Awakening, Gnostics & E.T’s

Just before I had my awakening experience I was in the process of resolving some overhanging issues which I mention a little about in my first post.  What I did not mention was a concern I had about some close encounters and dreams I had had about ET’s.  Up until I began to read into the ET literature, I knew next to nothing except for what was in the mainstream media concerning U.F.O’s.  I knew that Project Blue Book had supposedly lain a host of questions to rest.  There was even a television series that aired that chronicled many of the cases that had been researched by the government body tasked with looking into the issue.  As time has rolled by, however, cracks in the facade of the BLue Book era have emerged and what we are learning is that Blue Book was an attempt to make U.F.O.’s much ado about nothing from the government perspective.  Regardless of what we know now, I knew little about it, but had some sightings in my adolescent years that turned out to be the forward edge of what would become known as a U.F.O wave in our region that was so dramatic and so well observed that there was a piece dedicated to it on Unsolved Mysteries.

I will say up front that I do not think that we know the full story on what we consider ET phenomenon.  It has baffled me for years why such consistent experiences have been had and yet not a shred of physical evidence has ever been taken away from an abductee scenario where someone is taken aboard a craft.  I think there are very good reasons for this and I think it is very reasonable to suspect that this is because at least part of the ET phenomenon is simply not happening on our physical plane, but is playing out in what some would call “nonordinary reality” (which really clears things up!)  The sense I have is that the abduction phenomenon is not entirely physical.  We may indeed be visited by very physical beings, but I also feel that we are being visited by beings that are either from another reality or access our reality not physically but through the etheric level of energy or reality.  So much of what I have read since awakening now strikes me as very much etheric, a kind of out of body experience that has a form of assisting form surrounding it that creates the appearance of something very real but is in fact fabricated in the same way a dream is fabricated.  By saying “fabricate” though I am not suggesting that it is not real.  I am perhaps only suggesting that the desk you see or the craft that you see is simply not there physically even though it appears vividly there.  And yes, people do describe having marks and even scars on their bodies after such encounters.  Burn marks are not uncommon.  But having said this, I will also say that not long after me and a sibling saw a rather dramatic aerial display near our home in 1978, this sibling had a burn mark that could not be accounted for.  It was a series of circular marks on the abdomen.  It looked very much like a shower drain pattern.  This burn or irritated mark went away after a few short days.  Now this might all sound strange, and we might point to a possible point of contact, but consider for a moment that when I awoke I developed a burn mark on my right hip that was in the shape of a crescent moon.  The curious thing about this experience was that I had not burned myself.  It simply had not happened.  The burn mark did not hurt, and it did not feel irritated.  I woke up one morning and it was simply there.

Now since writing about this on another blog, I have had another person who has come forward who has had an awakening experience who has also had the same kind of burn mark on her right shoulder.  A perfect crescent moon.  I have also since had a burn mark on my heart chakra that emerged during my awakening.  I have clear photos taken of both marks.  Looking into this, I discovered that during awakening or religious ecstasies, saints have been known to present similar effects but with a slightly different thematic subject matter.  They have marks on their bodies that are the same as what Jesus was said to endure during his crucifixion.  These marks are called stigmata, and what I would suggest to you right here and right now is that this phenomenon is the way in which the body can manifest psychic and spiritual “truth” as a very physical symptom.  Some forms of stigmata are well documented.  People have been known to develop physical holes in the skin that do not fester or become infected.  There is a great deal of suspicion about the people presenting stigmata as having done this to themselves despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary.  I suspect, regardless of the religion involved, we do indeed have the capacity to manifest these kinds of marks.  This might explain why my burn mark did not leave a scar and only faded once I made conscious notice of it.  No burn in my life went away as quickly as this.  It was gone within three days.  Nothing was left to even hint that it had ever been there.  A normal burn of this kind would have left a discoloration at the very least on my skin for a year or two.  I know.  I am a glassblower and I am accustomed to getting burns in my work.  You could say I know their behavior very well, how quickly one type will heal over another.  I can look at a burn and know whether and for about how long it will leave a mark.  What I had should have left a mark for at least six months.

So what I am suggesting is that it is entirely possible that even in the cases where abductees have had burn marks (which are one of the most common marks post abduction) that this is a psychic imprint or expression of some information that is present in awareness but is being expressed in an unusual, but perhaps not uncommon nor as impossible way as we might think.  It may be that for those who are close to awakening or who have more energy flowing through them, that it makes these people more likely to manifest these effects than other people.  The curious thing about most abductees is their tendency to be psychic or intuitive.  This, I feel, also lends some credence to the possibility that what they are experiencing isn’t physical but is psychic information or experiences.  I know that you might think that surely one would know the difference between a dream and waking, but I will offer up this one observation that I have made as a result of my research into out of body states as well as my own experiences in this area, which is that there are people who sometimes take their out of body experiences for being real.  Many times people have projected out of their bodies at night, woke up to go to the bathroom only to find that their hand would go right through the wall.  The television would appear to be on, and some things that were not normally seen would be present.  One man was approached by someone carrying a rifle and was shot in the chest and felt very physical pain and saw what he took to be very real blood coming out of his chest.  For what he took to be about an hour, he ran around yelling his head off until it occurred to him that he had in fact projected earlier and that this was a very real and believable event, but not one that was affecting his physical body in any way.  It was happening at a different layer or vibration of energy.

It is curious, too, that there are accounts in the Nag Hammadi, early Christian texts that were found in the desert of Egypt in 1945, which describes the ET abduction scenario perfectly.  These descriptions of beings called Archons are identical to their modern ET counterparts.  When I first awoke I suspected that there HAD to be something out there that would help to illuminate my experience, and it was in the Nag Hammadi that I found my first pieces of the puzzle.  They were talking about awakening.  They simply used a different vocabulary and had a slightly different knowledge set from the Hindus (who weren’t that far away), but it was all the same stuff.  Somehow, or for some reason, this material was deemed heretical and was shown the burn pile that took place in the wake of the forming of the church under Emperor Constantine.  Many texts were deemed outside of doctrine and were considered heretical.  It may have been why the Nag Hammadi cache was spirited away to Egypt to begin with, so they could lie in the sands of the desert for a time when people might be ready to read them with new eyes.  I also discovered that Gnostic scholar John Lash had gotten on the sent of the Archons and a possible new explanation for at least part of the E.T. mystery.  So back to my early experience and why I had looked into it to try and clear up some overhanging issues….

I was also seeking to clear up an issue concerning a dream I had had about being on board an extra terrestrial craft as a young teen. This was experienced as a dream, and it was also in the wake of some sightings of craft in our area. In the dream,  I was being taken on a tour, I was told, and was with a bunch of other people who all looked like they had been taken out of their living rooms for a sudden look around.  Children, adults, nothing stood out except the striped red and blue shirt on a boy slightly younger than me.  As we were being taken through a door into another part of the craft, I noticed that there was a hole in the floor where there was a giant set if turbines that moved.  I stepped out of line and took a look at this device.  I noticed how it worked and thinking in terms of ordinary jet technology I thought that it could never work.  A being which was standing next to me explained simply that that was not how the device worked.  The key lay in an entirely different method which struck me as exotic technologically.  The dream, though, was incredibly vivid, and after having stepped out of line, I went back into the line as we went into another part of the craft and thus ended any recall that I had about the rest of the dream.

Perhaps because of this dream, which took place on the forward edge of what would become known as a U.F.O. wave so large in our area that it would later be noted on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, that I began to have a lingering curiosity or wondering about what it all meant.  During this same time I had two sightings, one with a sibling of things in our night sky that defied normal explanation, and another several months later with a craft that was so close its outline could be seen against the night sky and looked like it was strung up with Christmas lights.  When I read about UFO sightings where they use “Christmas lights” I smile; I saw the same thing on that night.  In the first encounter or sighting, we watched as two very brilliant balls of light merged in the sky.  Some have offered that this was ball lightening.  The only thing about this explanation is that what we observed was a very slow process that took over half an hour to complete whereby two large brilliant objects very slowly moved across the ridge of the next row of hills until they merged.  The two objects also pulsed in a rhythmic and coordinated way.  That is, they both were pulsing in the same repetitive series many many times over.  One brilliant pulse followed by three smaller pulses, with one much dimmer pulse and a slightly larger pulse, all repeating over and over perfectly for the twenty minute encounter.  The two objects moved slowly across the sky and emitted not total silence but what I can only describe as the sound similar to a rocket without the Doppler effect.  This light was brighter than the full moon.  You could read a newspaper by it.  Once the objects merged and grew brighter, I walked into the house.  My sibling who had remained outside came into the house explaining that soon after I had left that the light went entirely silent and then shot across the sky at a very high rate of speed.

Years after the incident, I would read about close encounters and the very odd world of the people who see things in the night sky.  It quite frankly raised more questions than it answered.  It was a kind of cosmic rabbit hole of sorts that led me to read such books as Communion by Whitley Strieber among others.  Instead of answering questions, it raised others, and they were of the kind that I did not like.  All of this actually made me feel spooked.  I had met a man who had had an encounter where he had details of a device “downloaded” into his mind for possible use later.  His and my notes were curious in how they matched.  I would read about devices that many abductees would feel urged to build that operated on the same set of principles I saw at work in my dream.  The thing that bothered me was that abductees most often learned of their past “missing time” as the result of dreams that were described as being “screen memories” for more involved encounters with nonhuman beings.

