I have been working methodically on a manuscript about early Christianity. It’s a slog in order to have all of the right sources. My project presents the thesis that in earliest Christianity there was a very different understanding concerning some foundational concepts that would inform the religion for centuries. It’s a story of one group that pitted itself against another and sought to wipe away its influence for all time. But like the sun, moon, and the truth, what was hidden was later revealed when documents began to surface from early on in the movement that told a very different story. It is one of the greatest stories never told about a religion that exerted tremendous influence for centuries.
It’s here that someone from the distant past emerged, a seeker herself, and artist like me, who was keen to collaborate with me. What has emerged has been a new project on a facet of awakening most commonly known as twin souls or twin flames. This is an aspect of awakenings today that link people who have karma in common.
I have been critical of the concept, though, and it was a surprise finding myself considering a project like this. The result has been a flood of information that provides a new perspective on the phenomenon that I have been bringing through. Because of my familiarity with the subject already and the history of awakening, I found I have been able to bring what I think may be a new perspective on the phenomenon.
The agreement was that the project had to be small. I didn’t have the time to devote to a 200 page manuscript. As a result, a book of 120 pages emerged very quickly. The collaboration begins with me writing and my coauthor providing illustrations and proofreading the manuscript.
The illustrations in some cases reveals the artist’s own discoveries of her brush with a new energy in consciousness, which shows up in her work, which I think helps to bring added meaning and comprehension to the project. Being able to have the work illustrated is a plus, something that makes the project unique, I think. There will be some intersections with the book I am working on related to early Christianity, which is awakening and how kundalini was actually being taught. Other cultures and traditions that have teachings or writings on awakening also tends to include the phenomenon of union both on the individual level as well as between two people, which is a second wrinkle in the awakening phenomenon. The book shows that the history on twins as they are called today is scant in the way some would like them represented, but a more abundant field of understanding awaits when you can shift your focus. To this end, I show instances through time when high vibrational relationships emerge. The phenomenon has been hiding in plain sight, but is not obvious to anyone unfamiliar with the subject. It helps if you know how and where to look. A little sleuthing can make for interesting reading.
A lot has been done in a short time, and with our moving into the Fall, I am facing the busiest time of the year for my studio business in glassmaking, so work on the book will go into a less intense phase now which will be a refinement period where I will have friends help review the work for editing. It managed to get slipped in just in the nick of time!
In the meantime, I will be publishing excerpts from the book as the editing work proceeds. This has moved along so quickly we don’t even have a title yet! I am including preliminary illustrations from the artist, which will help give you a sense of the character of the artwork and the flavor of one important aspect of our story telling.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about a very unusual discovery that took place involving a documentary released in 2020, a conversation with a guide in 2008 and a past life memory that emerged as a result of the confluence of these events.
In 2020 I saw a documentary entitled The Hunt For Transylvanian Gold. It was streaming on Prime, and had made the rounds on Netflix too. In one very short scene there was shown the ruins of a ceremonial center in present day Romania that had images of a large stone disc that my guide was talking to me about in 2008. It looked exactly like it. It was the same size, same thickness, and had lines cut into it.
I know how that sounds…weird, right? Well, at that time in my life, my awakening had just turned a corner of sorts and I was getting a lot of inner activity with a guide who had seemed to make a return after first emerging back in 1985. As he explained to me, it wasn’t that he was ever absent, but that I wasn’t always able to tune into the range where I could hear him. All of a sudden, I was hearing him loud and clear after my awakening intensified in the wake of questioning what people were saying about aspects of the experience. I always thought that need brought him back, but no, it was the other way around. I had shut down and my ability to hear him seemed to go completely away.
Among the things he was telling me that early April during a walk to the waterfalls near my home here, was an object he made sure to show me. It was a large stone disc, about twenty feet in diameter, that had lines cut into the surface so that it looked like a giant pizza. There were something like 8 to twelve triangular sections. I wasn’t sure of the exact number, but it was easily in that range. My guide was telling me about how this stone had to do with union and that this was related to the work I would be doing in my life. I was walking along deep in thought trying to understand what was being told to me. It seemed that what my guide was showing me was how a group of people had merged and had become part of this stone disc. Huh??
I struggled to understand that one. What was the reason, the point? It was like my guide was trying to explain something to me, and try as I might, I wasn’t getting all of it. I wrote about this in a blog post in 2019 or 2020 when I saw the documentary. In it they showed an image of a disc that was part of a large ceremonial complex. It was uncanny.
The large divided disc in the ceremonial center
It is easy I think to try to make something you have seen fit into a random story line that seems to be a fit, but there is a curious second element which I never connected with this part of Europe that bears mentioning.
