When I was young, eight years old, I dreamed of a very unusual building. I had never seen it before, but because of the content of the dream I suspected that it was a location I had lived in, or maybe it was created in my mind-it was so unusual looking.Enough information was there in the dream to inform me that this had taken place in the 1800’s. When it is important to find a way to convey the information, dreaming will accomplish it.
Years later I saw an image of the exact same building I had seen in my dream. I saw this building on the cover of a magazine. The building was the Tibetan monestary in Lhasa, the location where the Dali Lama resided before Tibetan monks were persecuted under the Chinese invasion of their country.
I know very little about Tibetan Buddhism. I grew up under a kind of inner decree as a child with a directive which stated that I was not to join any school of thought or any religion. This voice or presence said later when I asked why that I would understand this in time. For a particular reason it was important for my own path to not become invested in systems.
When awakening came, it soon became clear. My final chapter in dealing with the innermost secrets of Christianity was it seemed to show how its secrets are the secrets of all other traditions and that these secrets are accesible to all.
This has not been the case before our time now. In fact, the secrets have been surrounded by traditions that have locked them within veils both cultural and dogmatic. There have been reasons for secrecy in order to protect people who had not properly developed their minds and bodies for a force of understanding and presence that can send a person into shock and overwhelm. But in recent years, something has changed…
A series of events worldwide has resulted in a condition whereby what was secret is now being known. These events go back through the centuries and were catalyzed by what you could call steps backwards by humanity. There are too many to count, but they helped yo create a condition by which a threshold was crossed. I will say that I do not see this effect as being like God coming to our aid, but rather is part of a requirement for there to be balance if at all possible. The appearance of many people within so short of a time on earth who are awakening is just such an example. On the one hand, it communicates that we are in a dangerous time, but it also indicates that there are ways that we can eliminate or heal this danger through understanding better our relationship to each other, to our consciousness, and the interrelatedness of all life.
Dangerous times? What??
Yes. While the wave of awakenings is a very hopeful sign, it also is a sign of possible danger because something is being countered. Like? Like extremism of all types, like a darkening rift between those seeking illumination and those stuck in shadow. When I awoke I saw just how deeply some around me tumbled into shadow just as I awoke. One of the people tumbling down asked me if I had noticed this. Oh yeah, I noticed. I remained quiet about it because I knew what it meant. I knew these people would become purposefully ignorant, cruel, even bestial. And they did. The message was “respect freewill,nothing you say will dig them out, only they can do that.” And so it was. I fled the burning world.
So yes, our presence is part of a balance. Its also part of an evolution. This is an innevitable rise of a long-turning tide. In time, the tide will likely turn in the other direction. There will be a flowering for a time, and our movement or day in the sun may turn to winter. That is, if we let it. If we don’t teach, or spread knowing nondogmatically, people could devolve again. It is a cycle. It could also becone part of a new evolutionary spiral. It is up to us. Freewill. Anyway, I digress.
One remarkable culture that walked the talk of kindness and compassion has been the people of Tibet. They remain an important example for how we can be and what is in us to know. Their insistence on compassion and nonviolence is something we all could learn from. Many cultures that have remained sequestered from Western culture in the last 16000 years often developed keen insights into these secrets.
Venerable Nupa Rinpoche
This morning I had a video come across my feed. I wasn’t looking for it and I hadn’t looked at anything related to it recently. When I watched it, I saw someone in it who I felt an immediate recognition of. It was completely unexpected. I found myself in tears. Okay, so he is an old friend, someone from that time most likely in Tibet. He chose to reincarnate there as a monk later, but I chose to reincarnate in the West. I saw that what he is doing now is not that different from what I am doing, it is just that I am learning to do it without the presence of a tradition or teacher. I needed to have other experiences in order to break open the cosmic egg once and for all.
