Message From The Mountains – Part 2

In the midst of all of this awakening the experience taught me that there was little I could do to effect any positive change outside of my own inner change. It was such a contrast. I was changing fast and my ex and my son weren’t changing, they were actually reacting negatively to the energy that was flowing through me. They were in polarity. I was watching this horror show unfold and there was no changing it. It was going to happen, I tried many times to be a calm voice of reason, but there was one way this was going to go. Somewhere in our development we rise to the surface of all the samsara and gasp, taking in the air of a new life and wonder if there is any way to stay in this new world long enough for change to happen in the depths. How do we turn this ship, which has been on the same heading for years? There’s no use in sugarcoating any of this because we all have been born into a world that is riddled with dysfunction. Most don’t notice (and are the happiest among us), in large part because they are so enured to it that the horror of our world have been normalized: mass shootings, the poor living in tent cities, nations rushing headlong into war with nuclear armed nations! The (lack of) humanity!

Whoo boy, Parker, I don’t think they want to hear this stuff!

Because of my own makeup as this kind affable person who was this thoughtful artist and mystic, I sometimes have attracted those who lack what I posess. They say opposites attract. In addition, for me, these personality types have been involved in abusive behavior, an issue going back to my childhood, so I suppose I grew accustomed to them and unconsciously attract or am attracted to them. I was a year out of an abusive marriage when this person energetically forced her way into my life. This person was a carbon copy of my ex behaviorally. Part of me knew it and had taken a protective stance. This time I was along to see if I could change all of this. Could karma be changed? Was I mad? I really wanted to help make change, but people need to be ready to see and help make the change. Had I really wanted to help or change someone as a run-around changing myself? Not so much. But maybe a little. Maybe just enough for it to be a problem, a karmic hook. Karma creates chemistry.

Finally, after years of emotional chaos after emotional chaos and her temporal meltdowns, she finally found someone else to latch onto who lived far away and she moved away.

She had told me the first few weeks I knew her that she had spent her whole life moving from one place to the next, spending not more than five years in any one location. It was because of the abuse she had experienced, she said. When she moved away five years later, I realized that the genesis of all the problems were about her. She wanted to run, because my presence pushed her buttons. She would panic in my presence and she dudn’t know why. It had nithing to do with anything I had said or done. I spent years trying to be calm and cool as she went through meltdown after meltdown. I realized that this wasn’t going to work. She would push responsibility for her feelings onto others. If I didn’t pay just the right amount of attention to her in public, she would berate me. Everything became my fault as I slowly grew tired of the treatment. To make matters more strange, she would say how terrible I was and then a week or two later go on about how important I was in her life. I remember reading about these kinds of people in an article that described these personality types as saying “Your terrible, I hate you, don’t leave me!” I was fooled for years with the act and only in our last year together was I able to begin to see the behaviors for what they were. I had willingly gotten back with her numerous times in the hope that something might change, but her limit was about two weeks before she would meltdown. I had to realize that this person had been doing this her whole life and it was time to let go, bless her, and hope she could find peace.

I wound up learning about narcisists, and saw how both women I had known were on the spectrum of this behavior. My ex was the most destructive, though, because she was toying with the hearts and minds of my children. Still, both were amazing in their destructive capacities due to their inability to fully self reflect. At least not when it mattered most, which was when they were in full freak mode and were trying to pin the tail on the wrong donkey. Life with these people was like living in a house of mirrors. And you want to know what? Some part of me was attracted to that vibe, even if I didn’t know consciously what it was that I had on my fishing line. All I knew was that the energy was BIG. I had to admit that I had to unlearn this and be open to awakening to aid me in releasing the karma and the sense of supernatural draw. This isn’t to say there weren’t important moments, or bright light in either experience. I just happened to become involved with some incredibly immature people.

