Release Work

Every awakening comes with your own past. Awakening is a substantive effort on the forgotten part of your being to overcome that past.

This is very much tied to our neurophysiology. Without going into an egg-headed discourse into all of it I can simply say that through these two brains we all have, we begin using them in a new way. This can be mediated by the power of awakening. Everything is swept up in this: mind, brain, body, emotion, and soul.

You don’t have to know anything about awakening in order to reach it….but some knowledge can be helpful to identify why some things are happening as they are. Sometimes root causes are seen in a new light as it relates to our neurophysiology. Sadly, little research is being done in the field as it relates to liberation or “enlightenment” from a neurophysiological perspective. You can see I don’t much like that word, but I use it because it points in a direction.

I have said before that if you do not have a teacher or guru, you can be put in a position where you have to rely on yourself. By doing this, you dig deep for the resources that are there. I found that I could speak to the energy and it would respond. At one point in my awakening experience I had the energy say to me that I needed to go to the liquor store and buy something strong and drink only enough to get tipsy. Now what I can tell you is that NO teacher anywhere would have told me to do this and NO teacher has probably EVER prescribed drinking as a way of doing a release, and yet this is just what the “voice” said for me to do. I am not a drinker, so this was new to me.

The next day I did as I was told and got tipsy as prescribed. The next morning upon waking, I stood up out of bed and had something fall away, right off the bat (this was out of the LV meridian line near the hip). I had no idea what it was that released, but it did, just like that. There was this spreading flow and awareness of a calmer more still energy taking its place. This is the advantage of listening to the inner voice and teacher within, and I insist that you will begin hearing it when you are open to it and when you turn inwardly enough asking yourself the question and waiting for a reply (which could come in a variety of ways depending on your turn of mind or constitution).

NO, I am not suggesting that you try and drink your blocks away. It only worked that one time and the intelligence in the energy knew exactly what it was doing when it told me to do that. My describing this incident is to show that we have a superintelligence within us, but you must learn to rely on it in order for it to work (and you risk being taken in by someone’s perhaps ill-conceived notions for how to go about doing things if you buy into another authority who may or may not have as good discernment or observatory skills as you do).

Yes, I am suggesting that IF you rely on yourself, you can do things that no teacher would ever think of suggesting. You of course have to decide if you are game for it and if it asks you to hurl yourself off a mountain, I would say that you should rethink doing that!

That said, though, having other perspectives can be helpful in the case where someone has gone through something similar as you have, or someone who has a similar turn of mind as you and had to navigate certain self-imposed hurdles before you. For as woo-woo as it seems, when the need is there to know something that your own mind will resist unless it is presented to you by someone else who you see as an “authority” then that person will invariably arrive in perfect timing. Those are the gifts of the universe. They can happen as often as is needed and the way to this is not by way of some rational process. It is not accidental, but it always appears to be that way. It feels like it cannot be controlled or milked by the rational mind. That is true. Your hand must be open to this universe because it (the universe) has a habit of stepping in if you provide the means for it to do so. The fewer conditions you place on it, the more the possibilities grow.

Ask what is in your highest. Be humble in this and you will get just what you need for that time. But this wont necessarily be monolithic in nature but perhaps only for that one moment in order to get you over an important hurdle.

Random people can unwittingly play the role necessary for you at the time. It could be someone standing in a coffee shop, or an old friend who offers something up in conversation that you have never mentioned before but bears on an important issue you are dealing with at the time. While we see these as coincidences, they gain greater significance when they are located in close proximity in time to the thought (not action) that originated in your mind such as, “I need to figure out a new way of breaking through into bliss when the energy is making me feel agitated…” only to step into a shop where someone has a book that is entitled, “Breakthrough To Bliss” and you were just thinking about this need two minutes prior to seeing the book, for instance.

What seems to happen is there is a need on your part but NO expectation of an outcome. Your need APPEARS to be working with the universe in helping to create this magnificent, purely coincidental, event that helps to answer an important question that probably couldn’t be answered any other way at that time.

Now the real mind-bender to consider in an example such as this is by following cause and effect. In a case like this, time travel must surely be involved OR you are reaching out subconsciously feeling that there is the book ahead of you, which triggers your asking the question about bliss. If time travel is involved, in which your thoughts reach out to the nearest possible target that prompts the person to later consider taking that very book with them where you will then see the book, then it is equally mind-bending.

Whatever the case may be, something impossible is happening according to materialistic science. It feels like magic, a synchronicity, but it helps I think to reveal how consciousness and matter are innextricably bound or connected.

I know I digress, but it helps to make the point that the universe can conspire to assist you in a myriad of ways if you let go of the mindset that you need to be in control. I have found the more I have left it up to the universe, the more this phenomenon happens. It also appears to me to be consistent with the shift into the right brain, which is very different in its focus and approach, which is to be receptive, to allow, instead of the narrowly focused left brain (and its form of ego) that is trying to control everything and insisting on precise outcomes. It seems that the left actually breaks the “waveform” of phenomenon that allows for these events to happen in the first place. I say this after years of observation, and it appears after hundreds of such events like this, that there is a connection. I could be wrong, and if I am, I would like to know others’ observations and ideas.

The rational mind has little involvement in this process. The left brain is the catalog of past experience. Drawing from it is mechanical and limited, and if your present situation mirrors precisely some prior experience, you are in luck. More often than not, the present moment will offer up something entirely new that might look like something from the past but will bear an important new lesson that simply cannot be understood using that catalog of prior experience. In truth, it is this past experience that clouds our judgment often, biases us, and sends us off in wrong directions.