The Tibetan tradition is steeped in learning how to harness tummo or kundalini for perfecting the body and mind. The video I stumbled upon today is a rare look into what many believe is a tradition that is dying out. I suspect it is in the process of transforming. The Dali Lama has said he will choose to reincarnate outside the Tibetan system next time. I did this a few lifetimes ago, choosing instead to explore the golden thread that runs through other traditions instead. I think this is what will transform some traditions, force them open, and make the secrets more accessible to everyone. I think also that awakening can be spread through a simple act of Presence now. This wont be enough, however. It wont be enough to “trust in God.”
Note: Before having watched the entire documentary myself, I went back to it after writing this to find the documentary expressing aspects of this sense about balance I have been describing. For me it helps to see how, for me at least, that this was a confirmation of the things that I have sensed inwardly.
It is with that that I reccomend to you this important documentary. It is not the be-all, but a piece of a longer strand of truth that runs through all traditions. We are the secret. To know this secret we need only know ourselves beneath the day to day monkey-mind that keeps so many distracted.
Reading this article then watching the video provoked a flood of feelings, thoughts, memories, and images. Relax: I’ll just share a few…
I think your youthful soul was ahead of mine in the game, when it realised it wasn’t to be involved in any school of thought or religion. This has been one of the main lessons for me to learn in this lifetime, and it has to be learnt the hard way. I was full-on Buddhist for ten, maybe fifteen, years, then almost the same period of time in steady withdrawal. I benefitted much, but the recognition dawned slowly and painfully that any system of belief will eventually be a stone around ones neck, rather than a passport to liberation.
I recall nothing of past lives, but I have thse ‘Ah ha!’ moment from time to time, when instant recognition occurs, or a sense of ‘coming home’. So it was with Tibetan Buddhism. I had these books, and ‘understood’ very little. But I knew this was onto something, onto ‘It’.
It’s funny, now. I was all those years a Buddhist, apparently, yet much of the Buddhist traditions never turned me on at all! The Theravada Buddhism, typical of Thailand and Sri Lanka, for example, never inspired me. Not at all. It was only the Tibetan Tantra, really. The images resonating, the mystical stuff. All of which was not really encouraged in the Buddhist community I was involved with.
It seems to me that the transposition of the Tibetan tradition as portrayed in the film into western cultures is problematic. I went on a Tibetan Buddhist retreat once, put on for westerners. The lamas were great, but the attitudes of many western folk were not so. This was clear to me even in my generally not-so clear mind in the mid-1970s. It seems that Tibetans can take on this guru-and-lineage stuff healthily, but to many westerners it was disempowering. They would simply give up their power, their self-determination, to the lamas, to the lineage. Cue wide eyes and gaping mouth. And it seems to me that self-determination, healthy independence of spirit and mind, is one of the keys to kundalini awakening, and ‘personal growth’ in general. What was going on was the opposite to what was needed.
I have done some of the Tibetan practices, for example prostration practice, on retreats. Too often it seemed like an act of personal will. It has taken kundalini to awaken the path of love, and of surrender to divine beauty .
I shall be fascinated with what you eventually come up with as regards the early Christians and kundalini. The stuff that some Tibetans have done, such as multi-year retreats in the dark, just isn’t going to catch on today! That kundalini awakens more spontaneously and does its magic regardless in the lives of some of us today suggests that it doesn’t need to be as kind-of involved and complicated as some Tibetan systems make it. Let’s see.
And that’s it for now….
I don’t know why I had that persistent voice saying no tradition. It seems like it was perhaps a very specific thing for me, just me, a prescription for finding peace maybe? I had someone years ago who did a reading, and he said that there was something I had to bring through, and it was less about helping others as much as it was unwinding a kind of spring inside. Maybe unwittingly being utilized by larger forces, I don’t know.
I never had any significant memories except for the one of my seeing my parents before I was born. I had a lot of “out there” experiences when very young, but I mever saw a connection until I got much older. I had a vivid spontaneous memory at 18 that felt orchestrated by my higher self that had to do with what would be happening today and the memory was an event that supported what would happen now in terms of an altered state or what have you. It wasn’t until awakening came that I had a cluster of memories, not because Im good at remembering but because as I would release stored emotional material if it was tied to the past, it would pull that memory through as a consequence of the release of that material. I can tell you that nothing materially changes or is beneficial in remembering. I mean, in some cases yes you can help release old material, and the person who is mariner to mother who blogs on wp has done regression therapy to great effect. But that said, if you dig beyond tradition, it will come up. Maybe its a memory, maybe its not. The past is all present here with us, and once you get into the stuff inside, it naturally comes up. It isn’t always beneficial to learn that you ordered the deaths of people in a particularly hard life, or that you killed, or were killed viciously. So this veil is there to protect us from being to demoralized.