I held strong to my sense that I had simply not had any physical encounters, but I was a little freaked out to be honest.  I was freaked out because these encounters were not enjoyable.  People described feeling like they were like lab rats, or were held against their will.  So during this same period of time, I went to an online community to read up on other peoples’ experiences to see if there was anything that could help me to settle this nagging uncertainty once and for all.  Once I mentioned my own experience, I didn’t get curious looks but people who stepped forward and described similar things.  It left me more in the dark for a bit.  What was the nature of all of this? Something was telling me that all of this was within the realm of dream.  I had no memories of being taken.  None of what I had seen was the least bit troubling to me.  As the first pieces of awakening began to trickle in, I began to sense something about a large part of this group of people; they were all experiencing a realm of energetic experience that verged on awakening.  There were instances of time slips, odd anomalies concerning time.  Other had a stronger than usual sense of precognition and intuitive abilities. This was a group of people I sensed were all in some way on the verge of something, and as awakening slowly trickled in, I began to sense this more clearly and began to understand that this phenomenon of the visitors may well be one that is not entirely physical, but which occupies a different class of space or reality.  This would explain why not a single person has had a single physical artifact taken from their many encounters aboard ships.  This could explain why so many of the encounters happen at night (although not always).  this might explain why so many encounters mirrored vivid out of body experiences wherein people were floated out of bed on blue beams of light into what seemed to be ships in the air with beings that seemed to be from another planet or world.  Experiencers, as they are called, often described how they would see ghostly apparitions, or step into future events through unknown means.  Some of the encounters were more like astral projection than anything physical.  Some sported scars or marks made during their abductions.  Some described marks that would appear.  I had a couple of these marks appear on my own body during awakening and it got me to thinking.  Isn’t it just as possible that all of this is powerful psychic phenomenon being translated into very specific terms, i.e. extraterrestrial encounters?  I am not here to somehow seek to downplay any one’s feelings in regards to their own experiences, and I am not one who plays the hysteria card (which is to say I do not think this is all just hysteria).  But my own intuition tells me that many people that were part of this community were on the verge of awakening.  Is it possible that their experience was in some way co opted or interpreted in a way that focused the phenomenon in a given manner much like how a dream can change in relation to how we feel about the imagery that it contains?  When we overcome certain fears, for example, in dream, the images that most often emerge as emblems of that fear, or symbols of those fears often change forever as a result of this emotional and cognitive shift.

There is another reason for my wondering this, but it is one that did not come until I was digging into awakening trying to find some explanation for the phenomenon.  I had not yet hit upon kundalini as the explanation and was instead reading the Gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi when I came across a couple of books that dealt with a curious constellation of phenomenon that were identical to the modern abduction phenomenon.  This phenomenon was being described by Jesus to one of his disciples and it outlined how a certain type of being called an Archon normally appears to humans.  The Archons come in threes.  They appear and strike terror into their human subjects due to their countenance being like a lion (they are actually described as looking like an “aborted fetus”).  Once they strike terror in their subjects, the humans become paralyzed and are unable to move.  It is then that they are “taken by theft.”   These beings, it is explained, try to appear as though they are like gods, but are not.  They utilize a form of synthetic reality that was called “HAL” that seems to create the appearance of events that are not entirely real.  These same beings have tried to interbreed with female humans in creating a hybrid race of the two.  All of this, by the way, is in the Nag Hammadi, particularly the Hypostasis of the Archons and the Apocryphon of John.  If you are the least bit familiar with how the abduction scenario, you know by now that all of these phenomenon are entirely coincident with the Archons of Jesus’ day.  In fact, there is an interesting article written about how all of these phenomenon mesh together by the Gnostic scholar John Lash HERE.

What I have inferred since then is that the experience of the bridal chamber, which is awakening, is itself a powerful protective force that keeps such intrusions at bay. This is the bliss that is felt when one awakens.  Yes, it is sexual and sensual in nature, which is why it is referred to as the bridal chamber. Kundalini is called the “libidinous” force, which includes all centers of the body in a “release” of a vibration of energy that moves all through the body.  It is as though the entire energy field is now swathed in this potent creative and sexual energy.  The challenge is in not taming it as much as learning to lose all shame and ride its wave with shamelesness and innocence (which was precisely what Jesus spoke to in the Nag Hammadi).   It seems that as one awakens, ones susceptibility to beings such as the Archons goes away or fades.  I do note that within a years time of my own awakening, I knew of four other people who were going through awakenings who were visitors to this online community.  All of them I suspect were having phenomenon taking place over years that may have seemed like “visitations” but had all the hallmarks of etheric, rather than physical encounters.  Is it possible that before awakening we might move through a territory where our own growing field of energy is in some way co-opted by others in some way, but that upon awakening serves as a kind of protective field from additional intrusions?  Is it that we are like children with new perceptual powers, but just don’t know how to deal with them, do not know how to break out of the old conceptual barriers and thus remain in a kind of hinterland half way between awake and asleep?  is it possible that these transition points are ideal locations for anything that feeds off human energy?  One person who had been a lifelong abductee said to me about a year before her awakening took place (which was after she told me this) that the ET’s were leaving her, that she was progressing nicely and that they were activating something in her DNA that they described in terms of using light.  They claimed that they had made a change in her DNA using the technology of light, they said, and it meant that they would be leaving her alone.  And they did.  A year after she explained this to me, she described how she suddenly had these odd synchronicities that involved a man she had never met, but knew online.  She wrote of her sense that it was as though they were suddenly on the same wavelength and seemed to begin to communicate without words.  This developed more and resulted in their coming together as a couple.  Her description of all of these symptoms as well as others that were presenting themselves but were flying under the radar at the time (as they were for me), were all awakening symptoms.

I used to be a little freaked out by all of this, to be quite honest. However, over time, it has become clear to me that all of this adheres perfectly to the Law of Attraction.  Whatever we have not resolved in ourselves, persists energetically and like attracts like.  Something begins to happen, though, once awakening reaches a certain level.  I am not of the mind that there is a clear point of awakening, even though there are all points where we all feel the movement that feels serpentine up the spine, I simply do not buy that this is IT.  I exhibited all manner of symptoms directly tied to awakening that presaged the more obvious awakening.  It is why, I insist that our understanding of awakening is not as complete as we would like to think.  We approach awakening in the same way that we spiral through our lives.  Life is not a point A to point B experience but a series of cycles within cycles within still larger cycles.  We exist in eternity wound within the appearance of time.  As such, there is not one point where awakening is, but rather, I suspect, we approach it and certain symptoms occur when the necessary thresholds are met that will incur other phenomenon such as rising of one force or another, or hearing things, feeling flushes of intense heat, tingling on the skin, in the energy centers, vivid dreams, loss of appetite, increase in appetite, change in the production of bodily fluids, hormonal changes, and a long list of other symptoms anyone can read about on a site dealing with the symptoms of kundalini.

My earlier sense was that these folks experiencing all of this unusual phenomenon were all “preawakened,” or in a place where with the right threshold or experience, awakening could dawn quite easily.  It is a sense that you can pick up on quite easily and there are plenty of symptoms to support such an intuition.  But until that time comes, it seems that people are caught in a middle land of sorts.  Lash explains how the Gnostics were themselves involved in awakening kundalini in this quote from his site:

The lion-headed serpent of the Gnostics is called by magical names such as Ophis, Knuphis, and Abrasax. In the occult anatomy of Asian mysticism and Yoga, this reptile is known asKundalini, the serpent power. Gnostics who practiced Kundalini yoga were called Ophites, from the Greek ophis, “snake.” This cult was condemned by early Christians as pagan “snake-worshippers.” To the mundane and uninitiated mind, the Kundalini serpent can only be conceived by crude literalization. To Gnostics, the lion-headed serpent crowned with solar rays was not only the image of the Lord Archon, but also of the source of spiritual power that allows human beings to resist that entity.

Until one comes into full embodiment of the kundalini force, one can be susceptible to forces that may approach such forces in a similar manner.  In my own experience I noted that an entity had been associated with someone I was aware of and had a connection to.  through the awareness brought on by the force of kundalini, super normal vision made it possible to be aware of just what was going on.  All of this defied normal reason, and I often thought I was going crazy, even though I KNEW without a doubt on one side of the equation that everything I was seeing and experiencing inwardly was in fact the case.  What is worthwhile noting was how the being or entity that had been associated with this person was not able to approach me or come close in anyway due to a field of protective energy that I seemed to be endowed with.  Within this energy, there was simply no fear.  Even as the creature attempted to menace me, I was unaffected.  I felt a powerful field of energy propagate outward from my body that gently pushed this being away as I prayed to this being that it needed to learn to create its own energy, to know its place in the universe, and its connection to the Source.  As a result of that experience I learned that while we may have something on our side that aids in creating protective effects, we can also wind up side stepping the necessary inner work that is also necessary to fully embody awakening.  Yes, it is present, yes it has its effects, but like anything, we still remain subject to those aspects of ourselves that remain unhealed and which leave openings to other intrusions into our own inner etheric sheaths, which I suspect is the entry point for these beings.  they do so through those openings where fear resides, or some past hurt or some other trauma that serves to tear our own inner fabric and keep us divided within ourselves.  When we heal these divisions, nothing matching the energy of that division may enter.  Period.

