages of the process. The endgame is peace. The problem is that people can get stuck on the intensity and not let kundalini do its work. They like the intensity, the drama, the strong emotions that it brings up all without realizing that this emotion is the poison leaving the system. So to say that kundalini is one or the other misses the point and can leave you “one-sided” in your awareness. Yes, it connects us to higher order energies and those energies include what we think of as divine feminine and masculine….but so too does it connect us to other energies in consciousness that are just as beneficial to us.
Swami Rama’s teachings have been the most consistent in how it goes beyond any agenda. These kinds of teachers often are not as interesting to people who want something dramatic, but he is a teacher who has gotten beyond many of the conceits that often plague non-dual teachers. These conceits as I call them, often result in distortions of awareness and become an article of belief (which stills further investigation). As a result, these teachers repeat teachings that can only go so far and are not born out in more final or complete results. What do you think the result is when you have a teacher who does not know the true nature of self? Ideas like the self is an illusion, that all of life and reality are illusory, not real. While it is true that we are constantly judging or filtering what we see in the world, that alone is not what makes our world illusory. It is possible to see into the core of physical reality to see how it is composed. When I did that, it wasn’t that the world was an illusion but rather that it was a creation that was creating the appearance of solid matter from a source of great energy and purpose.
This is one example of how these teachers, no matter how much acclaim that they get from their followers, have missed important realities of the self and how it relates to cosmic consciousness. But who would know if the teacher him or herself does not know?
The teacher teaches something that is based on his or her own lack of understanding and awareness and this gets handed down and gets passed around to all of the other students, and it get repeated until everyone takes it as an article of faith. What do you think that person’s capacity for discernment might be under such a situation as this? But it gets worse; teacher after teacher then goes on repeating the same ideas and it seems to others who study their teachings that it must be, and the pattern only gets more deeply impressed on the community at large. If you say an untruth enough times it has a way of being accepted as truth and no one bothers to question it.
In my own experience I have seen that we take on selves and identities as an important part in our learning process. At no point have I ever seen self as false but instead as part of the process of becoming. But do not mistake the expansion of consciousness that comes with awakening to mean that the self is somehow false, it is simply part of a much larger story of how varied our consciousness is. We can experience both feeling separate as well as one. Both. They are not mutually exclusive. Why would they be? You come from the infinite and you have divided part of yourself to fit into this body, one chapter in a host of chapters called lifetimes. And despite how the self is decried as false, there is not a single one of these teachers who have shown how they can remove it with a waive of their own awareness. If it is an illusion, then why not pierce that illusion once and for all? Not a one. And so this is telling, the elephant in the room. Hopefully that elephant is Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, lol! Rama has much to say about ego, not as something to kill off, but to master. He even touches on this in the short but revealing video below.
So Rama is unique in the field. His teachings continue to show a great deal of awareness on a host of fronts. I am not one who “follows” a teacher, but what I have seen in his work has been a considerable level of insight. Yes, it is because without a teacher I have seen how his teachings have aligned with my direct experience.
How do I know that I myself am not buying into a belief? My earliest memory in this life was of choosing my parents. This was before I had a body. If ego is false and identity is false, how did I manage to have a sense of self at that point? Further, how did I recall numerous past lives? Given my level of recall (including two lost languages and historical accounts to back up some of my memories) I see the chance of simply “imagining” these things hard to square with Occams Razor.
I invite you to watch what he has to say about what a teacher can do for the student when it is done correctly…
Recently while watching a hawk trying to catch a mouse outside my window one morning, I began having a very unusual effect happen with my vision. It was quite curious; when I looked a certain way or focused my eyes a certain way the grass of the lawn outside rendered itself into a rich mandala-like pattern. It was unmistakable, and it took me by surprise. It would go away as I moved my eyes but I found that it would also come back and I would see the same pattern. It looked as if the landscape had arranged itself in a very coherent pattern visually. I wasn’t under the influence of any substance like a psychedelic.