When I stopped listening to what people were saying about this experience was when my own progress took big leaps. Its really the best stab at trying to explain it, and spiritual development is all over the place dor our kind. I have seen people I never would have thought had any business having awakened. I know that sounds hard, but I think it points to the disconnect about what we think awakening is. Personally, it looks more like a switch, little more. The way to flip that switch is by way of a unitive experience, and there are loads of ways to have those, and they all aren’t sitting in lotus with your eyes downcast over your nose. It’s possible to awaken after a powerful trauma. I have already seen a couple of people who describe just such a thing. But how can trauma be unitive? The self pulls into itself long enough to marshall its deeper resources. Huh.
But there is more beyond the teachings. The teachings can help, but it always was like someone was trying to explain a state of being that I then had to imagine correctly what it is like in order to go there, or to get what they are on about.
Buddha developed Vipissana (sp?) the way he did because that was what HE was doing at the time: lotus, eyes at the bridge of the nose, the magic combination. Then, silence for ten days. Meditate.
But that isn’t the magic combination. It CAN work, but it means it ferries you to that unitive state where the opposites merge.
This is why I am so interested in the Gnostics
I am interested in them because they caught on to an aspect of the very core of awakening as being a switch. They describe the unitive state. Few teachers point this out. Why? I don’t know. And maybe there are some who do and I am just so unread that I am not aware. They seem to dance around it a bit using serpent imagery or the yin and yang. Maybe in those cultures, it is enough. Maybe they are less literal minded as Westerners. But the coded language actually isn’t that different from other Eastern practices.It appears less developed, but that may be because there were more writings that were destroyed which we will never see, or it was a tradition that lasted for about a century before proto-orthodoxy began taking hold. It didn’t take long.
The biggest challenge for me is in trying to see if I can tease out whether this was a Greek based system that WAS heretical as stated that took hermetic knowledge and grafted it into Christianity or this was discovered by Jesus and he developed a way to pass it along privately, seperately from his public ministry (which there is pretty good evidence for, I have found….all within the synoptic gospels in fact).
I have found that when you learn from another, you inherit the blind sides the teacher has, and this goes deeper than you might suspect.
Ram Das was musing about with his new teacher how all the students (including himself) had not learned a certain principle related to awareness. The teacher said “Your teacher didn’t embody the understanding.” He didn’t say that he didn’t understand the concept, he just wasn’t there inwardly. He taught the principle, but it was the being that was important. There is an aspect of nonlocality in all of these teachings. It is possible to pass them on not through words but presence, through feeling. This sounds like mumbo jumbo or magic, but it isn’t. When mind opens to the larger field of awareness, teaching us via osmosis, or can be. It depends on whether the student is there, ready, receptive. StarLight, who had a blog here wrote to me about how he was awakened from a great distance. In India we would call this shaktipot, but once the mind opens up to that field, many things can be “conferred.” It also means you can take on a spirit of misunderstanding as well. A student can also not get it at all, either.
I think its in one of the gospels where Jesus breathes into the faces of his disciples. This may well have been how he opened them, blowing on their fields like a,warm breeze opens a flower. Sometjing similar happened with Papaji (I think) who began to awaken with just a steady knowing gaze from Ramana Maharshi. I suspect it is just the same.