What is hopeful to me is what Lash has dug up about the Gnostics, which include Jesus, in terms of the protective nature of awakening:

Gnostics taught that nous, the spiritual intelligence endowed in humanity, could be blocked by the Archons. This occurs through Archontic intrusion affected by a kind of subliminal invasion at the level of thought and language (i.e., mental syntax). But nous could be reinforced through accessing the power of Kundalini, an ecstatic current that normally rests dormant in the human body. In his monograph on the Archons, I. S. Gilhus notes that “the erotic strategy is the most important means used by the pneumatics to save the lost light.” (p. 51) Pneumatics is the Gnostic terms for humans who pursue the path of psychosomatic illumination, the key method of Gnostic religion. Pneuma, “spiritual force,” is developed by cultvation ofnous, “higher intelligence.” But the Archons present a blind field of resistance to this process: in short, they rely on humans remaining ignorant of their inherent spiritual potential.
When Kundalini is raised from its dormant state, higher intelligence blossoms, and there are other effects as well. Gnostic sects such as the Ophites practiced the communal raising of Kundalini to produce an protective envelope against Archontic intrusion. In effect, they held Kundalini, the sexual-spiritual energy locked in the body structure, to be the main instrument of defense against the Archons. The Dialogue of the Savior, NHC III, 5 (85), contains this exchange:

Judas said, “Behold, The authorities (Archons) dwell above us, so it is they who will rule over us.”

The savior said, “It is you who will rule over them. But only when you rid yourselves of jealousy, and take on the protection of the Light, and enter the nymphion (bridal chamber).”

The savior-teacher is emphatic that we have power over the Archons, but he also makes it clear that some human failings impede the use of our power. The Greek word phthonos may be translated as “jealousy” or “envy.” Gnostics considered envy to be the signature of the Archons, as well as the key human failing that makes us vulnerable to their intrusion. “The protection of the Light” comes through activated Kundalini, often described as a lightning-like tide of electrified light that pours through the body. “Nymphion” is a code word for the ambient cell of psychophysical protection generated by high levels of Kundalini. Sir John Woodruffe, the great transmitter of Hindu Tantric wisdom to the West, directly identified the practice of Kundalini yoga (raising the serpent power through the channels of the spine) with Gnostic rites of “serpent worship.” (Shakti and Shakta, p. 191 ff.) Buddhist scholars such as E. A. Evans-Wentz, J. M. Reynolds, and H. V. Guenther have made similar observations, but Gnostic scholars have not reciprocated because they do not look outside their genre to understand the theory and practice of Gnosis.

We are all on the spiraling path, all each in our own way in our own timing.  We are all approaching our own greater becoming each and every moment, and yet in each moment there lies the potential for it all along, which means that choice is there, rather than some destiny; we move moment by moment by virtue of freewill just as our own soul essence whispers what we surely have known all along but have kept at the periphery of our waking awareness.  What happens today bears on tomorrow, and as we reach those clusters of events that help us to reflect in just the right way and to resolve the old barriers to held us divided (which the Gnostics write about!) then the door is increasingly opened to the channels opening in our awareness that allow us to realize who and what we are in still broader dimension; we awaken.

I don’t have a fascination of these Archonic beings, though.  I have a fascination with what brings us closer to our divine natures, what breaks the bonds of our limitations, and old awareness.  Do we do this through a perfunctory understanding of what awakening is and its protective nature?  No.  I don’t feel that awakening can in any way be brought about as a result of a rational process at all.  Just as emotion is often perceived as irrational, so too does the awakening force transcend our habituated tendency towards resting in our left brains and sparks both hemispheres into action in awakening.  Latent portions of the brain begin to mirror the phenomenon now taking place as it happens.  We would like to think its all JUST energy, but everything I have experienced so far has shown that everything happens together; body and soul are married and thus one is experienced because the other is capable of experiencing it also.  It isn’t that we are JUST spiritual beings, but that we are here wedded to duality for  a PURPOSE which is to bring heaven and earth together.  Married.  Just as we marry soul to body, we marry heaven and earth together.  Father Sky, Mother Earth.  Shakti is often seen as the world of the physical, the manifesting of creation, the great womb of creation.  She is filled to the brim with her consort, the initiating force, and they cycle one into the other in a harmonious circuit of creation that is the very essence of bliss.  This is the bridal chamber, the nymphion as the Gnostics term it.  All of these things are themselves images that seek to put to word and into analogous form what exists in a more primordial manner, a pre-existent state, which just so happens to be where both the “father” and the “mother” exist.  They are not begotten, but are the unbegotten begetters, which is to say they are before form and manifestation, the deities if there ever were any.

My interest in our reaching a place as a race where we can get beyond the veils of our own ignorance to see and know what is.  As the dross is removed, as the force of awakening clears and cleanses, we have the opportunity to live a life unlike anything we may have known previously.  We emerge as if out of dream, an old dream with many nightmares, ones which we began to question. Is this all there is?  Is this as good as it gets?  Is there something I am somehow missing?  How do I resolve this nagging sense of uncertainty about these events in my life?  How is it that I can reach a state of greater peace within?  Do I just accept how things have gone, or is there a better way?  What IS that way?  These are the fateful words of a seeker turning within and setting free the chains that hold her and him to what was illusory.

Perhaps there is something more waiting for you on the other side of all of this.  We will each find it in our own time, in the moment when the choice is made, when the turning of the soul shines brighter than our rational mind and our limiting beliefs do.  I remain hopeful for our clan of humans here.  We ache too much for a better world for it to be anything except that.

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Awakening Symptoms

There are lists of the  symptoms of kundalini awakening, and at first glance, they are bewildering in their breadth, and do little to shed light on the larger phenomenon (at least at first glance).  I say this because they are just so broad a range of symptoms that it might lead some to wonder if this is A thing or many other things.  But I assure you, it is THE thing.  The symptoms are so broad I think because kundalini isn’t like something you catch, like a cold.  With a cold, it’s a fairly focused or specific experience.  You get head, throat, and ear soreness.  You sneeze and cough.  You get itchy eyes and you feel tired.  You might have congestion.  But for the most part, a cold has a series of symptoms that all make sense as a specific THING.  With kundalini, this is involving all aspects of your being, so be ready for a host of symptoms.

Kundalini is like the World Tree of the Maya.  It feeds everything, is everything.  It is the World Hoop of the Lakota, the sacred circles and Dream Time of the Aborigines.  So it spreads it limbs far and wide and does not include one energy, but a host of them, all interlocked, related, merging and unfolding.

While it is easy to point to the event of the rising of kundalini, I think that the approach that I do believe we make towards awakening may well  provide clues to us for something looming on the horizon.  In the Hindu tradition it is claimed that you cannot even awaken kundalini without the proper preparation, which means kundalini yoga and meditation.  Well, there are people all over the planet right now who are awakening spontaneously without having had ANY practice and certainly not even knowing what kundalini yoga even was before this thing hit them.

Even before the series of events that took place that landed me smack dab in the nondual universe that day in August of 2006, something had actually been brewing.  There was a sense of expectancy, as though something was happening, I just could not put my finger on it.  The one big symptom pre-awakening (if I can even call it that) was what I would call “time slips.”  Time  was acting weird.  I thought at the time that maybe we were being bombarded by cosmic rays (imagine my surprise when I read about how the entire solar system is actually heating up as a result of some radiation, perhaps coming in now from the central galaxy “sun” or from increased solar activity—note: Mars’ ice caps are melting and most planets are showing evidence of symptoms that could be attributed to warming up!). Others who were having these same symptoms thought this same way, too.  I don’t know if this was an intuitive sense, or an attempt to fashion a myth around an unknown effect that was beginning to hold people in its sway.  These slips were a sudden change in the perception of time.  Time simply would suddenly seem to go by very quickly.  I remarked once that five minutes ago it was yesterday, an hour ago it was last week, and who knows what tomorrow will bring.  These slips seemed random, but were happening frequently.

After this period of time, I had the definite sense that something was up.  What it was, I just didn’t know.  I didn’t know what I knew.  I was not fully aware of what I was aware of.  Does that make any sense?  Perhaps a new current was already making its way inward, but not enough to spark a deep enough level of awareness to gather my cognitive function into the famous “A-ha!”  moment.  I mention all of this because this MAY constitute one aspect of the awakening experience that is not talked about or even mentioned simply because we become too fixated on the more dramatic effects of the “rising” of kundalini.  For my experience, I had a slew of symptoms that all presaged the rising of kundalini.  For a good while I just wasn’t sure WHAT was going on, and because of how these symptoms presented themselves, it kept me off the scent of it being kundalini.  Sometimes it can be helpful to know what you are dealing with when it comes to things like this.  Many people thought they were going crazy, and I do wonder how many people did go off the deep end who were lacking in the support they may have needed at such a crucial time.  Would having a good support structure make the difference between a hard or easy awakening?  My sense is that if you are engaged, curious, and have a good sense of self, you can make it through all of this quite well without thinking you are going around the bend.  When you awaken you aren’t alone.  With it comes a presence, an intelligence, a kind of silent guide that is ever-present.  However, years of programming that might keep someone from listening to this trusty presence could create a lot of inner turmoil about it.