I have never taken DMT, however, years ago when I was new to awakening, I often saw patterns like this in my mind and they were very similar to what I would later learn are called a Yantra, a mandala made up of triangular geometry. When I saw images in Indian culture that reminded me of the same patterns I saw in my mind’s eye, I figured that this may in fact be tied to some inner effects that awakening can have and artists illustrated them in the spiritual iconography of the yogis and yoginis who were experiencing this phenomenon as a result. I considered also that it was quite possible that in awakened states we may release small amounts of DMT, a substance that is in many plants and is produced by the body. It is a powerful psychedelic and if you are familiar with Terrence McKenna or Joe Rogan, you are likely to have gotten an introduction to its use and its effects.
People describe experiences of enhanced perception both visually but also of seeing other worlds open up to the mind and visual cortex when larger doses are taken. DMT is also present in the mixture called ayahuasca. What is so interesting to me is how both the ayahuasca, DMT, and awakening experiences all have the effect of aiding in the release of stored emotional blocks. I have considered that part of awakening involves the production of dmt (along with a host of other chemistry clustered in the endocrine system).
In the wake of my unusual encounter with my hawk as it tried to capture a mouse in the grass outside (actually it looked like it was playing with it…it never looked like it had actually found the mouse but that the mouse was hidden under a layer of dead grass thus protecting it—the effect was like a cat playing with a mouse, never really serious about catching it and eating it), I watched a video of a Joe Rogan podcast dealing with Covid and in the suggested section was a video of a graduate student describing the geometry of the DMT experience. It is entitled “The Hyperbolic Geometry Of DMT Experiences” on Youtube. It was an oddly timed discovery as I would soon find out.
I skimmed through the video and I came to a slide describing the different visual effects at different dosage levels. What was so interesting is the description of one dosage level that was identical to something I had seen the day I was looking outside my window that morning with the hawk. I will show you how the grass looked in a screen capture of their slide below:
What I saw corresponded to a known dosage amount, which is 4-8 milligram. I have wondered if it was possible during awakening, particularly with kundalini, whether we are experiencing elevated levels of dmt production, perhaps enough to briefly cause effects like the one I had recently seen.
I have observed that kundalini has had a very tangible series of physiological effects on the body, namely the endocrine system (which consists of the sexual organs, adrenal gland, pituitary, pancreas, thyroid, and pineal). The pineal gland is one center where dmt is suspected to be produced in small amounts in the body. Since I wasn’t that informed about the dmt trip aside from a few descriptions in videos, I found it interesting to find through some research that naturally occurring dmt experiences can be induced through breath work and meditation. Here was one source that describes a few of the symptoms of the natural dmt experience:
Common symptoms are as follows: pressure in the middle of the head and behind the sinuses, flashes of light with eyes closed, the feeling of the body vibrating as if laying on top of train tracks, twitching of the limbs, and a feeling of heaviness of the body.
These are all symptoms that can be experienced with kundalini. One is suggestive of a third eye activation (not to say the pineal is the third eye—the third eye is a chakra and thus part of the energy body’s inner senses). Additionally, “ego death” and loss of ordinary identity happens at the correct dosage, another possible symptom depending how far along in the process that you are. Bliss has been reported as well as being able to overcome emotional issues from earlier life (including enhanced problem solving and intuitive powers of the mind). These are also features of kundalini (or can be experienced). My sense has been that the dmt experience is an analog to kundalini. Named the “spirit molecule” it may well be that what we are dealing with here is an experience native to kundalini.
Finally, what I found was that I could see the patterns when my eyes were slightly “defocused,” something that was hard to determine how to repeat simply because being far-sighted myself, it was hard for me to defocus naturally. I would say that there was a very slight defocusing of the eyes when this happened. I thought I would bring this experience forward for all of you psychonauts who are interested in the spectrum of experience possible with kundalini in specific but also how it may in fact be related to how dmt may be involved.
