It Gets Better

They don’t tell you this in the sales brochure, but Awakening isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes it’s you, marinating in some dank dark oil of your own indefinable misery as you tell yourself that this must be what they mean about “Shadow Work.” Sounded pretty innocuous at first glance. It didn’t stop you from rushing through that door, though, did it? And it hasn’t stopped you from reading this far.

It gets better. I promise.

Awakening for Westerners is proving to be it’s own unique kind of experience. In India, the culture has systems in place that have been developed over hundreds, even thousands, of years all for the purpose of preparing the individual for one thing: awakening. This is in a word, called yoga, a system with multiple rungs intended to somatically clear the naddis (our circuitry for prana) of stored emotional energy in preparation for the emergence of a stronger or higher energetic state which is called kundalini. The results, then, are different for those in India than for most Westerners (with every case being unique). I could say it’s good to prepare, but here we are, Westerners, blank slates where awakening is concerned, now thrust into this new life. It’s a birth that took only seconds in some cases where everything is changed…..irrevocably. Truth is, we haven’t a clue about the kind of prep needed for awakening. But then again, this preparation wasn’t a part of our culture unless you count accepting Christ as your savior or having a meditation practice.

It’s exciting to watch as it takes shape. It can also be a little terrifying. It’s because something quite large is within and it’s running the show. For as freaked out as I was those first few weeks, I came to realize that this force was not here to hurt me. It never has. It has always removed things that in the end really did me no good at all. I thought of it as a chef in the kitchen of my spiritual life, concocting solutions, changing the menu, setting things right. I learned to stay out of the way, watching a master at work.

I lost really important relationships. I was crushed by a woman I was married to and had children with who sought to turn my children against me. It never hurts nearly as much as when they succeed, though. I was taught that some things just aren’t my own, and never were. I was just there, and it could have been anybody, really, the same scenario was going to play out for them. I saw the kitchen door open as the chef showed me the back door. He whispered, “It will be safer for you this way.”

There is hurt, happiness, fear, joy, loneliness, love, and longing. It’s all lit up, incandescent, at least for a time, so you can see your issues and foibles and learn to let them go. Since the truth is that material things don’t ever buy authentic happiness, the shift is into real often “lonely ” joy. It’s this solitary joy that is like entering the Holy of Holies. It is what dying is like, too, which is surprising when death comes because it’s such an expansive process rather than the dark ending that our worst fears promulgate. It grows in freedom the further you go along with it. It has a swirling beauty that is sensual and orgasmic. It is, of course, nothing like the Southern Baptist minister said it would be like. It’s clear that you are blissful now for no reason except that this is what you know about yourself, and it’s unbelievably beautiful. You feel this way because of this realization that woke you and opened you to your true nature as a child of the one great Light.

Even as you know this, you go through bliss to misery, sometimes many time in a day, a sure sign that your buried bones in your subconscious are still there, rattling away, killing the thrill of your “be here now moment.” You wake up one day and you feel paralyzed. Unable to move. The next day, the energy is leaping around the room and you hear voices or see shapes, or angels in the wee hours, or a hundred other amazingly wonderful things. On this day you are a golden goddess or a god,but you do wonder when it will turn to rust. But wait long enough, and you suspect you will be on that train to Paradise yet again. Something in you screams that there is a reason for this rapid cycling, and you’d be right. You make a new promise to let the energy penetrate as deeply as it can, next time, even if it does uncover acts and feelings you are ashamed of or that you have loathed secretly about yourself for years. As a Westerner, you probably have to be brought to the furthest edge of your misery before you are howling in the night, praying for it to come take you from your fucked up madness. And it does. Honestly, this is how souls are saved more often than we would like to admit.

One morning you might look in the mirror and forget for a few seconds who you even are. The disorientation itself is enough to keep your brow furrowed. You might worry that it might be a brain tumor but you think, “No, I’ll just wait” because you dont want to tip your hat to the world that you might be hip deep in a shit creek. Sure enough, it passes, but you get a feel for what a real brain tumor might be like and tell yourself that you’ll have to give to cancer research because what you just experienced was its own special version of a bad morning discovery.