Some of the most mentioned symptoms of awakening are these:

An awareness of the unity of all things – an different sense of time – increased creativity – powerfully inspired states of mind – increase or decrease in libido – changes in appetite – sleep patterns can change – quality and intensity of dreams can change – a sense of presence near or within ones self – awareness of nonphysical presences – increased empathy – increased psychic abilities – chills or goosebumps on the skin – crawling sensations on the skin – feelings of energy in the form of hot or cold, buzzing, and vibrations – hearing sounds, music and voices – sensations of pressure in the body – sudden and subtle sensations of something (energetic) moving up the body in a serpentine manner – sudden giddiness/laughter – sudden sadness or even depression and despair – light effects; seeing lights when eyes are closed, seeing energy around the body -strong effects of energy in the chakra centers a sense of pressure even to the point of discomfort can take place as chakras open in powerful ways – anxiety brought on by all of these changes – fear of losing ones mind – sense of physical pain often centered in certain regions near the chakras (abdomen, heart/shoulder as well as throat, third eye and head pressure) – the presence of synchronicities in ever-increasing numbers –  a larger sense of awareness, intelligence, which you are now a part of – jerking or sudden movements that may help to relieve the “pressure” of some energy (the Hindu call these “kriyas”)

Okay, so by now you may wonder just what this is all about.  All of these symptoms and others similar to these or analogous to these are all a part of the awakening process.  The thing to understand is that an awakening can be beautiful or it can be horrifying.  It can also be somewhere in-between.  There can be bouts of incredible bliss  and rushes of energy followed by a sense of intense pressure on the psyche or emotions.  This process, its nature, is in truth all up to you.  If you get anxious, then this will color the experience.  If you surrender and go with it, it is much easier. I can remember being on carnival rides where I really didn’t or couldn’t give myself over to enjoying them.  I felt like I was gritting my teeth all through it.  On other rides, however, I felt open and free and had a ball.  So you see, it is very much like this.  So much in this is up to you, and this is all a choice. So for this reason you will notice a broad range of symptoms that are quite frankly all over the place and could make for a sense of confusion over just what this is all about.  Since this is not the common cold with a fairly limited range of symptoms, this is about life.  It is about you.  None of this awakening will leave any part of you untouched.  It will move down into the very cellular structure of your being.  This can be disquieting to some who are used to being in control.  It is just a ride, and we can enjoy it or not enjoy it.

What I can tell you is that the most central effects are less dramatic in nature and more feeling in nature.  Yes, there is energy, and yes it creates bliss and brings on enlightened and “altered” states (I don’t like this word—perhaps “alternate” is better). it feels a bit like riding a very big wave, though, one which might be invisible to everyone around you but is absolutely there.  Learning to ride this way, neither too forward nor too far back (holding on) is key to a positive experience.  The chemical cocktail that gets triggered in the body is pretty significant and I will be writing more about the changes that take place with the body, and learning how to regulate feeling so that the body is an accurate  mirror of what you intend or want is key.  What is termed a spiritual experience is in fact a whole-being effect and what touches on the nonphysical parts of you also touches on the physical body as well.  This is alchemy; a refining of both spirit and body in a crucible of energy whereby the person is brought to a new place or way of being.

But let me be clear; awakening is JUST the beginning.  With rapid change taking place, it is easy to think that you are further along than you are.  The junk that is now being dealt with, the “house cleaning” taking place now is up to you.  You can block progress or you can get out of the way and let the “crew” within to do its work, which it will most certainly do.  Perhaps enlightenment comes in degrees.  When we awaken, it is as though we see the sun rise for the first time.  As we progress, we move ever closer to this sun until we are this sun.  Not a perfect analogy, but it gets you close.  You are able to see and feel all that this sun is on first glimpse, the very moment it peeks out over the edge of the horizon, but there is a difference when you embody this solar body.  Perhaps also awakening can come all at once, but we tend to pull back and try to manage it, telling ourselves that we need to be in control of this thing happening to us.  This energy seeks to remove so much dross it can feel a bit like you are having someone come into your house and begin tossing out all your cherished belongings.  It can take a while to begin to trust that whatever gets tossed was simply keeping you from being aligned with your own authentic divinity.  I hesitate using that word because of the associations that it has, and yet it is the best one I have to use just now, so divinity will have to do.

There are other symptoms certainly, but the ones I have mentioned are the main-line ones.  If you understand how you are positioned spiritually and emotionally prior to awakening  then the symptoms tend to fall into three categories; energy effects (which I would include seeing lights as well as psi ability and tend to happen to everyone), and then negative and positive effect (which are determined by “where” you are before awakening).

Beyond The Light Regiment

Awakening is a universal process.  It is not a religion, it is not a philosophy.  It is both a spiritual and very physical process that takes place within you that will change your life.  For as much as we as humans like to institutionalize things, awakening will cohere to institutionalization only because it is what you are, not a thing like a book or carpet or technique.  It is what you are.  A plant will grow in a church, in a greenhouse, in a synagogue, or in your yard.  This is awakening.  This is just how it is.  If you need to make the plant grow in a monastery, it will, but ask yourself if this plant would do better just being given all that it needs to flourish or if sitting in that monastery will do it justice.

The only problem with what I have just told you is that we have thousands of years’ worth of doing what I just asked you not to do.  We have the tradition of kundalini yoga, kundalini meditation, and pranayam breath work as part of a meditation regimen.  Now, I will say to you that on the one side of this that all of this discipline that has emerged over time has benefits, most certainly, but it also carries with it some pitfalls.  The pitfall is in the need to put ones belief in something.  If you are doing that, you are effectively sealing up the letter of your life in an envelope so that at least for the time being, you wont be tempted to open it again.  Belief means that you put your faith in something, and the power of the group think will tend to keep you there.  Pressures will build to believe a certain way, to not ask questions, to not think in an authentic way.  Those who are able to not take their belief so seriously will tend to do much better.  Be careful of the gods you choose for you will each reinforce each other.

Let me give you an example.  There is this belief that breath is prana, that breath is life.  When doing pranayam (breath control), the emphasis is on how one breathes in and controls breath.  It is well known that you can stop the flow of energy in your body by how you breathe.  Yes!  This is indeed so!  However, this does not mean that breath is itself prana or life force.  If you take what someone tells you about this one example and you do not examine it to make sure that it passes muster, what else are you willing to believe?  You might just believe that the most advanced being in the universe created hell for all those who made mistakes to go to after they are done here.  You not only will believe that, but you will fall for just about anything for the simple fact that you have given up your ability or responsibility for your own thought process.  I know; doing this may put you at great odds with some folk, but let me ask you; what is the advantage to you of staying in their good graces when you have to take on such vast blinders as this?

Pranayama is effective, yes, but it is not because your physical breath IS prana.  No.  The ACT of your physical body breathing stimulates your etheric or light body to relax and take in more energy naturally.  When you stop breathing, you slow the flow of life force in your body.  Consider this to be a coincident effect, but do not consider that air particles ARE prana.  Prana is itself a vibration of energy.  And yes, prana DOES make up everything (this is what I have observed through my OWN experience, not through teachings), but prana has changed its vibration so that it becomes a different phenomenon.  Your own physical senses and physical body are keyed to a range of vibration which is physical.

When prana transforms into physical particles, it is not experienced As prana.  It is now being read as, say, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.  Your body uses these gasses in the process of breathing and it nourishes the very physical tissues for what this density of experience needs for its sustenance.  You can say all day that air is prana, and in a sense you would be right, but try breathing prana energy into your body only and see how long this works for your very hungry physical tissues.  Yes, there have been yogis in the past who were buried for long periods with no air and lived.  Theirs is the stuff of legend.  Perhaps they had a way to transform prana into air.  Or perhaps they learned to slow their metabolic state down. Whatever they were doing, I don’t know that the average person would be able to do this.  So regardless, back to air and prana…..when I am able to move prana through my body without breathing, I know there is something wrong with this notion that breath IS prana.  Clearly, it is not.  Understanding the underlying principle for WHY you move prana through physical breath is the important factor.  If you do not make the connection, then for you you only see to the level where breath SEEMS to be the same as prana.  As a result of this one small and seemingly inconsequential thing, you will likely missidentify a whole raft of other issues that some people do in fact make about the nature of prana or etheric energy.