While it was known that the pineal gland in rats had dmt in them, it was not clear whether human pineal glands did the same production of dmt. In a recent study it was found that trace amounts were found in the human pineal gland as well as in the neurons of the brain also. That study is linked here:
UPDATE: the morning after preparing this post, I looked out my window and found the same hawk doing the same thing it had been doing the week before. And like last week, I found myself watching the hawk and discovered that the landscape began to change in ways that were consistent with the video that I mentioned that described the different dosage points of dmt. This time, I had two different visual effects. the first was one in which the landscape began to appear to break up into a series of points, like clumps of grass. These clumps appeared very regular and I wondered over how I could be seeing this the way that I was. Was it just that the landscape was that regular? The sun came out and highlighted the landscape and the effect became more pronounced. I looked away and the effect went away. Then, a moment later, while watching the hawk the landscape bloomed into this “chrysanthemum” effect like it did last week, but only for a moment. What this reminds me of is the effect that I sometimes get with certain types of lighting that put out a particular wavelength of light, like sodium lamps. It is almost as if the light is polarized and moves along certain lines somehow, which then highlights certain parts of the scene along with the light, producing a strange radial effect. Whatever is happening, it is not permanent and seems to be tied less to my eyes as it is my perception, which I sense involves inner sensing as well as physical sensing.
I will add that a couple of months ago I had a hawk feather show up at the bottom step of the deck where I live, right in my path. Who knows really. Messenger?
DMT is a material that breaks down very fast in the body. It is one reason why dmt trips are of such short duration (unless when using ayahuasca which has an added ingredient that slows the breakdown of dmt in the body, thus extending its “lifespan” in the brain and body). Is it possible that as the body releases dmt that we can have very short bursts of visual phenomenon and changes in consciousness? I will say for the record that for the forty minutes prior to seeing this this morning, I was in a meditative state with off the charts high bliss. Who knows for sure, but it seems worth paying attention to.
I don’t see anyone mentioning this so I will call out the elephant in the room. I have been seeing it since awakening made its rise and it is this; there are two ego’s. I noticed when I felt myself drop off the deep end of the pool of consciousness that there was this tightly focused awareness of self and then there was another form of ego, a kind of “superego” which was just the opposite of its counterpart. This form of ego was more broad, seemed much more mature, and unlike the small ego, which was like a genie in a bottle in its own cramped space, not much bothered this larger ego. It also felt more mature, more emotionally capable, and it could glimpse the larger things without being bowled over. Two egos? But who talks about there being two egos?
Concurrent with this awareness was also the awareness that the powers of the mind, more specifically the brain, were now more obvious to me. I felt the force of awareness of each part of this awakened consciousness in my body: I felt a concrete, linear, rational feeling energy on the right side of my body. I referred to it as “the man.” On the left side of my body I felt something completely different. I felt a presence in the energy in my body that was fluid, nonlinear, holistic, and emotionally intelligent. I began referring to this as “the woman.” It felt like a classic yin-yang situation. I felt this all the time, it was as if a bright light was shown down into my consciousness and into my physiology to highlight a quality I had not paid that much attention to. This was before I even knew what on earth had happened to me. i didn’t know that this was even called kundalini. I worried for a bit that I might have something wrong with me, like a brain tumor or something. Luckily, this concern didn’t last for long, but the awareness of how different everything was at that crossing over period in my life helped to provide clues into the nature of this phenomenon.
In those early days, I was free to simply observe. I noticed that whatever this thing was, it had an automatic quality to it. What I mean is that I was aware that I was caught up in a force that was now moving me along with or without my direct participation. There were concerns of possession, I will admit this was true…but this was also short-lived, thankfully. I was curious, eager to understand what on earth was happening to me. It was as if I had somehow crossed over some line of psychological inertia whereby I now had developed some kind of force in consciousness that was now running on automatic. One of these forces in the eddies and flows of my day to day was how I noticed how these two forces, the “man” and “woman” were beginning to merge together in a kind of union. I didn’t just feel this as a force in consciousness but I could feel it as a force in my body. My left and right side of my body had twin forces running in them that were now beginning to merge in the center line of my body, right along what felt was my spine. When they did this, it was when I wasn’t holding them back. They just did this naturally. It was a new novel effect I had never experienced before. When they merged together I would go into ecstasy. Imagine my surprise. It felt orgasmic and it felt like two forces were making love inside my consciousness.Instead of physical sex, this was a higher order version of what I knew in the physical. It felt extra-dimensional, tied to here and now but took me entirely out of it all at the same time. It was in these states where I felt a new consciousness emerge, it felt like another order of magnitude beyond what I had known. It also shared qualities with states I had known before all of this took place. Inspiration was one of them. As an artist, I had brushed up against this state before, it was the firestone that all artists seek and find it oddly elusive sometimes. Artists “seek” inspiration…..and we do whatever we can to find it, since it is the fuel that helps to bring forth new creations. In my new state I saw how two forces in my body and mind were merging to create a new synthesis, a new mind…..the Metamind. This fueled intense creative output and also personal transformation that was natural and happened automatically while at the same time to the degree that I allowed it to happen.