You are visited by angels even as you are haunted by your demons. Its how this is for us; we didn’t prepare. We come to awakening dirty as sin while standing in the temple of our greater spiritual light. Lucky for us, this light is just so glad we managed to show up. There is a bit of muddy water until we begin to get washed clean. It goes on for years, really, but you can’t help but clean a dirty garment of its filth when you live in the water of life.

Over time, and in direct proportion to the amount of material you have released (It’s all repressed emotion from one traumatic event in your life to another), it gets easier. Turbulent intense sexual energy refines into finer vibration. It’s smoother. There are fewer stones in the road. It all takes time, dedication, and a willingness to just let go. What feeds your purpose stays, what doesn’t, goes. The pendulum swings aren’t as great as they were before. You don’t transit from heaven into hell and back again from one day to the next. Swings come, they just aren’t as destructive as they seemed before. We each have much to learn from each other who are going through this trial by fire and water.

It’s just your baggage. Seems you can’t be in heaven with it, so we learn how not to accumulate it here. And awakening is the magical elixir that makes it possible to heal the impossible. It loosens your grip, allows you to fall, it let’s you see that there is nothing except this feeling which is a version of what the great Light feels. It too was once lonely, and it speaks through the very light of awakening in as unobtrusive way as it possibly can. It wants to be with us if we can let it in. Its like how the Egyptian god weighed hearts using the feather as the measure. It isnt that you are damned if you have a heavy heart; you just cant feel or be aware of heaven without that lightness of being. Which of course begs and answers the question all at once that heaven is a state of mind and not a silly tale about a gated community somewhere.

The earthly self is one rung on this ladder into heaven. The Higher self is the second rung. From there, ever higher rungs lead us back into our ancestry, our origins, back to a less complicated way of being, and back to something we call God (note to self: no description can ever describe it).

It gets better. You get to be whoever, but perhaps more importantly however you want…. just as long as it’s your highest. Anything else will always be hard. What is easy is the flow. I know; Westerners look at flow and think “lazy ” but this is in truth learning to partner with physical reality to bring about the manifestation of important events that reveal a hitherto unknown quality for consciousness to join with the physical universe to make small and big miracles happen.

Whoah! That was fricken incomprehensible!

How about this: we are suddenly magical and can make miracles happen when its needed. It’s just co-creation and it has everything to do with how you feel and how your mind has been unleashed. Yes, it gets easier. It takes dedication and a lot of self honesty. This is turning the light back on yourself. What do you see? Yeah, shadow work.

It is lonely. It’s lonely realizing how everyone is caught up in a world that has very little to do with what is here on this planet, or that matters. Sure, you can get people to care so long as you tie it to a 5k Run for charity or you can create a slick meme you post on social media so it gets gobbled up and digested for a few moments. You wonder how anyone wakes up at all.

Can you see how our desire has been eating our planet alive? Car trips spewing carbon just so we can satisfy our desire to see someone we love,or to go to jobs, to do all the things we say and see as important. Plane trips to visit coral reefs in decline. An addiction to plastic that makes eating our Little Debbies so much more convenient but also gets into our rivers and lakes as microplastic, disrupting the guts of fish and their endocrine systems. Yeah. Big buzz kill, right?

The shape of our desire has forced us to live easy but it comes with a price. Again, buzz kill, but it’s true. People who want things so they can feel a certain way….cars, houses, and relationships. We marry so we won’t be alone. We have children because we don’t want to die alone. We buy nice things sometimes to scare away a deeper sense of poverty or fear that we aren’t good enough. Once in a great while we get really honest about what is motivating us, but we usually want what we want. We will take dying rainforests and bleaching coral reefs just to get those Little Debbies and lifestyles born of a desire that is killing our world. And there you sit, on your own, watching this giant pooping machine of hunger turn and move. You are, afterall, a part of it, too, but maybe a little more aware of what’s going on because a channel was opened in you that let you feel the connection everything has with everything else as you can’t help but feel a sacredness about it which leads to grace. But it still won’t change unless we are it’s harbinger, it’s mover, it’s shaker, it’s champion. The loneliness might also come from knowing that the life of desire, the shape of desire as we know it now on average, is coming to an end as it pertains to what we think will make us happy…

Nothing, though, brings as much exquisite….feeling…than the energy in awakening, simply resting in the heart of the divine. And that too is a challenge because it washes away desire for the things of this world. Is it any wonder we demonized it back in the garden by calling it a deceiver who brings knowledge? But still, I challenge you to find anything as incredible as the light which confers a standing wave of orgasmic ecstasy pulsing through every level of body, mind, heart, and soul for days-months-at a time.