So the result in all of this is that if you free yourself from this notion of prana only moving with breath, you are also free to reach deep down into your being and discover the very source of this prana in you.  You will also, perhaps as I did, discover how my FEELINGS had the final say so on how prana moves.  Once I discovered this, I realized that it was my energy body that was shutting down to life itself.  How many times a day have I done this contraction to life?  How can I remain open and flowing to prana?  How can I keep my very essence in a state of “Yes!” instead of pulling back out of fear or some other thing?  If we create our reality, fear is a huge issue to get over.  We know, for example, that going into the fetal position is a natural posture for protecting the body.  We also know, for example too, that when we are in ecstasy, our bodies do just the opposite; our arms go by our sides, or spread out away from the body, we arc our torso upward, as the heart center, the core of our divine center, is offered up in a posture that is the epitome of surrender and vulnerability.  Oddly enough, it is only when we reach this same inner posture within that we open up to the great mystery of ourselves.  So it is the same with prana.  If you can learn to control prana without breath, you will not be dependent on that method to work for you.  Yes, physical breath is coincident with prana in the etheric body, yes, and use it if it helps you, but there are other more fundamental ways of moving energy and these ways will show you to the very essence of what you are and how you are made.

I know that this all sounds terribly pedantic, but it is in truth my seeking to cut a clear swath through a tangled forest of misconception.  Someone needs to do this I think if we are to get down to the very simple issue of what we are and how we are made.  If we do not, we will mythologize so much of our experience and make the wrong associations with phenomenon.  It is like saying that fire trucks are responsible for fires because they are always where fires are happening.  We all know how silly that notion is, and yet, unless we understand the underlying issues happening, we as humans will tend to create these myths simply because they make sense and appeal to our sense of the dramatic or even magical.

Okay.  I might be a little off topic to you, but here I am, bringing the cattle drive around full circle:  if you let someone else to do the thinking for you, you will not be reflecting and using your own powers of discernment.   As such, you will give your power over to someone or to something that may or may not serve you in your highest.  The legacy we have as people is that we have given too much power to others over the centuries.  No one took it from us, we ceded it willingly.  And yet, for as convenient as it is to have a priest or priestess standing before us to give us a sermon for our consideration, why don’t we do this for ourselves?  We then wind up looking to this person and we wonder why we live the lives we do.  Thing is, your priestess might like to tell stories about going to the beach or riding in a boat, but what you really need to hear about is the power fire has in purifying the soul.  Where are you ever going to get to hear something like that from someone who likes water stories?

Your own soul knows what you need.  It is infinite.  And you have been holding it back like the Dutch Boy with his finger in the dyke, never realizing that if you let go, it would all just flow around you, sweep away all your carefully made things and take you to a place entirely different.  But better.  There is an intelligence that has perhaps escaped you that lives quietly in your very cells and it has the capacity to work wonders for you, and it will happen so effortlessly you might think it was an accident the first few times it works for you.  After a while, though, you might begin to realize as I have that this intelligence works wonders.  It is what I call the genie in the bottle.  It has been corked up inside of you in such a way that you didn’t even realize it existed.  Time to let it out.  Time to make that step into the next.  Beyond the earthly regimentation of what people call light.  The pure light is only discovered in a one-to-one experience within, so listening to yourself is just that important.

We are kind of afraid to step out on our own.

We have to step out on our own if we are ever going to trust ourselves, our own thoughts, our own feelings, our own ideas.  Trust them.  But realize, too, that some of them may be like weeds growing in the garden of your soul that will need to be plucked out.  Again, if you trust your own discernment, something deep inside of you will give you a simple dowsing rod-like ability for knowing what is useful and what is not.  And if you do not get that type of deep intuitive sense, then all you have to do is look at the places where you have the most trouble in your life.  Why is that?  Are you at odds with yourself or others?  If someone is projecting something on to you, even then there is something about you that makes them more susceptible to doing this than with another person.

The guru is within you.  It takes some leaps of cognition in order to realize that this is so and to tap this deep resource.  it is not tapped through ego or normal intellect.  Within the very strands of energy moving through you right now, its voice lies latent but alive.  Somewhere along the line we shut that channel off.  We have become so numb to ourselves that we cannot hear this quiet voice within.  It IS there.  It is in the garden of the soul.  Most of us are used to the closet of our subconscious, which is full of skeletons.  To get to the garden, you go through this closet, clear it out, and realize it never was a closet but the portal to this other part of who you are.  No longer is the subconscious sub anything.  You are effectively knitting together two realms of being and awareness into your day to day.  The effects?

Your intuition will grow stronger.  You will feel more connected.  You will also feel more connected to your authentic wants and see old desires as part of some older way of being that always had a way of getting you hung up.  I once knew someone who had a father who was abusive to her emotionally as a child.  She grew up always attracted to a certain kind of man who always had the uncanny tendency to treat her in a callous fashion.  It was her father all over gain, just in a different person.  She wondered why she had radar for these people.  it was because she had not resolved her feelings about what had happened in the past.  Until she resolved it, she was destined to repeat it even when she said consciously that she was done with it.  See, you can be done with bad behavior in others and tell yourself you do not want to be around that kind of thing, but if there is some hidden part of you that is somehow NOT done with it, it will persist.  To get down at this is what Philip in his gospel had to say about plucking out these weeds in our selves (this gospel is in the Nag Hammadi cache of scrolls discovered in 1945 so many people still don’t know much about it).  Until we do that, the issue continues and we are just trimming our weeds instead of plucking them out of our being.  This is not for the faint of heart, but is itself a transformative process that takes an initial level of courage, but leads to a much better life.  As you do this, your life will change into the thing that you had perhaps always wanted all along.

So listening to yourself has its benefits.  Someone who is caught up in the same karmic struggles as you who is not ready for change will not encourage you to do something different no matter how they might say so up front.  I know.  I had a partner who knew how my problems hung me up in life and said often that I needed to get a handle on my stuff.  When it came time to do that, however, it was as though some inner world was suddenly coming apart for my partner because i was letting go of the karmic threads which we held in common.  Instead of nice taut strands holding the rigging of a mast and sail on some boat, these ropes were now slack and lying all about the deck.  I was no longer concerned about keeping these ropes or threads in their near-constant state of suspension, and this resulted in a period of time when there was a lot of very chaotic behavior on the part of my partner.  In fact, I was able to observe that every single time I released some energetic strand, she responded with an outburst of anger or frustration within 12-24 hours.  I counted up to nine times where this happened over a three month period and stopped counting after that.  It was simply too coincidental to not have been connected.

But wait.  Strands?  What strands?  What on earth am I talking about?  Welcome to the world of energy.  It is all around you, and if you awaken, you will begin to feel it much more clearly as you release your old focus in the world and take on a more inclusive one.  Part of this will be becoming much more aware of energy both in yourself and in others.  It is well known that awakening brings on abilities, what the Hindus call siddhis.  It is a natural byproduct of becoming more sensitive upon awakening.  I mentioned in my first  post how I began to feel the world from the inside out.  Well I did.  I do.  I no longer related to the world of mere appearances but also based on the things inside.  Someone can be telling me one thing and I will sometimes feel another.  I will know, then, that there is a mismatch between what the person says and what they feel deeper down.  We are all like this.  We tell ourselves that we like peace and prosperity even as we lead chaotic and emotionally raw lives.  This is what I mean.  When we can begin to align with what we really are and get really honest with ourselves, there will always be this mismatch, you see.  So these strands are merely energy.  This energy has a vibration based on how this strand is maintained and focused upon.

We actually co-create moment by moment with the prana or life force flowing through us with all of the issues that lie latent within us.  Prana is in a way like clay or water.  It will take whatever form you give it through your belief, feelings and intention.  That means that prana can flow AS it is or as YOU are.  If you are flowing only as you are, you probably wont learn the great lesson that this highly evolved consciousness can offer you.  Yes.  I just said “highly evolved consciousness” and I mean it.  Never considered this to be so?  Read on, because there are even more surprises as we go down this cosmic rabbit hole!  So this energy comes into you and YOU choose what to do with it.  This is why, if you JUST let it flow in you, it can SHOW you HOW to be.

Yes, it will mean changing how you react and respond to the things that you have become habituated to.  It will have effects on your personality, on your sexuality, on your body, and on your belief set.  Much of the material that prana will dredge up  has been shoved down so deep that its now subconscious, and this seems to me through my own observation, to be the key action of awakening, kundalini, or high levels of prana present in your being.  It is so deep in fact that we may only deal with it in dreaming only while feeling unable to get our arms around what problems it presents to us in our day to day lives.  Philip goes on to say that until we do this, it masters us.  We are prisoners and it is our master.  Wise words.  Whatever is unresolved in us gets shaped the same way over and over, and the prana can only be shaped as we believe it must be shaped in us and thus experienced.  But there is more, way way more.

So these strands of karmic material are very real and present a kind of tension that is not flowing but tight.  When you let go of a karmic thread, you will literally feel a sense of relief.  It is like holding on to something heavy for so long that you forgot you were even holding on to it.  But when it goes, it is like you have this epiphany moment.  Sweet release!  Now imagine an engine of change inside of you whose job seems to help you release these threads on a weekly, sometimes daily basis!  After a while, you get used to this act of release.  These energetic releases also change your own inner landscape so that the energy you put out is different.  Now what you are, I have said, will serve as an attractant to people and events in your life.  When you change these threads, you will also change the events and people in your life.  It is just how things work.  But since this force of awakening is bringing you to what you are deeper down, you never let go of things that are not in your highest.  Life does change, and yes this can be hard when you are up close to it, but once you experience this effect enough times, you tend to realize that none of this change is bad for you.  This is the power that your own karmic threads has.  I know for some it will sound like magical thinking, but again, allow yourself to observe the effects for yourself.  the smaller the thread, the smaller the shift.  The bigger the thread, the bigger the shift.  And events will change on a dime the moment you release these threads.  It is how energy and reality work.