This Metamind was like turning a cosmic key in a cosmic lock. Each unlocked each other and fueled a new form of awareness. When this happened, I felt like I could also unlock knowing about just about anything. I had a lot of trouble with this notion at first. One side of my mind knew that what was happening was correct and completely on the mark while the other was skeptical. As time wore on, these experiences began to pile up. I took notes hoping to make sense of what was happening to me. Part of it felt impossible, another part said. “not so fast….hold on….watch….just you watch….” Over time, years, in fact, I would find that many of these experiences where I felt like I was reading the “secrets” of the universe had an odd habit of showing up in other writings. If I was trained on something in physics, there were theories that spelled out a large part of what I had seen earlier. How was this even possible?
All through this was the awareness that there was this left and right side in my body and awareness that was involved. I felt two kinds of awareness of self, two ego’s. I knew this was the case only because I felt it in such an obvious way. I began to consider that what I was experiencing was based in my physiology. I considered that these twins were connected to the two brains that we each have, two hemispheres that develop along two different lines to form the processing engine that we call the brain. We think of it as a whole, but there are two joined by a large cluster of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. Was what I was feeling on the right side of my body, this flowing nonlinear form of my consciousness which I called the “woman” commensurate with the left hemisphere? Was this solid, concrete, and rational feeling part on my right side, the “man” the left hemisphere both reflecting themselves in a brighter or more obvious way in my awareness and my physiology? What’s more, when these two merged together, they created what I called back then “the child” and this, I would later discover was what the ancients called cosmic consciousness. My first realization that other people knew and wrote about this state was when I read the gnostic texts of early Christianity. It was an epiphany, a welcomed one, in which I finally realized that yes, there were people who had experienced this and I wasn’t just going around the bend. They spoke of the “left and the right” in a curiously similar way as I had experienced it. They spoke of the place of union within us, the bridal chamber, where the two become one. Somewhere, though, in the centuries that followed, this knowledge was lost, along with the keys to how to unlock it as the power of the tide of Orthodoxy took over the Christian world. That, though, is another story best saved for another time.
Was much of this being fueled by the fact that we have two brains? Was this man and woman the two hemispheres and how differently they develop in order to handle the broad range of possibility that we each have in consciousness? I sensed that this was entirely on the mark and I wondered if there was anyone out there who had done any work in the world of neuroanatomy that might provide clues. I didn’t have to look very far. I found a TED Talk by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor who described how she had a stroke in the left brain one morning while getting ready for work. Having her left hemisphere shut down through hemorrhaging in her brain meant that the right brain was now running the show (mostly). What she experienced was very telling. She came away with the clear sense that she had begun to experience samadhi, which is the bliss that is encountered when we experience cosmic consciousness. She further described how she observed that it was the left brain that was like a linear processor while the right brain was a parallel processor, able to handle vast flows of information all at once. It was her right brain that provided her with the awareness of how everything is connected, a common awareness of nonduality and cosmic consciousness.
I was aware that how we use our brains that the left brain acts as if it is running the show. I saw this as common to all people of the earth, it was just how we have all developed, a tendency that has been in place for a very long time. What happens when you shut down that part of your mind so that your other mind can begin to express itself? Much like how women have been sidelined in our world, there was a microcosm of this happening inside each one of us. Was the left masculine serving to hold back the flood-tide of awareness that we think of as the feminine side of our consciousness? A few years later I remember reading a paper about how scientists had found that the left brain served as a brake against the right brain. Bingo. So the process of enlightenment was in large part an effort to quiet the mind so that the left brain, which deals with language and process based tasks and linear logic, is not as active. And as often happens when we are lucky, the right brain hums to life as its own capacities are felt perhaps for the first time in a meaningful and substantive way.