Just yesterday I had a breakthrough in regards to my sense that Jesus may have in fact taught these things as described in Thomas and Philip. There is a compelling bit of data that shows that heresy came before Orthodoxy be at least a hundred years. It is a theory with multiple data points. One is that when we perform digs in layers dating to the furst century, we find heretical teachings, not orthodox ones. Additionally, a historian and linguist found that in the areas where Christianity first spread to, the language and teachings lean in the direction of heresy instead of orthodoxy. It is only later that orthodox ideas begin to emerge. Those orthodox concepts grew stronger, had better funding and thus spread and began stamping out the heresy. That is to say, heresy WAS the deeper teaching, the deeper understanding. It only LOOKS like orthodoxy was the only game in town because it stamped out the esoteric tradition so early on.
John Atwill goes so far as to say the gospells were fabricated from Jesus’s own teachings but were done a while after Jesus was gone ftom the scene. The people he credits this with were an arm of the family of Caesar’s called the Flavians. He presents a highly unorthodox argument, but one that has some very compelling points. If correct, Jesus’s life may have been largely fabricated in order to control the religion which was out of the bag and causing all manner of problems in the empire. Josephus was involved, he claims, a man considered a turn-coat by the Jews of the day. But a beyrayer for one can he a hero for another. His book is Caesar’s Messiah. It has been turned into a documentary and might even be on Youtube now, but is on Amazon Prime (or was).
I need to stop yacking and get to work!
That’s high quality yacking! I’m pleased that you took the time out to share those two replies: there’s plenty of good and useful stuff there.
I like the way that you talk about the past manifesting through the present, as we release blocked energies which have their roots in the past. You describe that very clearly, and it’s very helpful in terms of orienting myself somewhat.
I sometime feel as if I’d like to know more about my past lives in order to better understand what I’m up to this time round. Purpose, direction, the bigger picture of my soul’s voyage. If I sink deeper into this feeling, however, I begin to sense that this wish for knowledge of the past reflects a lack of contentment with the present, a lack of confidence with what I’m doing right now. The solution is not to know what I was doing in previous incarnations, but to allow to emerge the confidence that everything is here, in the present moment, anyhow. As if ‘now’ is not sufficient – my head tells me that it is, but my guts sometimes waver and wobble when confronted with this reality.
At other times, I experience complete coherence; past, present, future present as a unity. Everything fits together, makes sense, without need to conceptualise. Then there is a sense that the ‘goal’ has already been realised, it’s always been realised. I am simply going through the motions, the movements through time and space, which seem to be necessary. But it’s all already there, written in the stars, inevitable. Time and space are merely a construct which has been created to facilitate full awareness of what’s always been there.
About eight years ago, I attended a shamanic-type retreat led by Ralph Metzner. We did meditations and other work on going back through the Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPM) as elucidated by Stanislav Grof. These are the stages between conception and birth. Some of this work I found very healing, as well as revealing more about the ‘core’ me, the ‘me’ which first turned up in this lifetime, as opposed to the ‘me’ or ‘mes’ that are the product of more recent superficial conditioning.
That all seems a bit of an incoherent ramble. Things are like that when they are just hanging in there, on the edge of conscious awareness. Maybe you can squeeze a bit of sense out of these rambles!
I was going to say something about another topic you wrote about, unitive states, but that would be even foggier, so I’m leaving that for now….. And that’s all.
I do wonder if we set challenges, carefully crafted ones intended to lay in wait so that in solving them, they work out hitches in the soul and how it is having trouble interacting and expressing/manifesting soul on this plane. I think Grof is a true visionary. I remember listening to a cassette my Mother had passed on to her when he came to do a workshop in our area. Listening to it was a real trip because he was talking about his experiments with projections of consciousness…trippy for a nine year old…But I always sensed that I was impacted in the womb by the events happening in my Mother’s life. Then, after birth, it continued. For as difficult as the snag seemed, all this time later the way through seems to have been to let it go, to no longer allow it to define me. I suspect when we get to that point, we rewrite future outcomes….as we let go of the patterns of the past. My biggest stumbling block has been in thinking it meant I didn’t care. I do, but no longer pining over what could have been or might be. Like you said, the present point is the place of power.