To do all of this requires that you look within for the answers.  Sometimes the answers will come through “innocent agents” as I think of them.  You might be thinking about the nature of grace and how this might help you in the next step in your development only to find that people are offering you books on grace, or someone mentions something they saw the day before, all without having heard peep from you about this grace business.  Life is conspiring to help you.  And you are creating this.  Accept the gifts as they come, consider how they might help you without making them into the end-all be-all.  Yes, these events will seem entirely miraculous, but you are creating this attractant in your life.  If you make it into God speaking, it might be that this God is terribly inflexible and also too absolute a form to allow you to consider the broader implications of just such a message from the universe.  If you identify too much with it, you lose sight of the benefit that it can offer you.  Yes, it feels miraculous.  Let it BE miraculous, but let it just be that and nothing more.  Let it lift you, but don’t let it chain you to one way of being only.  You are infinite, so keep things flowing within because the moment you create such stiff conceptual borders, you pen this universal energy in and keep it from going where it needs to go.

This is why thinking for yourself is so important.  How many people lived unrewarding lives simply because the church said that getting divorced was a sin?  or how many people stayed in the closet because someone said their orientation sexually was a sin?  Or what about having a liberal viewpoint was somehow bad, or a conservative one?  The divine has its own directive and when you throw off the shackles of this world you will be able to begin glimpsing it. This doesn’t mean that you become immoral or hard or uncaring or unaware of the plight of others.  On the contrary, you begin more and more to live the life embodies in the term Namaste, which is that the light that is in me sees and salutes the light within you. As you begin to hear this lilting music of the soul, it means you listen more intently in the moment for its presence all around you.  It has been muffled for years as you went about in the clamor and noise of your life.  Now, perhaps for the first time in a long time, you are hungry to know what this presence has to say.

It is interesting because the “voice” of this music is the same voice that is coming from within you.  So given this, why would you put all your chips on any one horse save for the one ready to bolt free within you?

In this long winded way, I have come to explain to you where I am coming from.  It may not be what you expect in learning about awakening, but then, there are plenty of people who like being an authority and will seek that mantle.  YOU are the authority.  When you come at it from this perspective, you can then begin to glimpse more clearly what the divine is.  The Oracle of Delphi was once asked how we could know the gods.  The Oracle replied “Man, know thyself!”  The world is itself a projection of consciousness, at least this is what the ancients have said, and I certainly have to agree based on my own experience (the quantum mechanical view has also suggested this in recent times as well).  If this is so, and if YOU have consciousness, then the pathway to understanding what this consciousness is, is resting within you.  The clearer you become, the clearer the lens through which you are viewing this consciousness is.

Awakening Begins

I have been a seeker for a very long time.  From age nine I began to develop an in-my-bones sense that there was something that I wasn’t being told, that there was a great secret that was hidden from me.  Consciously I didn’t know what this secret was, but some part of me obviously knew.  It felt like an instinct that was coming alive in me, drawn forward by something so deep within me that it would not let me alone.  I had the sense that whatever this thing was, it wasn’t in the mainstream and probably lay at the borders of what we considered real.  As a result, I began my search by reading up on divination and astrology, seeking for something that might suggest some hitherto unseen or realized pattern in the chaos.  So much of what I came across was drenched in a magical sense of how we can go about life, and while I think this is a valid perspective to have, it struck me as having the same adherence to dogma as any mainline religion or philosophy might have.  I developed a honing instinct for all things non-dogmatic. Bells went off in the mid 70’s when I came across Raymond Moody Jr.’s book Life After Life, a work that described for the first time the experiences that people have when they experience clinical death.  While many accounts were draped in religious themes, many weren’t, and there seemed to be a broad range of experiences involved that sometimes mirrored traditional religious thinking or belief, but then again, there were just as many that didn’t cohere to this kind of belief.  For the first time I felt as though someone was honing in on something important. There was another world, I knew this, and I was seeking to find it.

But let’s step back for just a second to a time when I was three and four years of age.  This might help to explain a few things.  I had as a young child a series of experiences that involved what can be understood as an altered state of awareness.  The hallmark of these states is a sudden sense of reverie, dissociation from ones surroundings, and very often a form of paralysis that takes over the body.  During these episodes, I would feel myself grow incredibly large somehow while also being aware that my body was incredibly dense, lead-like, even.  This is the state most often associated with altered states of consciousness and with out of body experiences.  This is the hallmark of a fundamental shifting of awareness or focus from a strictly physical one to another that serves to highlight the differences between the etheric or light body and the physical one.  Perhaps you are familiar with this very state.  You may have felt it when you have gone to bed some nights as you fall into a deep state of relaxation, or while meditating. During these episodes that seemed to simply “come on” while I was alone at play, I would find myself transported to  a different place that always looked the same. The scene looked for all intents and purposes like standing in front of a giant cliff face.  When I was a preteen and visited Dover England I stood before the great chalk cliffs and thought how similar this cliff was to what I had experienced to many years ago.  The cliff itself I knew to be physical reality, and that this cliff acted as a type of veil between the worlds.  It felt incredibly dense to me and I could feel how my body and this cliff were made up of the same vibration of energy.  Over the top of this cliff I would see what looked a lot like downy orbs like dandelion fluff that would lazily drift down over this cliff and down into physical reality.  These forms looked a little like umbrellas or parachutes that were carrying the souls of soon-to-be newly born people into our world.  The experience had no sense of story or resolution, only a matter of fact view into the comings and goings of those about to enter our world as a new life.  I never saw anything more than this, and while I would find myself standing before this giant wall, the view was always the same.  I suspect that there was something about the propensity I had for falling into these deep states of altered consciousness as a child and my own later seeking that were linked.  When I read the work of Moody, bells went off and I knew I was on to something.

My journey led to a  solitary seeking.  For as much as I was interested in the traditions of the world, something in me urged that this would not be the way for me.  Instead, I sought out sources that were as free from dogma as possible.  By the age of thirteen, I was introduced to the work of Jane Roberts who was a trance medium for the personality known as Seth.  these books were thick and hard to get through, but it offered up fodder for my own inner reflecting that did not require me to believe any of it, and there were large tracks of the books that I simply had trouble buying into.  What kept me curious about her work, though, was an odd proclivity that I had for aniticipating the material before I would read it.  Prior to reading in the first book, Seth Speaks, I had an uncanny tendency to think about the very concepts or ideas that would later be put forth the following weeks or months in my first reading of this book.  I figured that if I was already considering these ideas, then perhaps it led to their being valid and worth considering.  That, or I was merely shifting forward in time in order to anticipate what I would be reading next, which was not entirely out of the question since I had had fairly regular dreams that wound up being precognitive all through my younger years.  I spent years reading over the Seth material simply because it was so free from dogma and belief.  Hard material to wade through, but it gave me my first grounding in a broader view of reality.

For years, the theme of this other world would be front and center in my awareness.  I felt that the afterlife as we called it represented a broader range of experience that was marked by our fear of it on the one hand and our ignorance of it on the other.  I sensed that in our western culture we didn’t have the means that would help us to deal with this other world very well.  This other world was to be ignored and staved off at all costs since to pass over into it meant that you had died.  I felt that if we could learn more about this other world, we could also help to dissolve our fear about death and live lives that were more unified, fearless and more fulfilling.  Other cultures did a much better job at preparing their people for this transition as evidenced in such books as the Tibetan and Egyptian Book of the Dead.  While different from one another, they both dealt with the issue of the afterlife in a direct and matter of fact way.  This information had been garnered by people who had perhaps done just as I had done as a child; they had out of body experiences or altered states that allowed them a broader view out into the world and beyond the veil of death.  Granted, as a child I was not looking past the tall cliff that represented the veil between worlds, but it would only be a matter of time before I would be making forays into the world beyond life here as I grew and developed.  As I grew into adulthood, I began to have an ongoing series of dreams where I was helping people move from their old physical life and bodies into the next world, into what we call the spirit world.  In one case I spoke to a man who lay in his bed on the upper floor of a white wood framed house.  He said he was afraid to die, and I gently explained that there was nothing to be afraid of, that death was itself a giant surge of energy and nothing more.  IN another case, I flew through the yard of one woman with her in tow as her brilliantly flowered m00-moo fluttered in the breeze as her eyes were as wide as pie plates on our way to her next destination.  IN another case, I was helping move an entire family who had died together in an accident get settled into what looked for all intents and purposes, like a normal earthly home.  the clue was how the light that streamed in the windows had this marvelous golden hue that contained within it the glory of this world.  I would learn years later that other people had reported having the same experiences, that it seems that some people become like spiritual couriers of a sort for souls making the transition between one world and the next.  the idea that we are accompanied by angels or other beings may well be part of a memory of the actual experience or the last words of the dying to those who remain in the physical; “they are coming for me, and I feel at peace….I am not afraid…..”  Perhaps its just not as institutionalized as we might think, and that we each exist in a multidimensional way as beings here, first seemingly very limited in knowing and yet also involved in many other experiences and types of work that lie comfortably behind the wall of sleep and memory.  Perhaps the veil between the worlds is a veil that exists more within ourselves and our own perception than anything else.  Perhaps we could begin to dismantle those veils, realizing that no one put them there to keep us marooned on this planet and life, but that we ourselves created all of this for ourselves and that now, we can choose to create something else.  I think that when we think some outside authority did this to us that we give up the power that is our own and also the responsibility that is ours for embracing all that we can be.  I know this cuts across the grain of many institutions of thought, but its quite possible that we have been getting it wrong from the very beginning.  We can write what we want to write.  I am audacious enough to try!