Is it any wonder, then, that the Hindu describe kundalini as “kundalinishakti”? Is it any wonder that in Hindu iconography this new form of being is illustrated as a man and woman split down the middle? It was all the same thing I had been experiencing, too, with the man and woman, and the birth of a new form of mind which I called the child. The early Christians called it Christ and at least at one time people were learning how to BE Christs. Similarly, there are other cultures that also describe this same phenomenon, all using their own cultural lenses with which to understand it.
In my experience, I kept receiving the admonishment not to read about what I was experiencing. I know this may sound strange at first, but this is just what happened. Except for nibbling around the edges of this topic and wanting very much to understand what had happened to me, there was this still voice within that told me to pay attention, to watch and observe it directly without seeing what others had to say about it. Only after a number of years after I had uncovered these early Christian texts on the subject did the voice within say it was okay to begin researching more widely. This was itself part of my own inner development and was part of a task which was part of a very long story that had to do with other lifetimes (involving how early texts were hidden away from view and from those who might destroy them). But as I began to search more widely, I found that so much of the literature is speaking to this left/right paradigm in fueling cosmic consciousness. For as new as it may seem to many of us, this has been something that has been experienced by many people down through time. Many wrote about it and when you understand the phenomenon well enough yourself, you can pick them out quite easily. Plato created a myth about the separation of the sexes where we once were both male and female, an echo of this primordial awareness of the two-in-one that we each are inside. And perhaps it is because of this twin nature that we each have that we have been so fascinated with the Other, the opposite polarity of our own sex (not for all, but for many of us), keeping us always seeking that other “part” of ourselves with which we are less acquainted with.
I found in my own development that there was a point where the left brained awareness of ego was beginning to become a problem. I had experienced the oft-described “contractions” of consciousness that is tied to the ego-mind. I saw how it was a literal bottle-neck in my awareness, and as time went on, the forces of a larger awareness began to push hard against how centrally installed this “little” ego awareness was in my consciousness. After a period of about two years, I kept coming up against a solid and hard resistance within myself that felt instinctive and hard to work with. What gives? Over time, and during an extended dark night of the soul that lasted about five very intense months, I found that I reached a point where the force of awakening finally disengaged this little ego from its front and center arrangement in my consciousness. This took time and happened through repeated rises of the energy which would come for me, bowling me over each time. I described it was feeling like the energy had become a 600 lb gorilla that would glower in the corner of the room, launching itself onto me until it wrestled me to the ground. Each time, I would resist this force, not even aware why I was even doing so. I was embarrassed; I was about as unsurrendered a person as there could be. Why was I resisting so much? Why couldn’t I just let go? It was what I knew, what I was familiar with. It was how I was raised. It was how everyone who I knew was. This thing, this mad gorilla, was trying to break me and turn me into something else.
Slowly, in steps, each time our gorilla came for me, I slowly softened. Maybe it was only after feeling like I had just been attacked and pinned did I finally cry uncle. But at the end of each of these “attacks” I began to see how the face of this force would completely change to my mind. Instead of being a threat, it became a bubbling and effusive force that would look out through its mysterious eyes and smile at me, still very much lying on top of me, but looking at me now with wonder and joy as I was also feeling the same. So it was in this way that I gave up the small ego. It was done piecemeal. I gradually got the memo and began to welcome the wrestling matches that would take place in silence. Eventually, I no longer even got attacked. It never was an attack. I was just seeing it all the wrong way. Over this time period, I learned that all I needed to do was to allow this new force in awareness to simply be. All of this was like one long tutorial, taught over and over until I learned to let go. And the day came, a very definite moment, when I finally got it. When I did, a curious thing happened; all thoughts ceased and it was like I had punched through a layer of atmosphere that was dense and I was free. I felt for the first time an enduring silence in the mind. With it came a peace and a presence. I had felt both of these things before, in fact I had felt them hundreds, perhaps thousands of times right from the beginning of awakening, but I always did so as a visitor. I could visit those places but my old habituated consciousness would win over in the end, sending me back to where I had been before. Awake, full of energy, intense and alive, but still in an old mode of being all at the same time. This was a process.