It does get better, but it’s a new world. Maybe we need this so badly that it’s coming the way it is…to people nearly unbidden and woefully unprepared. It’s a new orientation, a new world, if we can take it.

Namasté ❤

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How Christianity Gained And Lost The Kingdom

Have you ever had an experience so different from anything that it brought the very foundation of what you thought the world was about into question? It turns out that experiences such as these are the stuff of which new movements are born. Great inspired people who have been struck by cosmic lightening have often gone on to teach, to make big impressions on others with what is authentic in human experience. What follows after people like this are institutions such as governments and religions. The problem with religion is that it turns a movement into a static entity, essentially a moment frozen in time. The problem with this is that our progress spiritually is gauged by what someone said thousands of years ago. Different languages, many people telling the story, taking different parts and emphasizing them. In such a situation as this, things often get lost. No one wants to admit it, but even in relying on anothers’ experience, we are naturally trying to see it all through their lenses.

 

When I went through my awakening in 2007, I had no idea what had happened to me. I was just recenly talking to a friend in my town who also went through awakening, and I was saying how it went completely over my head even though I had bought a book on the subject when I was 15. Even then, it was hard to draw any comparison. That is just how unique this experience is, and bewildering, too.

 

What makes my awakening interesting was how early Christianity figured into my discovering what I had. I didn’t learn about it like most people do from Vedic texts or the Upanishads, or from Buddhism of one stripe or another. I made my discovery after publishing  some writing online about my experience. It turned out that a reader who had a background in seminary said that there were passages in my writing that sounded just like the Gospel of Thomas. “The Gospel of Who?” I asked incredulously. He went on to explain about a recent discovery of previously unknown gospels and he suggested I take a look. I, of course, took a look.

I came away from that experience, once I picked up my jaw off the floor, beginning to read more widely the books in the Nag Hammadi Library, which is where  The  Gospel of Thomas is found.
I began to see that these books were describing in detail all facets of the awakening experience. I began to read in the canonical gospels and wondered why there was such a disparity in the content. More or less orthodox Christians will say that these books represent a heretical branch in the Christian tree, not true mainline thought.  But how could it be, I wondered, that these heretical books were describing in lush detail the facets of my experience so well? And how was it that the canonical gospels lacked this information?

To learn this I had to embark on a journey into the history of Christianity and look in places most people don’t think to look. After studying language issues, dating issues, and the canonical gospels structure and where earliest Christianity began to emerge, I found that something was not quite right. To understand what I mean, I looked at the work of a linguist and scholar in the field of religion who uncovered something rather startling about earliest Christianity.

A religious scholar named Baer did a survey of the countries that had the earliest Christian presence and he found that it was the heretical teachings and the language associated with them that got there first. In most cases, orthodoxy was the late-coming movement. Something was beginning to come into focus that I had never dared consider, but made perfect sense; the original Christianity was a very different thing from what it was turned into once Rome began to support Christianity as a religion.

But something else bears mentioning, which is how Rome created its own spin on the doctrine or teachings of Jesus. Rome won out as the defacto  center for Christian thought because of its wealth in resources: educated scribes, money, and political power to back it all up. Constantinople, which was an early church center, lost out as the seat or center for the church.  In telling history, it is the victor who gives their version. This most certainly happened in Constantine’s Rome, but it was a movement that had already been three hundred years or more in the making before the Church was institutionalized. There was an interesting history in those years between 100 A.D. and 340 A.D., and in looking at the writing of historians of that time, I began to see that a certain strain of thinking was gradually weeded out. No, it did not all come at once, but a community of thinkers who would call themselves “Orthodox” grew and gained momentum. They didn’t grow in momentum because they were right, they grew because they had might.