What I didn’t know was that if you stepped back one lifetime or three or seven or fifty (more like fifty for one), you see some really gnarly stuff happen, a real tragedy unfolded, and in some cases, no one was at fault, and yet HOW people reacted to the event in the past created the karmic pull lifetimes later. People died, reincarnated, and were pulled back into relationships again, but this time all they felt was this powerful pull and this breathtaking sense of attraction. I wish it wasn’t so counterintuitive as that.

I have to say that in each soul connection I have had there was some rough karma to work through. In one case it was as simple as me wanting to serve and please another person. Once I knew everything was good, the MOMENT I knew that her awakening that took shape when I entered her life (all from a great distance I might add) was to her great benefit and that she was happy despite our not being together, everything just fell away. “I’m happy, Parker, I really am!” The karma was that I had felt like I had failed her in another life, and in some ways that was true. She was a leader and I a trusted aid. I gave bad advice and because of it people died and she and I were then wound like wicker to each other, you could say.

All of this was an education, of course How practical was it for us to be together really? She was in Canada and I was in the U.S. We had only met two times. She was only willing to go to the water’s edge and I needed to jump into it and swim to the continental shelf to find the endless blue, the kind of deep blue that is like staring into the Void. It was the Void for me. And I understood before we parted ways that she KNEW she wasn’t able to go where I wanted or needed to go in this process. Neither was wrong, each took what they needed.

Who can say what is right for anyone? In the end it wasn’t some great love down through time, no. It was this meeting where I helped her as an African Pharaoh. But underlying it was this wrinkle in us both that led us to screwing something up royally. So when I hear people talk about twin flames or twin souls as this split in a person’s soul, I have to chuckle. No, it isn’t that, I don’t think. It feels great because it is a crack in the cosmic egg, and in rushes our soul energy which is amazing! The gift is we feel the energy from the divine leaking through into us at first, then flooding more and more later. This flood of truth can also freak peole out. We are able to realize a little of what we are beyond all of this. And yes, it is amazing and glorious, but it can also send people to dark places too as their unresolved issues can get amplified.

The reason why we aren’t able to see into this realm of soul so well is because of how we have evolved. It would help us dealing with spiritual experiences if the curtain was pulled back a little more for everyone. This curtain or veil so many speak of is merely how we have learned to tune all of this amazing stuff OUT! What we feel when we feel the draw of the twin is the draw of karma with the incredible boundless love of the soul. Soul love is the great untold story in all of this. So whether you become aware of it within yourself as pure bliss or if you are caught in a soul connection, the effect is the same. Meanwhile, I think the best thing to do is to make the best of it.

So when my ex showed up recently, it was bizarre. Surreal. I didn’t have the sense that she would EVER be able to acknowledge that she had done ANYTHING wrong or bad. But there she was trying to use her new dog as the way to introduce herself and why she was there in the first place. Just stopping by….and by the way, she wanted to say how sorry she was.

But hang on. Did this person really know why she was sorry? What she did was behavior that was exactly like a psychopath. That term sounds really severe, doesn’t it? But a psychopath isn’t some axe-wielding slobber-jawed maniac seeking to kill anyone they see. No. Psychopathy is actually the lack of conscience in a certain area emotionally. It is a blind spot, a lack in the emotional feeling space of the individual. It leads a person to do horrible things but never see or understand why any of their terrible behavior is a problem. You can’t know what you don’t know, the experts explain. And it could be a blind spot in one area and one area only in their inner landscape. By being that way, a problem could lie unacknowledged for years. People like me, spouses, could see hints of it, but I am a glass half full person so I just told myself it wasn’t as bad as it was, which served to enable the behavior to some extent. Everything else about her was so functional, so smart, so aware, so caring.