Many years ago I read the epic tale by Marion Bradley entitled The Mists Of Avalon. The story is an effort to give the Arthurian legend a more pagan and thus gaian twist, which means Druids and priestesses to whom the Druid priests answered to. In one notable scene, the main character, Morgan, is remembering a past life that involved her warching as Atlantis burned and then sank beneath the waves. That memory was trigerred by being with a man in the story. She could see tattoos of serpents around people’s wrists in blue woad, telling her that this man was a follower of the goddess and the hirned god. The thing that was curious about this was I never saw them as tatoos as I read the book. Instead, I saw them as golden serpents that wrapped around their arms. These serpents “burned” as Bradley wrote, because the serpent power, which was kundalini, was the sacred fire, the grace that inspired people no matter their belief system or their epoch. While Bradley’s story was historical fiction it always felt like she got more right about those days than she may have realized. It is a small detail but it is another one that supports the possibility that I was once with these people called the Dacians. The height of their civilization when these ruins were built was 100 BC to 100 AD.
When I saw the documentary, though, the whole story had me shaking my head in disbelief. There were those gold serpents some 30 years later! Still…maybe I was jumping the gun. Maybe it was all just coincidental. I considered that even as my gut screamed I was on to something from my past.
The Dacian gold serpents
So who were these people? To learn that, I went digging in the Romanian archives.
“The Dacian bracelets were created during a period of great flourishing of the Dacian culture, known in history as the “classical Dacian era” (1st century BC – 1st century AD), in which significant transformations took place at all levels: political, economic, religious and cultural. This fortunate context was greatly influenced by the fact that in the 1st century BC, for a short period of time, King Burebista united under his reign most of the regions inhabited by the Getae and the Dacians into a “great dominion” with borders reaching as far as the geographical area of today’s Slovakia.
“The last great king of Dacia was Decebalus, during whose reign the kingdom became a political, economic and military power again. Located on the border of the Roman Empire, which it had successfully faced in the past, Dacia had become too much of a threat to Rome. Thus, Emperor Trajan decided to eliminate this danger and, following the wars of 101-102 and 105-106, Dacia was conquered and transformed into a Roman province. This is how the “classical Dacian era” ended.“
Statues of Dacians on the Arch of Constantine in Rome
Above: Representations of Dacians on Trajan’s Column. The nobles, the military chieftains, are the ones with their head covered. They were known as tarabostes or pileati. The others, commoners, without head covers, were known as comati. The images are engravings from Pietro Bartoldi’s 17th Century album.
“The political and religious center of Dacia was the great fortress Sarmizegetusa Regia, on Grădiștea Muncelului (almost in the center of today’s Romania), with numerous houses, workshops, warehouses, but also with water supply systems. Near this fortress were several shrines and altars, which formed an impressive Sacred Zone, with walls, stairs, paved roads, canals and other stone arrangements, as we find in the Greek world. In Dacia there were many other cities (called dava), which permanently housed a large population, and which were important centers of craftsmanship and trade, but at the same time central places of political and religious life.
“The royal polyspiral gold bracelets are the most original creations of the Dacian artisans that survived through ages. They were made of Transylvanian gold, beaten in cold and then punched and engraved. The utensils used were wooden and metal hammers, covered with leather, wooden anvils, as well as sets of iron chisels and bronze punches.“
Between 1996 and 2001, the entire Sarmizegetusa Regia area, the last capital of the Dacian Kingdom (inscribed on the list of monuments of humanity in 1999) was targeted by the activities of organized crime groups, which practiced archaeological poaching on a large scale. An exceptionally large number of gold and silver objects were exported illegally. 14 of the 24 bracelets that had originally been spirited out of the country were returned.
A hilltop site belonging to the Dacian culture
The bracelets as they are called, were buried in a number of different locations as caches, we suspect, to keep them safe from an invading army of Romans. With enough leaders lost in battle against Rome it is possible that the gold was forgotten or the location was only known to a few. An article in National Geographic on the subject said that these bracelets were offerings to the gods. I felt myself stiffen when I read that. These pieces were buried in numerous locations away from ceremonial complexes. If, as those at National Geographic insist, that theae were somehow offerings, where is the surrounding supporting structure that ought to exist?
My take is different. They were ceremonial, so they were used. They were power objects in the sense that everyone who used them were focused on the same energetics.
We also have the possibility that the culture practiced ritual union in a ceremonial context and this union was used to help strengthen the culture and to provide meaning for their spiritual practice.
It is also likely that they had developed their spiritual understanding to a significant degree. All of this was prior to the influence of Orthodox Christianity which would seek to convert everyone it could, wiping away any memory of the forces alive in earth and all of life that was tied to recreation, healing, and fertility.
My sense is that these people knew about the interplay of opposites and how awakening played into this. It is also quite likely that these people weren’t as shut down and didn’t suffer from the results of that condition to the degree others did, with less of a “veil” needing to be pulled away. This would make them appear intimidating to the “civilized” Christianized people who came into contact with them because such a state roots you in a very different reality concerning your creaturehood.