 

There are are things we can never know in our history of Christianity. One thing is certain, however, and that is that the deepest secrets were the ones saved for the “elect” and books were destroyed in order to hide the existence of what was once described by an early Bishop of the Church as the “heirophantic teachings” of Jesus Christ. While some roll their eyes at the notion of anyone taking such a statement seriously, I consider such mentions are incredibly important. As I delved deeper, I saw a schism between those who described the secret teaching Jesus did with his inner circle and those who claim that Jesus was always making his teaching open to everyone. This latter notion has showed itself to be a fairy tale, a bit of wishful thinking for a host of reasons.

 

First, consider that Jesus was Jewish. Rome and the Jews were not allied, but were occupied. Jews chafed at Roman rule. Not long after Jesus’s death, Rome sacked the Jewish temple and took everything in it out. The temple was just….gone. Jesus, being Jewish, had to be careful about his teaching. He hid his teaching behind parables because in many cases,there were Roman Centurions standing guard along the periphery of some of his meetings that were in public. The early historians wrote about the importance of reading those teachings which Jesus gave in secret (Origen). Valentinian, who spoke to one of Paul’s students developed a system of teaching what Jesus taught that was a tiered system that gradually brought the follower deeper into the innermost teachings, which were described as like the Holy of Holies.  Once that person had been suitably prepared, educated, or were “mature” enough to get the “Innermost” teachings which were given in secret, they were given access to these teachings. In the Nag Hammadi Jesus is quoted as saying that he speaks to the crowd in code, but speaks “directly” to his disciples when in private. Jesus had even warned his disciples about knowing what I call the “who, what, when” doctrine when he said to not cast your pearls before swine, lest they be trampled underfoot….and then set upon you and trample you as well! If this isn’t an obvious argument for secret teaching, I don’t know what is. Not all seeds sown will take root; let those who have ears hear! Jesus explained very clearly that you had to be careful who you said what to. Even Jesus was seen speaking in code in public….how is it that this is so hard for people to understand that, yes, he did have teachings that were kept away from public view. If you take the teachings he conveyed in all gospels, including Thomas and Phillip, it becomes clear that he is doing more than just setting out a code of behavior, he was providing the very keys to a radical transformation to occur within each person who knew how to “put on” this form of awarenesss. With governments perennially concerned about its populace becoming too empowered, such teachings could easily be viewed as a threat. Origen, the first century Christian philosopher and historian, pointed out that if you wanted to get to the meaty parts of Jesus’s teachings, you had to see where he is  teaching followers in private, away from the crowds. This was how revolutionary these teachings were.

I suspect that the “secret” parts were kept secret because they would have been considered blasphemy by those who had not been initiated into its mysteries.  This secret part involved a masculine and feminine aspect of the deity which,  when brought into full union within ones awareness, creates a state of pure ecstasy in the individual who is then experiencing this divine reality.  It was nothing short of flipping a switch inside ones own inner consciousness, a hitherto unknown capacity in each person for glimpsing, then experiencing a full-on union with the divine. Who then would dare to speak openly about what was described as a sacred event that occurred in a place in the soul that was called the bridal chamber?  This was how this union was described, folks! Two forces in consciousness were drawn together and when merged, formed another consciousness that changed everything; this was the Christ Consciousness. In Phillip he explains how the father and mother came down and entered the bridal chamber (the place where they embraced or became one) and on that day, he says, the Christ emerged from out of the bridal chamber! But what is he saying here? He is saying that inside each person we have a bridal chamber; this is an event that happens inside of us: “The kingdom is within.” This bridal chamber was not a physical place but was a way of describing how two opposite elements came into a mysterious form of sacred union that had no other equal save for sacred sexuality. To say that divine awareness might involve an ecstasy so powerful that the only comparable experience is a persistent orgasmic state would be enough to send the temple priests calling for the heads of the people so describing it. Utterly revolutionary! It was also utterly denied, refused in the canonical gospels. But aren’t the canonical gospels…..the gospel? Aren’t we taught to believe that the mainline gospels are the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Biblical scholars now suspect that the gospels were in fact not written, as they exist today, by the disciples they were purported to have been attributed to for a number of reasons. First, their structure is not consistent with itinerant fishermen, many of whom were illiterate. They are so sophisticated in how they are written that scholars see writers who already know how to produce great literature. Scholars also suspect that each of the four gospels were using another source, now unknown, from which to draw from which they call “Q.” In John Atwells recent book Caesars Messiah, the author puts forth a compelling argument for how Roman elites hired a Jewish historian, Josephus, to help them craft the gospels that we know today. Drawn from Biblical sources, this appears to be an effort to dampen the power of Christianity by removing the more empowering parts from the narrative. For the most devout, Atwell’s work will seem an effort at attacking Christianity, but when taken together with everything we now know from numerous other sources, it becomes harder to dismisss that something happened during those early years when it was becoming apparent that Christianity was here to stay. For a Roman elite, it would have been hard for them to grasp the importance that a trinity based in the father-mother-child (or Christ) had in Jesus’s teachings. Whoever wrote the gospels, they were literalists. Whoever wrote Thomas and Phillip, they had a firm grasp on the esoteric nuance of divine union and all that it entailed.