Psychopaths charm the public and often rise to places of power sometimes and as presidents they can send us all off to war at the drop of a hat and with no compunction about it whatsoever. Psychopaths are functional people, and they are everywhere. They are in politics, medicine, in Fortune 500 companies, in schools, and in families. They are people with a blind spot in them. In the case of my ex, it had to do with how she used my kids to try and hurt or punish me for not giving her something she felt she was entitled to in our divorce. When I explained what happened, people had a hard time believing it. The same was with this other woman. People would remark about how together she seemed. Then we would get to my place and she would go into an emotional melt-down that would be hours and hours of drama. In fact, I found that the longest she could hold it together was about ten days. She would claim that something about me pushed her buttons. This was always a mystery because there was never any action I would do, no trigger that could be identified. No, it was my presence. It was my realization that the jig was up and I was at the end of the illusory rope. She feared letting go of that rope. She held to it for dear life even as I coaxed her to loosen her grip. I was a threat…but the threat I represented was the threat of freedom. We often don’t see freedom for what it is and instead see it as a threat to our safety.

By this time I had ceased trying to help her anymore. I saw that she would go into one temporal meltdown after another. My guide’s words echoed in my mind: “You wouldn’t be doing what you are doing now if you knew what lay on the other side of this.” I had learned that I could see freedom as a threat or freedom as an unknown to be feared. I never put this onto another person, though. So given all of this, I stood there watching as my ex said that she was sorry.

So I asked her if she knew what she was sorry for.

She gave me this squinty look that told me she really was lost and had no idea what I was on about. It’s okay, her awareness is her awareness. You can’t pretend that her and your awareness is anywhere near the same. Meet her where she is.

So I did something that was uncharacteristic of me before awakening happened, which was I began to rattle off a few of the worst offenders in her behavior. To her credit, she listened and didn’t turn defensive. Before this, I couldn’t bring up ANY mention of her bad behavior without it being turned back on me, effectively gaslighting me. Twelve years of an information and honesry embargo. It was always my fault back in the day. All of it. But now she was squinting at me sideways and not putting up a defense. The tables had turned. Still, I wasn’t going to do what she did to me, nor did I want to. I kept on going down the list and she didn’t run away. I learned that she had been through a lot of therapy about all of this, and my guess was my innermost fantasy had come true, which was a therapist at some point explained to her just how abusive her behavior was and maybe she needed to set things right if she was ever going to feel any better. The clue was probably how obsessive she was about how she felt she had been treated unfairly (in my defense I behaved in a way I knew was fair).

What happened was something I was unable to achieve, which was to forgive my ex for what she did. Something came undone as a result of our talk out in my yard that day. I realized that this was the end of helping the broken birdies. From now on, everyone finds their way and no more being overly generous (and setting up a sense of entitlement). It is important that everyone learn how to be self sufficient both materially and emotionally, right? It seems time for a new chapter to be written, because honestly, I thought that this was it, and if that is so, I had little interest in this world to be honest.

How someone’s act of contrition, their mea culpa, was able to shift how I felt about the whole of life was downright magical. Instead of feeling like I wanted to beat a quick retreat back to the numinous realm I felt more eager to remain here on this still crazy ball of earth spinning through space. What are the chances that the craziest species ever, bent on destroying others and itself, but would get one of the most beautiful planets in the cosmos?

Besides, I have a project that I have to finish, which will help to settle a multi-lifetime theme involving the birth of Christianity and how it once taught sophisticated methods for attaining the Christ within. Surely its worth staying around to get that taken care of, right??

My hope is that we didn’t all wake up only to turn woke and ideologically extreme, unable to capture the nuance and the broad range of what it means to be a human here. I pray that the maniacs don’t get to decide our destiny. We all need to look our neighbors in their eye and offer kind words of understanding. Soon. We are being divided faster than a fraternity can cut up a pizza on Pledge night. For as bad as things can seem, there is so much to be thankful for and so much hope that lies curled up within our world…

The result has been a loosening of these threads that held me in an alienated position. I also see that when I hold a karmic cord tight the person on the other end often holds tight to it also, unaware of what that little bit of tightness is all about. But loosening, it goes away forever, and does not return. Perhaps the relationships that mirror this karma fall away. Perhaps some might continue changed. I think I am at that point of more wholesale change, so I rather think its time for an entirely new chapter….no…a new book to be written.