This Christianization wouldn’t happen until a few centuries after the Roman soldiers had invaded and took control over the region, though, because it wasn’t until the third and fourth Centuries AD that Christianity was legitimized or made legal (and the state sponsored religion) by Rome. Their conversion would have happened more gradually, first by Rome, then by Christianity. This would be repeated numerous times all over the world. It would happen in South America with the Spanish instead of Rome providing the civillian force to bend the culture when it would appear unseemly for the monks to do so. It would repeat in North America with the empire-in-waiting that began as a confederation of colonies and evolved into a nation that would later act like a new Roman empire (as it does today). It is curious how this pattern developed. Regardless, my sense was that these people, of which so little appears to be known about their spiritual lives, did what all people who live close to the earth do: they brought earth into the equation spiritually and that naturally included the concept of the family unit of the creative duo of feminine and masculine as an engine for creation seen in all things.
The Taoist concept of yin and yang, for instance, naturally gave room for the masculine and feminine together. Christianity did not: it had a god who behaved like a vengeful emperor as any notion of the humanizing effects of the family unit didn’t exist in this later model (present in Judaism but now being adopted by Christianity around this time period). Once seen in the earth as a force, it would be seen in all of life, and might even be seen in the forces that move air and push the earth through space in its travel around the sun.
People like this tended to be aware of the cycles created by the revolution of earth around the sun, even if they didn’t know its true nature in the larger scheme, they did know that the days and years had a specific repeatability to them as the erected standing stones in France and other regions reveal (a stone that is centered so it frames the sun on the winter solstice for instance).
The documentary raises the specter of the gold bracelets as being cursed because so many people experienced negative outcomes while hunting for and seeking to spirit away, the gold out of the country. I am not superstitious, but objects that are used communally can have energy associated with them that appears to have effects on people later who unearth them. In the documentary, which was more about buried treasure and the theft of priceless artworks in gold, the documentary uncovered how one of the discoverers of the location of the gold wound up dying a mysterious death later. The documentary suggested that the objects had a powerful aura about them.
As all of this was shown in the documentary, I found myself bothered, upset even, with images that were emerging spontaneously in my mind. When these happen in this way, my ears prick up. It felt as though I was picking up on another age, a time that came from our legends having to do with a time when there were dwarves and fairy folk….except there were no fairy folk or elves, but there was a time out in the expanse of forest where a people lived who were pagan and who lived close to the earth. And following me around was the pattern that has been present not in all of my lives but many of them: the inner union within consciousness that liberates a bio-psychic energy that reflected that union in the physical world. As many would use their consciousness in a lopsided way, often, I found myself wanting to scratch beneath the surface to this more luminous state I have sensed was there, could be there…..must be there.
An overview of the ceremonial grounds
I have seen a life in Babylon where the leaders of the country participated in ritual fertility rites of heiros gamos. Enough details flooded in that I found myself being able to identify the leader. If you happen to have a life or two that was known to history, being able to identify details from memory that later check out is a pinch-me kind of moment. When I was researching the region where I had lived as a Miwok in California in the 1800’s I found an Army memo describing a raid on their fort by the Indians who lived in and around Yosemite. That memo described a memory I had twenty years earlier to a “T.” There were no other attacks on a fort in that area that were written about in the record. What are the chances?
So it was an unusual pinch-me moment when I met someone who I knew from this life in Romania. It’s easy to secobd guess and doubt, but one thing I have learned is that when you really feel something is right from another life, it probably is. We just think getting to those memories are hard work. They seem that way, but in reality aren’t. If you are like me, you might get a small cluster of memories or impressions but precious little else. Why? Sometimes the bridge to that self isn’t as strong as it could be, some material would prejudice you in regards to a lesson you keep trying to learn and you need “radio silence” in order to solidify the lesson. Sometimes. Some lessons, once learned, are done with. Other lesons are like a seven course meal that is digested in parts.
It all happened effortlessly where I could feel the tug, the pull, the flow of that edge of bliss as I held off going any further. I knew exactly where we had met. Union, and heiros gamos again, a pattern showing that for my higher self, this work is some of the most important I can think of. While the stream of energy is powerful, we have decided to collaborate on a book on the subject of union and awakening. There is a lot out there that seeks to cast this experience as something closer to myth than anything else, and I think it is time someone gives a new perspective. I am not even going to say the “twin” experience isn’t real, but I will instead show how it is related to awakening and the sacred. It’s an exciting prospect especially since the book will be illustrated, which should help to emphasize and enliven the work in peoples’ minds.
Memory of past lives isn’t that hard, but you don’t get there via the rational mind. The feeling side is much more constructive and doesn’t throttle down the intuitive flow. Many things you are interested in now are experienced in other lives. Twice in two lives as a leader I embarked on building projects that included pretty amazing adornment and decoration. Today, I am an artist who makes objects to decorate the home. I am not a king. I also have a strong interest in leadership and good governance. But what I am saying here is your lifetimes often share a lot in common with where you are now…and the best way to explore is to playfully imagine. It wont seem like anything serious, but for this reason you can often find some gems. The position is one of feeling. Don’t let ego, pride, or ypur rational mind get in the way…feel it out. Oh, and if you tell me you were Cleopatra, I am going to have to say it wasn’t likely since so many in the past say they thought they were someone famous like Cleopatra. But who knows, someone out there might have been her actually!
Waking The Infinite 