I think Buddha said if you want to know what your last life was like, look at where you are now. And yet, you can change it through what you do now. I know that the first two years of awakening was filled with so much released material. One night I was awakened by this presence, this being that introduced itself to me during this time. He would wake me up at 4:00 a.m and things would happen. He told me to grab my robe and go outside, he had to show me something. I just did as asked, it tended to lead to insight. As I stood there he motioned to my left and he explained how this was the life where all the junk would be emptied out. I saw an image of a hallway into the woods, superimposed. It tilted down and the doors, each a life, had all this,material come falling out. It was like how you empty a bag of crisps (we call them chips, but chips are what we call fries). You just tilt it up and it all comes falling out. You don’t even worry what the junk is, better to see it go. Why?
I think….and it is just my sense, is the authentic or foundational state can better shine through or be known without competing material. This becomes the return to the garden, where Eve is in Adam and there is no death. ..itself metaphorical but apt. To be really alive. To feel how we are wed to all of matter, how we are all one, but also individual, working that part out perhaps. How do we learn to create, to “beget” but to work that out here…how to work with the energies in consciousness so we might do so elsewhere? It always felt like doing it here was like having to shift into that gear where it is hard to push against the pedal, but when we do, we can gain amazing momentum. Even when we deel we are barely moving, we move against mass which is energy that has turned itself into matter by way of this amazingly creative activity taking place at the microscale nanosecond frame….
I once had someone tell me of a life I lived with her….the curious thing was I later found that life simply didn’t exist for me. As I looked at the story, though, I saw a portrait of that person and many of her central misgivings about her life, the really hard things that kept her trapped without even realizing it. In this case, it actually did help solidify my own sense of how off it was. Knowing it was at a very specific time and place helped me to see how impossible it all was for me and showed me how important it was for me to know myself. And for myself, I had this pattern of letting others speak for me through giving away my power in a myriad of ways, all to teach me how to claim who I truly was….which in many ways was best achieved in this life, in the span of a few short years. And none of this is important to anyone except me…so yadda yadda yadda!!
Well, anything you might say about a unitive state is welcome here, as I am sure you know by now. Salome asks him who he is that he sits on her couch and eats her food and he says, “I am he who comes from the undivided.” In Thomas he says when you make all the disperate parts as one, you will know this…which he called the Kingdom. Very different from what Orthodoxy had to say….but evidence is mounting now that Orthodoxy came later. Its an interesting story. I hope I can tell it in an interesting enough way. It deserves to be told because we haven’t been told the whole truth, so held me God.
‘….. the authentic or foundational state can better shine through or be known without competing material.’ That’s a novel and vivid way of putting things. I like it. I tend to think of purifying the vessel, so that the light can enter and shine through. Different imagery, same meaning.
As for ‘the unitive state’, I guess we are talking about the experience of oneness; of total union with, and non-distinction from, the universe, and from God in some interpretations. I believe the phrase ‘unitive state’ is used with regard to both Hinduism and (unorthodox, for sure) Christianity. I don’t know if the meaning’s the same in the two, I can’t imagine it is exactly, though there have to be similarities.
What I was interested in, and what may be relevant to what you are working on at the moment, is the means by which the unitive state may come to be directly experienced. There are different ways: meditations, being in nature, flotation tanks, practice with entheogens, devotion and prayer, following trauma, apparently spontaneous occurrences, and a bunch of others, I guess. I have experienced flashes, at the least, of the unitive state through a number of these myself. But there is something very precise and specific which separates these from what happened in the unfolding process leading to kundalini energy waking up in me.
It was the opposites, the polarities, which presented themselves vividly, firstly as discrete, then as coming closer and closer together, until something happened and it clicked: the Two is One; the One is Two. The One, the unity, expresses itself in duality, and the many things of this life. Conversely, the Two are an expression of the One. Masculine and feminine entwined in ecstasy are just one small step from the Godhead, from the unitive state. The division between ‘sacred’ and ‘this world’ is bridged.
Every kundalini awakening is unique, and people’s experiences are different. Nevertheless, it seems not unusual for the opposites to be implicated in the precise way that the ground for the arising of kundalini is prepared, along with any accompanying unitive state. Most other means of approaching the unitive state do not implicate duality in the same way. Kundalini correspondingly normally remains dormant.