What took place once this silence emerged or was given space to exist in a more consistent way, was itself a bit of a challenge. I still had to be in the world and use old modes of focus just to get through my day in a way that would keep me anchored in my physical life. I learned to balance and to use different modes of consciousness like a child would learn to use its body to walk or to learn to talk. I felt like I was learning how to be a new human all over again. I found that I could be very forgetful. I might forget from one moment to the next what I had only moments before been thinking about. While this might not seem strange to you, this was happening all the time to me. I would go through self-checkout at the market and forget that I had just seconds before gotten cash back from the machine. It was left, a twenty dollar bill spit out by the machine, for the next person in line to notice it was there. But at the same time it was this lack of focus that also allowed me access to a field of being that was remarkable and felt like freedom. This process of learning to balance these tow states was itself gradual as I felt my way around things. What I found so hard to believe was how events would conspire to keep me in the flow of things. I had trouble focusing, I would forget about meetings, but they always worked out. Someone would call to cancel because something came up, or something else in my life would put me at just the right place at just the right time. It all looked so accidental and purposeful all at once. It is hard to explain how many times I had blanked on something only to have things work out perfectly. After a while it was hard to see how this was all working just by accident. It felt and looked like there was some force alive in the physical, a kind of conscious thread whose material I was unaware of being there that would look out after me as I floated in a kind of inner space of the numinous, as if time itself had been cancelled and I simply was there….unthinking, unable sometimes to think in the old way sometimes unable to navigate in the old ways that I had before. Someone might call out of the blue asking for an appointment at the studio minutes before I realized, I already had an appointment that was going to happen in minutes. Yes, I began to rely heavily on my calendar on my phone to write it all down to prompt me, but even this was hard to do sometimes because of how quickly I would shift into no-time and no-thought. I know that this all sounds hard to imagine, but it was my world for a good while. And yet everything worked out. I hardly ever wound up in a situation where I was able to completely forget something, not without the poking and prodding from the universe itself. It was like tumbling and falling from a great height only to land always on my feet. No one caught on to just how “out there” I was. Krishnamurti described this as his “declutched” state where he could not access normal thought and often felt lost in this new state of mind. It is a necessary step along the way to reaching a larger synthesis of mind and being where nothing is set aside, discounted or left behind. This is the path to being a fuller being here on earth and we have been wrestling with this for a long time. This relates, I think, to how we can develop these two powers of mid and learn organically how to balance the two, which is itself a process we call embodiment.
All through this, though, was the awareness of the two focuses in my mind, my brain. I had this incredibly large and diffuse awareness of ego that I sensed was from the right brain while there was this incredibly cramped quarters of the ego that was in my left brain. When I entered into that left-brained ego, it was like putting on blinders. I seemed to see everything in such microscopic detail that I completely lost the wave of cosmic mind. On the other hand, when I was so “out there” with my right-brained ego, I was swimming in a vast sea.
I have come to see these two forms of awareness and focus to be just that, two focuses. My job has been to marry them, not toss them out completely. The next stage has been to marry them so that there is no difference between the two. I see them as being like two parts of a cone of being; one side of the cone comes to a point for laser-like focus, and then its expands outward to where its widest point becomes the narrowest point of the other focus or hemisphere, the right brain. From there, this cone expands outward, perhaps to infinity. It doesn’t have the laser focus and relies on that part of the brain to make sense of some of what it is seeing and experiencing. But in the same way, the left brain is completely unable to grasp the larger more broader realm that the right brain seem so adept at. One is a particle, one is a wave. One is masculine, one is feminine. Neither can do much alone, both achieve a new synthesis when brought into harmony with the other.