It seemed to me that this represented an important aspect of our lives, that we had perhaps wrongfully identified this other world in terms of a barrier of fear that kept us from inching near it.  Those who were fascinated with death and the world beyond were often labelled kooks or weirdos.  For me, it simply seemed to be a case of misunderstanding, of missidentifying what may in truth lie on this other side.  While any suspected it was the realm of heaven for the fundamentalists, and a way station for the reincarnationalists, I considered that it could be an opening to an entire universe that simply was not physical, a higher vibration of energy that we here just cannot or do not see with our gross physical senses but may in fact have senses within our light bodies that could and do.  My fascination with this other world was of the same order that an adventurer might have when taking off in a boat to see if the world indeed simply drops off at a certain point.  I believe that our development as species have been marked by this very process of conceptualizing the world around us as we are instead of how it really is.  What exists as a mirror of reality is more our own confabulation than reality. The world was flat.  The earth was the center of the universe.  The stars moved the way that a clock movement moved and probably was wound by the hand of  God. Further, if we didn’t understand how or why something happened, we just said “it is the will of God” and that had, in the past, served to lay the issue to rest.  There seemed to me to be a gulf of understanding between the world of a deity like God and the world of the physical.  This gulf, I sensed, was merely our own ignorance.  If we ever were to find the hand of any god in things, we would need to better understand how what that god created worked.  That was how I saw things.  I may not have KNOWN the answers, but something itched and moved in me for years that drove me forward.  I grew up kind of unusual in my perspective in relation to my contemporaries.  I knew that if time was linear there was no way that I was able to have the dreams that I had over the years that accurately detailed deaths and births in my community.  Not just basic details, but very specific details such as the fact that there would be twins at birth, twins that would be blonde-haired in one case, an outcome that seemed completely unlikely given that both parents were dark-haired.  And yet, these details all were born out time and again.  I would go on to dream about Chernobyl, Waco, and major earthquakes weeks and months before they would happen.  I decided that if I could see all of this ahead of time with such accuracy and detail, there was way more at work with physical reality then meets the eye.  I stood face to face with the conclusion that events do indeed exist prior to their coming into actualization.  I knew that either I was creating the events remotely or I was looking ahead at something I was told simply didn’t exist.  Obviously, something DID exist, and if we were wrong about our notions of time, what else were we misguided or ignorant about?  It became quite reasonable to assume that the world of the spirits was a teeming realm of infinite scope that went entirely beyond anything we could believe or conceive.  I considered it was probably more like how it would be to visit a new world, another planet, or to make some other similar discovery.  It would simply be an extension of what we already know here in physical reality.  When you consider these things in this way perhaps you can see the mind-set that I had growing up.  I grew up not believing in the statusqou stuff.  There was something MORE.

So now we go to the summer of 2006.  It was at this time that I felt like there were a few overhanging issues from my earlier life that I had not managed to reach some sense of resolution about and felt the growing need to put them to rest if I could.  I think that as I look back on it, this was perhaps my last bid for awakening before I slipped deeper into a kind of slumber spiritually.  I had for years felt like I was in a kind of stale-mate concerning some experiences I had had concerning an experience with a past life when I was 18 and some sighting of UFO’s and some subsequent dreams I had that made me wonder if they were JUST dreams.  I had read some books on the modern abduction phenomenon and my experiences seemed to close a fit to what the literature was seeming to suggest, which is that contact with these beings was often initiated through dream or that dreams simply masked encounters with them.  This possibility freaked me out to be quite honest.  It also freaked me out that I described the same device that countless others had described as being aboard alien craft.  All of this predated any reading whatsoever into the world of UFO and alien abduction.  What freaked me out was the tenor of the experiences others had had.  While my dreams were not scary in the least, there were people who had found that mild-mannered dreams seemed to serve to mask a deeper level of involvement that was not exactly a fun adventure into the world of beings from beyond our own world.  These were the two things that were standing out before me and I decided I needed to find some way to resolve them if possible.

The details of this is recounted in my book Waking The Infinite, and while it may be an interesting side story, it does not get to the meat of the issue, which was awakening.

As a result of my seeking resolution into these issues, I found that I got it, but not in any way that I could have anticipated.  The result after having spoken to someone about the past life memory was that I felt as though a great weight had been lifted off of me.  I simply didn’t realize just how this had been holding me back all those years.  The issue concerned an experience of a past life that was more like a warping into time than merely replaying some past event.  It was a powerfully vivid event in my life that put me on a different course spiritually.  It resulted in more questions than it answered.  I wound up some fifteen years later feeling tied up inside of myself.  I felt frustrated, even angry at the universe for having sent me this cosmic curve ball.  the memory was of a vision in which as a native American man, I had gone up into the mountains to pray for my people.  What I had been shown some 130 prior to my life now were the details of my life today and the condition of the world and that I would play a part in those future events.  All of this was wrapped up in the sacred vision space of the culture in which it had occurred, and I was often left at odd ends for knowing how to understand how all of this fit into my life NOW.  It was with great surprise that I found myself no longer burdened by this issue anymore in a talk that I had with an elder of the Oglala Lakota named Sydney Has No Horses.  Sydney is himself the grandson of a well known medicine man Frank Fools Crow and a book was written about his grandfather which I had read some years previously.  The result was that a deep division had melted away and I was left feeling like I was walking on clouds.

Two days after having spoken to Sydney I was working at a local festival with a booth selling my blown glass when I felt it come.  I was standing alone in the backyard of a winery where all of this took place.  I turned and felt as if I was hearing some long forgotten song filtering through the air.  It was in fact a sense of presence, like a spirit on the wind, a presence that was everywhere all at once and was speaking to me.  It seemed so familiar to me, and yet as I searched my memory, I could not find a single instance where I  had encountered this very singular and very specific feeling or phenomenon.  Within the presence I felt a sense of intelligence and this intelligence was telling me in a way that I  belonged to a family of consciousness, to something much bigger than I had up to that moment knew about or had experienced.  I felt as if I had been transported to the world of childhood as so much simply dropped away and wonder took its place.  I felt lighter, joyful and expansive.  I “listened” to this “song” as it lilted on the air all around me, caressing my senses and lifting up my soul.  I was moved to tears and wondered what on earth was happening to me.  I had the distinct impression that something entirely new and different was taking place then I had ever experienced before.  the only ting that touched on this feeling were those instances when I found myself in that altered state of awareness where I would find myself curiously present and also “elsewhere.”  It really felt like some part of me was aware that I was everywhere.  A tunnel of light opened and my life would never be the same after that.

The sense of lightness persisted for three days.  On the night of the third day as I lay in bed at night I observed four differently colored lights coalescing in my inner vision as they lined up within my center vision.  Like birds on a wire, they rested all in line next to each other.  Then, without warning, they each shot off in entirely different directions.  After that, I felt as if something had left, as though something was now gone.  I was left feeling alone somehow, and wondered what I had done wrong.

Over the course of the next six months I would find myself in very different waters.  I began to hear all kinds of sounds at night.  I saw lights projected on the walls, and my dreams took on a sudden vividness and intensity that was noticeable.  My dream world seemed to have become a place where I was reviewing my life in total, dreams that would take the entire night to complete.  Instead of a series of oddly associated scenes, it was more as though I was being shown the entire content of my life and how I related to things, to people, to my work, to all of it.  These dreams were what I would call my “Christmas Carol” dreams.  Just like in the story A Christmas Carol, I would start the dream reviewing my life and wake up drenched in sweat after a marathon review of my entire life.  There were times when I would suddenly feel as though I was looking out across a vast expanse in waking and not know what to make of it.  In one case, I felt as though I was being melted.  I teared up and then became aware of the presence of two people in my inner vision who were excitedly speaking to one another.  I sensed that this was the spirit of my father and his mother who had died years previously.  I found myself relating to people and nature in ways I had not related before.  While working one day I was seized with the absolute certainty that nature was itself sentient and alive and that plant life itself felt the same yearning that we do. Our ignorance and arrogance has led us to assume based on what we think we know that feeling can only come about by way of a nervous system…. When I sat down to write this all out, I found that material poured out of me so fast that my hands could barely keep up.  In three or four minutes I typed a multipage document that detailed this inner life of plants and how sexuality in plants was a conveyor of spirit, that life force itself was full of awareness, that all of nature was shimmering with this silent inner life that we never see or appreciate.  The same evening after having written this piece I wound up picking up a magazine in a local convenience store that had an article on seeds and plants. It felt like the universe was trying to tell me something.  This would be the first of a whole string of odd synchronicities that would begin to populate my life as I brushed against the power of  awakening in those first few months.