Put another way, many people may experience a unitive state without any activation of kundalini. In Buddhism, a person may take up vipassana practice as a way towards Buddhahood. They may be encouraged to contemplate the impermanent nature of all things, or to follow every sensation they have, and see how everything is unsubstantial. These types of meditation do not seem likely to lead to kundalini being aroused. It is only in the Tantra that Buddhism gets interested in energies, in dualities as manifestations of the divine, and in kundalini/tummo etc coming into being.
You mention that Masters don’t normally talk about or describe the unitive state. I think that in some Hindu traditions they do, quite a bit. Maybe this is an exception. And maybe sometimes they feel it’s more relevant to instruct on the path rather than the goal. Too much instruction on the nature of the goal can easily become a head-trip.
There is also the point that, in much Buddhism, for example, the unitive state will not be taken particularly seriously, and they see their process as aiming somewhere else. But this is the point where, like you, I leave behind the Teachings! They are useful so far but no further. I listen to the inner voice, the knowing which arises in my body if I only listen, the sweet though sometimes uncompromising voice of She, as She whispers in my inner ear at four in the morning. I shall take as my guide direct experience, not hand-me-down notebooks from others.
And that’s it for now….
Interesting as usual, Ian.
Well, I think traditions have tended to be hush about this unitive state, but not so much now.
What I find interesting is that if correct and Jesus did teach what was in Thomas and Philip (and other NHL writings) then Jesus had a prescription for attaining this unitive state. I saw this point quite clearly perhaps because it was exactly what I had done. I “removed that which divides you.” Thing is, these writings are not really specific, so its easy to miss how deep the statements are, or how important they are. It reads like a bad user manual for a car. “Put the key in the ignition” but they never say what the ignition is or where it even is. Someone winds up trying to turn the key in the door at some point, instead of the ignition.
Anyway, I think that the cleansing of the nadi, releasing blocked emotion, was the yogic precursor to kundalini, right? Seems in India this is how they go about it. But this is hard and I am of the mind that you can open it all up by knowing which block to remove first. It does leave the process backward that way, trying to clear emotional material with kundalini screaming at full speed. But you see, that was MY experience…so who knows how it applies to others.
I honestly think we inspire others to get where we are through nonlocal tuning in. My experience was someone took my energy to catalyze their awakening, something that took me completely by surprise, unable to really consent or respond yea or nay. Sure would be great if we had some researchers with voltmeters and eeg’s doing exciting research on this topic, but alas, they’d be run out of Aberdeen or Virginia.
Maybe the cryptic instructions in Thomas and Philip are the best that can be done as regards instructions for awakening of kundalini energy. It’s not mechanical, like sending an email or making a peanut butter sandwich, where a universal recipe is possible. With kundalini, our uniqueness seems to come to the fore. For the person who is ready, these clue-teachings will mean something; they will experience that ‘Ah-ha!’ lightbulb moment. All will be clear.
As we’ve said ad nauseam, everyone’s process is different. And we live in a culture that is far more individualistic than, say, Buddhist or Hindu ones in the past. From the accounts that I have read, your own ‘explosive event, followed by kundalini working hard to clear up and clear out a messy system’ is fairly typical of awakenings in the modern west. It’s the way that we will most likely go.
It’s a bit like going on a long solo wilderness walk. You’ve got your tent, survival rations, a few scrappy notes on dusty parchment from Philip, Thomas, an obscure Tibetan guru, and Waking the Infinite. But you’re basically on your own. It’s your own trip, and you have no idea what animals, gentle or ferocious, you might encounter out there. Whether the sky gods will shine kindly on you, or whether you will be subject to blizzards and unseasonal tempests. Will the rivers be passable? Will you have the stamina, the inner resources? Will you ever return? And if so, will anybody still recognise you?
From the few clues that you passed our way, I suspect that this heretical Christian material will be more useful to our western mentality than lots of the better-known stuff which issues from points east of Baghdad. So I hope you continue with your work, and get it out there!
Thank-you for your vote of confidence, Ian. I am working on it now.