So all of this talk of the ego being an illusion is to me beside the point. So many who want to say that it isn’t real and for us to just chuck it out. I find all of it hilarious and sad. This is the left brain at work. It sounds pretty impressive, after all, so many teachers have prescribed doing this for ages. But all of them have been men and when I hear those men talk I hear a voice that shows no sign of being all that aware of the bigger picture that the inner “feminine” brings to all of us, regardless of our physical sex. The way that they explain it, describe it, it is all very logic-driven and it also lacks substance in the bigger picture. There is talk of “who is the “I” that is experiencing this?” It is all to me like one big tail-chasing game. The “I” is here for a purpose, use it and understand it better, then perhaps you will see that this is not merely an anomaly. When I see these men speaking about this “I” that is pure illusion, I also find that most of them have not had a single experience with a past life. In fact, the reality of a past life itself would disprove such notions as severely limited because it shows how the “I” persists from lifetime to lifetime and that while we are the universe, we are also given awareness of the “I” in order to allow us to look out with our own perspective and turn of mind on that universe, the all. And why would these need to be contradictory or mutually exclusive? There is the doer and there is the knower. There is the part that is at rest and the part that changes and transforms and works with the stuff of this world in order to work through its own stuff. To me, this talk of no “I” is a clever way of bypassing the work that you are here to do. And who knows, really, perhaps resting on the cosmic sandbar of the belief in no “I” might be a necessary step in people’s evolution before stepping out into the great ocean of consciousness where both I and All are commensurate with one another, a paradox to be embraced, two focuses to be fused into a new Metamind of great wisdom and understanding….compassion, even.
A while back I wrote this piece called, “I Cannot Ride That Neoadvaita Train” in which I linked to a wonderful video of a woman in India who pointed out how useless it is to try and make the kinds of distinctions so many teachers, all male, make about this issue with the “I.” I found it incredibly refreshing and meshing with my experience through all of this. Why toss it out, why not work with it? Please show me a single person who has gotten ride of ego. Name me one. I will wait. “That is because of how pernicious our consciousness is in the production of a false-self!” they explain. But perhaps it is only because we have always had this “I” because it serves a unique purpose here in our development. Is it all that there is? No. It is a part. But we are a whole of parts working as one and yet we are still also those parts. Small ego, big ego, emotional self, mental or intellectual self, the body, the light body, all make up the “koshas” which are aspects of our whole being. All can be seen as parts by the rational mind, but they all work together as a whole. And isn’t every single atom in the universe like this? Each goes to make up larger parts than themselves, creating or adding to what we see as the seemingly infinite physical cosmos where galaxies swirl in the distant reaches of space? And yet, we also know and can sense how all of this is also connected, delicately wedded together in a masterful creation that isn’t just our desire to project upon it or to imagine that it is so, but that it offers up its secrets to reveal how complex and amazing all of creation is in how it is indeed connected and engaged in a cooperative experiment that is our world. And this world is all energy, and all of this is itself a play of how energy recreates a world some call illusion but that my wise inner feminine knows is creation. It is creation because at every point we see these sacred-two at work inside the atom as “matched pairs” as the physicists theorize, as the opposites which are present at every dimensional level of our existence from small to large. This is also at work in your body in your two brains and it also informs your relationships, especially the intimate ones. Why do we accept it as fact in our world but a fallacy in our consciousness? Is consciousness itself not energy, too?
Further, without seeing the usefulness and need for the “I” I insist that it may not even be possible to get to the place where you can supercede your own local awareness to get to that place where you can see all of this for what it is. Yes, there have been great teachers, but they were all human, and while they all climbed great mountains within themselves, they only climbed so far. They seemed to have gone far by normal standards, but there is much more beyond what they might have thought were the highest heights that still remains to be mastered. I am reminded of how the earliest memory tied to my life today was how I came to choose my parents. I wasn’t physical yet. It is perhaps one of the greatest gifts I gave myself, which was the ability to remember this event. I was a point of awareness that had no physical body. I was buoyant and free, floating above the Ponderosa pines that were planted in near rows like a cathedral there in Northern Florida. I saw the two people who would be my parents lying on a blanket on the forest floor. This memory is the most vivid and crisp of any memory that I have to date. It exists, it seems, both in my brain and in my mind, something recalled from the past and from before my body was itself alive. It is one of many proofs that the “I” is no illusion or some kind of mistake in our cognition. It is not some aberration, but is instead a very natural part of consciousness despite what form that consciousness might take. While I was given proofs like this, it seems that the world of others are waiting for the day when this comes into view for them.