I do wonder what happens to the people who were part of those old patterns when the patterns get erased, healed, or transmuted. I suppose they are like the sacred actors in our lives who often bear terrible things that then provide the potential for us to choose differently and to feel differently as well. We are here for such a short while, and we are all coming and going. It seems worth it to make the most of all of this and face a many of our demons as we can. In spirit all things are known. On earth, things are veiled. What happens when we bear heaven to earth and cause the veiled to be seen again. Do we do our little part in redeeming earth or our little place in it?

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Message From The Mountains – Part 1

I have been busy, so its been a minute.. I haven’t much to say, too, and I am loathe to write just because. In the last few years I have gone back to my studio discipline after teaching for a number of years. Most of my writing has been while I taught, which was itself a side track experience that has helped me be better in my studio practice.

I am back to the studio since late 2017, where I designed entirely new lines of work for a business that would have a strong online presence. The demands of a business are always significant, more a lifestyle than something that you punch in and out of each day. There continues to be new work, new efforts in new directions with the studio even after my return in 2017 where I spent two years simply designing new work with no focus on selling (this was my own self-imposed creative retreat and it was wonderful). I could say how I doubled numbers over last year with an emerging event, certainly something nice, but that too is itself, when put into context, rings hollow to me. This is what happens when your world and your purposes are shifted so dramatically by this light bulb experience called awakening. When you have been to the mountain, there is this feeling of “meh” sometimes….something that by rights ought not happen to a person who is able to accept what-is, but I am after all human just like everyone else. I can say though that while parts of the studio process leave me unimpressed, the core fire of the creative where opposites merge is most of what keeps me above ground. It’s possible that it a problem with my personality who, upon being one with the Supreme Consciousness, has trouble staying on the farm after that. I suppose I should be more flexible, more humble, and more accepting. Like St Theresa of Avilla, I am left pensive for that time when I can leave here and be in spirit and be with that perfectly beautiful presence again. It’s enough to make anyone pull away from the worldly things. And yet, there is a path through and back to the inspired state, too, which I find in creativity. Bliss, I find, drives creativity and creativity drives bliss. But lot of bliss can kind of bleach you out it seems. When you have been “to the mountain” what do you do after that? I think you really have to look carefully to see the sublime in everything. I think bliss can also alter your physiology, which is itself a bit of a challenge many may not recognize right off. I remind myself that every moment in this system of reality is an amazing creative miracle where energy turns itself inside out to appear as matter to us and that the whole shebang is being recreated nano-second by nano-second. Its pretty amazing. That is what I have to hold onto to, which sounds a little crazy (I admit).

What can I tell you that will feed your soul? What can I tell you that will help sharpen your awareness in just the right way? Maybe only you can do that, and maybe all I can ever hope to do is to inspire you to that place.

The paperwhites, which are in full bloom now in the front window of the gallery lean to the light and fill the air with this super sweet reminder of how precious nature finds recreating itself to be: it creates a scent so sweet and strong that it is hard for pollinators to resist. The creation will put on its best so it can continue, and here we are spinning through space, a part of this dance of creation.

It’s interesting how, at a time when I am attending to the inner work the least, issues of karma have resolved themselves. I had always wondered about the power of time on karmic glitches…I think people think how they are so permanent, and I think they are only insofar as we are tied to what those karmas represent. Some of them I think just age out, that is, their once-strong impression is now rendered like nothing after inactivity and shifting awareness from that place within where it lies. No longer being given sustenance, like leaves they fall and die, but remain all about us because conscious recognition hasn’t touched them, and it has always seemed that once the conscious or outer self acknowledges them, those karmic threads are fully transmuted and we are freed from their governing effects (see ‘triggers’).

What happened for fifteen years was a near-constant attending to this process as a result of a kundalini awakening. Its important, certainly, but a few years ago I noticed how so much of the energetic entanglements that I had in my field were resolving themselves one way or another. Some of it, though, seems to have happened in a more background fashion, made possible by simply not “gnawing” on it.