For some people, awakening is itself a sudden and even violent event.  There is a sense that there is an energy that pushed up in whip-like fashion up the spine.  Some people feel as though they have been struck by lightning.  Some wake up slow, some fast.  For Buddha, it dawned on him as he sat beneath a tree.  He had not been involved in anything except meditation.  I woke up slow.  My awakening was like putting together a puzzle that I didn’t even realize was a puzzle to begin with.  I had the sense that something was happening, I just didn’t know what it was.  The phenomena that was associated with my awakening was too dispersed for me to make any causal connection to hearing voices one week and feeling presences the next.  All of this was like one puzzle piece after another being placed on a table.  At first, I didn’t even know all of this was even related.  It wasn’t until early in February of 2007 that I felt something that was like water pushing through something that resisted it as it travelled up my torso.  This did not leave me feeling like I had been struck by lightning, and I was not left feeling afraid.  In fact, it helped to solidify the previous phenomenon as something that was related to this now constant sensation of bliss and energy that was now alive in my body.  The world had come alive in me and I spent my days living with a great and wonderful secret.

Before this happened I had become aware of a tingling sensation that would start up one leg and would move all across my body.  It was the most curious feeling since it had a mind of its own.  I would often work through the day and feel it spread over my head, then down my back, then move around my abdomen, down my legs and up over my arms.  It was a sweeping feeling like being caressed by the wind.  this wind made me get goosebumps and the sensation was actually quite pleasurable.  This went on for months and would come and go without any discernible reason for why.  I did notice though that when the energy traveled up my torso it was after this sweeping energy had suddenly made a dive from my skin down into my body.  This created a sense of alarm in me initially because it felt like SOMETHING was doing this TO me.  I was not in control of all of this.  I was left to be an observer to some unknown phenomenon taking place within me.

Emotionally, I felt like I was melting.  Layers of defensiveness were not just wearing away, they were just melting away.  I found myself moved to tears.  I felt suddenly more fluid somehow, and everyone around me noticed the change in me.  My wife asked me if she should be concerned and asked if I knew what was going on.  I said that I thought that whatever was happening that it was good.  I decided to stay mum on all of this.  When I had asked my wife if she had heard any voices in the night that sounded like they were coming from outside I got a look like she had absolutely no idea what on earth I was saying.  I realized that all of this was like stepping off the continental shelf of North America and finding yourself in some other world.  Instead of speaking about it, I decided to simply wait and watch.

The truth was, I knew that something was happening.  I knew things without a shadow of a doubt and did not know HOW I knew them.  I was sensing things I had not sensed before, picking up on thoughts and feelings in others as if they were originating within me, or through me.  I was being visited by beings in my dreams that seemed so out of left field and yet turned out to have been encountered by other people as well.  I was aware that I had somehow stumbled across something that was allowing me to sense the world from the inside out.  I was no longer just SEEING and experiencing the world with my five senses, a new world was opening up within me.  I began to have what I would learn was Light Body Activation.  My third eye woke up first in a powerful explosion of brilliant colored light that revealed a singular eye staring back at me in the darkness of my closed eyes.  Whats more, something in me had directed me to place my focus on my third eye and hold it there without any thought or expectation of what would happen.  Some intelligence was coming on-line, some inner sensing that was beyond me in a way, or seemed perhaps so simple and integral that I didn’t have to think about it.  I was aware that I was being tutored during these night-time third eye experiences, and that I was being shown an aspect of reality that opened me up to the quantum world of effects in an unexpected way.  I was shown how energy moves from particle to wave form and that consciousness itself can conform to this natural polarity with the result of unusual phenomenon taking place.  I was shown a way to travel without moving, and a way to hold my mind in complete silence.  Part of this had to do with the build up of a potential energy that resulted in the breakthrough of awakening.  Without knowing it, I was involved in helping bring my own awakening to the fore.  I was simply a participant in these nighttime tutorial sessions, wondering how I knew what it was I knew to do in order to achieve the effects that would later take place.  there was some larger intelligence in all of this, and I would find a few years later that the universe is itself intelligent, that when we awaken we link to the higher self in a way that bring a flood of information and awareness that had not existed previously.

Something was in me, something vibrant, brilliant, and alive.  I felt its presence and it was changing my physiology.  It was changing my dreams, it was changing my emotional landscape.  I knew things and could not account how it was I knew them.  I went about testing this and found that all of my hunches were correct.  I was sensing the world in a very different way.  I could sense it from the inside out.  It took over a year before I caught on to the idea that what had happened to me was kundalini.  There was some consideration of this early on, but I ignored it partly because it freaked me out.  This did feel like something coming into me, but kundalini; I had no idea.  I knew what the word kundalini was and had even read up on it, but all the literature made it sound like some spirit that entered you.  Yes, this felt like a presence, but it did not feel scary in any way, at least not at first.  All of this was almost too much and I was content to simply know it on my own terms first before reading up on what it might or might not be.

When all of this began in earnest, I became aware of some things that took time to unravel, but would strain all of my credulity to the breaking point.  I was seeing things that I had no clue what they were, but would experience a series of odd, almost bizarre synchronicities that led me to believe that the universe was, in its own way, speaking to me through events taking place right before me.  this felt like a language made up of events.  As long as I followed the events with the correct assumptions as to what they were seeming to be telling me, I found that I was able to tease a significant amount of information out of things I knew nothing whatsoever about.  How did I know this stuff, and why on earth did I know that the universe was speaking to me in this way?  Obviously, all of this sounded crazy for anyone not directly experiencing these events.  For me, they somehow made sense.  Somehow I knew when the universe was speaking to me through these odd events that were all aligned in such peculiar ways.  I thought perhaps the universe was speaking to me through events because I could not just hear the voice of it speaking my head, so it had to use events in this way to get the ideas across.  Once I learned to secret to this “language” I found i could use it to reach information that would have taken me months to find.  It also opened up  a portal to understanding how we can in fact have a powerful impact on events and that we create more in our daily lives than we even realize. I would read later about how those who awaken experience the same bizarre events that seem to take on a life of their own.  Think it, and it happens.  I walked up in the mountains of Virginia with an image of a bear standing on a huge boulder only to come fact to face with a black bear standing on a boulder an hour later.  Everywhere I looked I saw signs with the information I was just thinking about on them.  I would be thinking about freedom of religions being just as much about freedom FROM religion only to turn and see a car pass me with a bumper sticker on it saying the same thing.  I would think of the soul as being a twin energy only to see a license plate saying “twin” moment later.  I would go around the corner while thinking that I was bearing a great secret the world might ever know only to see a banner on the front of a store saying “The best kept secret in town!”  I would go down another block to a friends house only to have her place in my hands a book containing the same words that I had been thinking the day before.  I would go from there to a gallery where the owner would begin talking about another idea that I had been mulling over earlier in the day.  This would go on for days, weeks, months.  I observed how events would just emerge out of nothing but thought itself as I felt an interesting coincidence with a powerful tingling energy in my body and these “coincidences.”

During the months and years that followed I would experience the burning fire of hot chi, which would leave me with my bed sheets drenched in sweat and  wondering if this was what might lead to the odd phenomenon of spontaneous combustion.  I would be visited by beings in the night who I could see and who I could hear.  I would wind up having an unusual experience with an angelic being who reached into my heart to pull something out of me, something that was incredibly vivid at the time and that I learned almost a year later had happened in identical fashion to an early Christian mystic whose experience could not have been more identical to my own.  Through all of the physical and psychic phenomenon, I have discovered that all of this, every shred of it, serves the same old focus I have had for years, which is that there is more to our world than we realize, and that the unseen world of heaven is in actuality right here before us for the simple truth that none of it takes up any space.  All of it is neatly folded, one into the other in a layered fashion whereby nonphysical energy serves to generate the holographic nature of our known universe that we reach out and call real.  Heaven and earth are being knitted together in my awareness and now I know the journey work of my soul.  If I can do this, you most certainly can.  By doing this, it also dissolves fear of death, opens up a new world of awareness and clears you out all at the same time.  Then, in the silence of the night, a great something that is nothing physical emerges just as it did on that first day I stood feeling it come to me.  It is there, but it is not physical.  It is the first mover.  Within its presence the divine exists.  If you want to know God or the deity, you must first know yourself.

This is where it all begins and where it all ends.  The story is an amazing one, and it is living inside of you.  Somehow the universe conspired to place your eyes on these words right here and right now.  You can brush aside its significance, in which case the universe might remain at bay for yet another day, or you might find yourself turning into yourself and feeling the rustling of something oddly familiar and beautiful seeking to release itself from its ancient prison.  Lifetimes of unknowing will resolve into knowing as your life transforms itself into a new kind of life and a new way of knowing that is as old as the universes themselves.