 

The great impedement for so many is is being able to conceive that any of this could be compared to anything like sex. But this is what the soul feels when it is in union with its source, it’s maker, it’s creator. The secret is that orgasmic energy may well be just the kind of creative motive force capable of creating new life, of begetting new souls, and resurrecting the dead ones. But unlike physical sex or orgasmic ecstasy, union with the divine is clear, without a need to engage in the physical act in order to feel the swirling eddies of bliss on a spiritual and energetic level. Initiates into this mystery discover that this is the very nature of our divine spark. This bliss is our true nature. This true nature returns us, heals us, straightens us simply because you can’t know it unless you have been carefully prepared.

But didn’t my awakening happen more or less spontaneously? In a manner, yes, but I did do certain things that triggered it. I don’t need to go into those now, but what I did was described by the Jesus found in both Thomas and in Philip’s gospels. It is the very essence or foundation upon which all awakenings are initiated or catalyzed.

Knowing this, and knowing the substance of my awakening, I knew that I had lept far beyond the conceptualizations made by others who followed along later in the Orthodox lineage. A lot is assumed, most namely what Jesus meant when he spoke of chastity or adultery. Most followers think he was teaching against being sinful. He was, but it is clear that when Jesus spoke of adultery, he spoke of not being true to ones own inner godliness,  not turning away from ones true nature, which is the kingdom within. Doing so was like adultery, or serving two masters.  I ask, what better term to describe being untrue to the divine within? Even Paul used these terms in the same way, explaining one should not consort with prostitutes, but he was not speaking about people who charge money for sex, but people who have sold themselves to that which is not true or not having to do with the indwelling Christ consciousness. It was not about sex, it was about turning from that which can save each of us; awakening does exactly that. It purifies, ressurects, and makes the crooked in us straight. But a tide of literalists followed along who seemed to have no idea whatsoever what was being described. But how can you describe such a thing that is not of this world? The answer is, “the best way that you can.” So I ask you you, did Jesus ever say the kingdom was a mustard seed, or that it was a treasure buried in a field? No. He said it is “like.” And that is important because nowhere does Jesus say it “is” because you can’t get there using 3-D words or thinking. Truth is, you can’t describe something so revolutionary and as outside our context of present physical life with mere words. And yet,they tried. All teachers do. At the end of the day, you simply must experience it for yourself. This is why those who have no experience with awakening will criticize and distort it beyond all truth with such phrases as demonic possession and not of God. Kundalini was precisely what Jesus was describing using a vocabulary that used different words, but the exact same structure and descriptions, all of which are analogs to the Hindu and Taoist traditions. I know because I have experienced it. I know it’s symptoms, it’s effects and outcomes, and they are all the same except for the languages used. To compound all of this,  they hid or destroyed books, proclaiming to all that they were heretical. They took some books and did not accept others as cannon. The Gospel of Thomas and the gospel of Philip  we’re both hidden away for centuries because they contained the very marrow of the secret teachings of the Christ and they struck those who were “dead” in their spirit as strange teachings. Furthermore, in Philip he makes clear that Jesus was seeking not just followers but people who could themselves become  Christ’s. This stands against orthodoxy but is what happens to each person who awakens; they realize the Christ consciousness that is with in them.