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.

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