Recently, my ex wife showed up in order to express how she was sorry for how she had treated me over the years after our divorce (and during it). True, her bad treatment of me had spanned years, and true it had been persistent and it had been harrowing for me because of how manipulative the behavior was and how it included my children as emotional pawns in the process (something I was powerless to do anything about, to change, or to help my children with besides grinning and bearing it). The process was one of emotional abuse on her part, seeking to hurt me because I dared stand up for what was right at one point in our divorce process, while my children were used as a way to get at me by trying to alienate them.

This experience was like living in a hall of mirrors where everything that was her fault was put onto me, a very strange form of misdirection and projection all at once. This person sought to try and destroy or spoil my relationship with not just my children but also with family members. In a strange way, people in my family had connections to either my ex or her new husband in odd entirely coincidental ways (a sister of mine employed her future husband before we ever divorced for instance).

I had been made into this monster who could not be treated like a normal human…not allowed to approach the house because clearly I was a danger. Park on the street, stuff like this, and stay away from the house (my house). I was never threatening, I never gave her a reason to treat me in this way. Turns out though that this is often how people are treated when targeted with parental alienation. The real person who was the danger was her, but when I tried to turn the tables on her at once point when she was tearing up my yard trying to turn around in my driveway, she pointed out how unsafe that would be, making my daughter cross the street to get to the car, which was something that I was made to do for years. So much of this was small and petty, but it was persistent and wearing. My children were told I didn’t love them, care about them, and wouldn’t be there for them. How do you explain to people how what someone who is saying with utter confidence and certainty (it seems) is utter and complete BS? I was completely outmatched by this person who grabbed the microphone and said whatever she wanted to that she thought would bring me down. Years later a psychic friend said it was like street fighting. It was horrible, that is true. I mostly just bore it without saying anything. To protest would be like throwing gas on the fire. The point was never about being right but about her maintaining a position and behavior toward me that was persistently denigrating.

It began in earnest when awakening came and instead of giving something away in my divorce that belonged to me (an inherited piece of property), I realized if the shoe had been on the other foot I would have never thought to ask. Because of this, I was rendered persona non grata where my family was concerned. A propaganda campaign began and continued for twelve years. Many family members saw through it, but for those who were not in the know, they were swayed by it. My relationships suffered. Parental alienation is what this is called and it has now been entered in the DMSV of psychological disorders acknowledged by the psychiatric community. What underpins its effectiveness is the bias of “S/he wouldn’t be saying all of this crazy stuff if there wasn’t anything to it!” The Nazi propagandist Goebbels said that the bigger the lie, the less likely a person was to disbelieve it. A firm assertion by a trusted parent saying that the father in truth didn’t love the child nor anyone in the family and was just off doing his own thing without a care for the family is hard for a child to shrug off in some cases. For a child vulnerable enough emotionally to consider this a possibility, the results are devastating.

Further, children of this form of abuse who internalize the brain washing, do not remember the parent taking part in the alienation, instead, once the narratives have been internalized, the child actually believes that s/he came up with the opinion all on their own. Try convincing a child that they had been fed this negativity once their ego’s think they came up with it on their own. No matter what I said or did, that child could not be dissuaded from their opinion of me. It was a nightmare. The majority of children so treated and affected do not see the deception nor do they reunite with the alienated parent.

Many parents describe the behavior as being like their children joined a cult. That was exactly how I felt when I began reading about this type of behavior. For years I thought that somehow I was at fault. Waking up I realized that no, the fault was not with me, at least with many of the things that my soon to be ex tried to throw at me and my children. It was in many ways like a death, one in which I was shoved underwater and allowed to drown. By not being able to see my children, by having game after game played on me about visitation with my children, it was like having the life being wrung out of me. In the literature it is stated that the parent most often the target of this behavior is the more sensitive one, the more loving one. It is hard I think to quantify love this way, but in this case being able to not manipulate your children emotionally to have the other parent alienated and to not turn them against half of their extended family members I would say yes, that is a more loving approach for a parent.

End part 1