This “I” is composed of two ends of a very larger, perhaps infinite spectrum of awareness that we call ego. One is ego and one is superego. It is the same part of ego that teachers have pointed out are the parts of us that continue to exist even when we reach such lofty states as cosmic mind. Taisen Deshimaru the Zen master pointed out that as we touch cosmic mind that there is still a higher order form of “I” that is always there. There is always the awareness of self through all of this, even when swimming in this sea of the All, there is always the self.
Swami Rama who was a man who developed a high level of consciousness has explained that without ego you would be forced to feel and experience everything in your local environment like a giant rush of water. Your senses would be swept away as your nonlocal consciousness would be aware of everything taking place around you from the atoms in the air to your neighbor stubbing their toe. The ego, he explained, serves as an important filter that you need while in the body. His many talks have been preserved on Youtube where you can find them. I found in his talks the awareness of how useless it is to try and rid oneself of ego, but to learn how to work with it differently, in what I consider a more natural and organic way. His life itself is a fascinating one and it is all preserved online if you wish to look.
As I walked up the road at dusk in 2008 on May 17th, I found myself suddenly without that filter, or without much of it in place. In that instant I was aware of every single thing down to the smallest detail from the mist in the field, the leaves on the trees, to the eddies in the water flowing in the creek below. What’s more, I was aware of the atoms in the stones and the life swimming in that creek. It had the effect of unbalancing me, making me feel like the water from a fire hose was flowing through a garden hose. It taught me one thing and initiated another; I needed the ego but I needed a new awareness of what ego can do for us as physical creatures here on earth. Ego was part of it, but it is not the whole story.
Ego can make us feel very small, but it can also show us how to be larger, how to grow, and a better way to be. The way we are now in general as a species reflects mostly the small ego, and this is a problem if you want to know more. There waits for you a new synthesis of mind that is as much about the spin of electrons as it does the duality and unity of the self. It is all-in-one in my experience, and it waits for everyone for when they get to that place. Kundalini is not a goddess, it is a fusion of our polarities. That alone is what lends potency to the experience, for those two poles are each powerless without the other because they are two-in-one. It is the addition of the right brain, that expansive side of us, the feminine goddess side, that seems to activate kundalini. It is only this way because we are only using one side up until that time comes when kundalini activates. yes there seems to be the addition of “her” but it is in her union with her compliment that moves the cosmic force we call kundalini so that our energy body is transformed. We need both sides of the brain to make full sense of this. And yes, it is the feminine aspect in consciousness that is the larger more expansive one, but what she lacks, the more masculine part has. The masculine has made itself small so it can show to the feminine side that which it needs in order to create. She alone cannot do it no matter how hard she tries. Nor can the masculine, either. He might think that he can, but it always winds up dry and lifeless, like those men who talk about ego and about a great may other things that hold people in the hypnosis of the trap of rational thought. You need both. The two walk hand in hand, and the more aware you are of this, the more aware you are of your fuller nature as a being on this earth. Yes, you can leave ego alone and experience something majestic. You can learn to leave it alone so that you are not a slave to it. This is not the same as destroying ego. You remove the dependence upon that part of you that is ego. It can become like one tool in a toolbox, one tool among many. Pull it out when you need to, use it, it can be very useful and even helpful for some things, but a screw driver does not do the job of a wrench. Ego, then, is like the screw driver that is constantly being pulled out of the toolbox each time. You can let it be, you can use a wrench instead. And when you do use the ego, you have two parts to it that correspond to how each of the hemispheres of the brain have developed seemingly separately but are made to work together to help form a new synthesis of mind. Two ego forms can merge and work together peacefully and in context with a larger whole. All ego death is, is losing the reliance on ego. Ego does not go forever away. You must learn to work with it but not be its slave, that is all.