The left brain is only a tightly focused servant because the power of seeing the NOW belongs to the right brain. Unlike the left, the right does not focus on particulars and instead sees everything in context, as wholes, as relationships, and helps us to get through the big thorny issues by helping to place what we think is important into a better more accurate perspective. We think of this part of the brain as the feminine side of ourselves, but neither brain has a true gender since both men and women have them. That doesn’t stop cultures all across the Earth from gendering these two modes of awareness, though. I did the same in the beginning when I was trying to get a grip on what kundalini was doing.

It is easy not to take the right brain seriously because of our history of the “default mode” of most human consciousness which has shown a habit of being locked in a kind of cognitive prison for so long, which is to say that the race as a whole has been left brain dominant for a very long time. I know how this might sound, but having been an artist my whole life I considered of all people I was more right brained than anyone else I knew except maybe for other creatives like me. But once awakening came, I saw that I was nowhere near as right brained as I could be. I had also lived with this inherited left brain dominance growing up which is the default mode for most people here. Language is developed in most people in the left brain. So are process-based tasks. Any discipline that has certain steps in a certain order are most certainly being mediated and kept the by the left brain.

This isn’t to say that the right brain has no say, but recent research has shown that the left brain acts as a brake against the right. We constantly “shush” our right brains and thus become largely unfamiliar with its power and capabilities.

Waking up involves a shift in how the brain is being used, and I think that I have found evidence for how the body is involved in the process. It has to do with the significant number of neurons that reside in the gut, the heart, liver, and kidneys (in descending order of concentration). It is an observed quality of awakening to feel stored emotion to come out of the body. I think the simple answer is that the brain may in fact relegate difficult and unprocessed emotion to the body to hold onto so it doesn’t overwhelm the brain itself. Consider it a kind of annex, or maybe a graveyard full of triggers. The work of many awakenings is in clearing out that “inventory.” The power of kundalini naturally gets to work clearing out the mess to the degree that the person doesn’t resist those efforts. I have seen people who have awakened who went at all of this in their usual “mental” fashion (left brain controlling the show, using the rational mind as if this was ever a way of resolving an existential crisis) and it never works well. Using the old default mode also only appears to forestall progress.

Opening up to The Mystery and being humble before the force of this energy in your body and consciousness can have tremendous benefits. This is for the simple reason that you are no longer using reason in the way you have used it before. Be comfortable with not knowing, and learn to trust that this force has a handle on even the hardest knots in the pit of your soul. The answer isn’t in wrestling with it but in offering it up, loosening your grip on whatever it is. Being willing to see that old stored emotion once more for the final time can be of some use in this work, but always without grasping for it, or trying to hold onto it because you have grown comfortable with that little prison box that this emotion represented to you for so long. This approach also helps to engage your intuitive capabilities. I can tell you that the harder the issue, the more important it is to acknowledge it without getting macabre in your curiosity for knowing exactly where it came from. Was it when I was two and was traumatized by a stranger? Was it from that time I nearly drowned in the river? Who cares. Be a passerby. Don’t rubberneck as it goes on by. Don’t try and grab it back.

The yogi and yogini prepared for awakening, for kundalini, by practicing yoga. The benefit that it offered was a way to help clear the body of these “knots” or samscara’s (soul scars) prior to kundalini rising. Further, with this release work being done for decades sometimes, it meant that when kundalini did rise, it did so in a more peaceful way. I remember reading in a book about kundalini that the force of prana is itself smooth like a still lake. But why is kundalini so intense?

For most today, kundalini has been happening to people with little to no practice and certainly with no clearing work being done, or awareness of the benefits of clearing work. Many Westerners simply come to the phenomenon with great intensity because kundalini amplifies consciousness and there is a backlog of very intense things inside of them. If you have stored emotion there, then those emotions will be amplified and it will make it seems as though kundalini is this incredibly intense thing. I had my doubts when I read that about kundalini. Calm like a lake? Really??

As I worked through the backlog of stored emotion (and I certainly made an industry of it in my life, a daily awareness of what the energy was now amplifying and showing me was there), over years of work I found that yes, things were calming down (release by release). I even worried that the energy might not be as potent as before and might not work as well in clearing out the junk that remained. It took me a while to get over the idea that prana was some intense fiery thing. It is in the beginning, but to the degree that a person has that backlog of junk. I also suspect that people who have these calm awakenings that they have done a lot of work in their past, even before this lifetime.

There is a risk that Westerners who have a backlog of stored emotion to think that kundalini is this wildly intense thing when in fact it is the energy shining through and animating all of the stored emotion that needs attention. And yet, for Westerners, how else are they going to clear this material except with kundalini there motivating them and making them more aware?

If I walked up to the average person and told them that they were a storehouse of repressed emotion, they would either get upset, defensive, or think I was some kind of crazy. Maybe all three. But this condition is where we are with regards to humans right now. Just look at how much raw emotion there is in people today. Everyone almost to a person will want to say that it is because of something outside of themselves that is causing it to happen. We know that this is just not so, however. Buddha (Gautama) once said, in essence, no one MAKES you feel anything that you yourself have not chosen to feel already. The answer is found within. Untangle that trigger and you will find peace. It will be gone if you do it right, and it will represent a void within that can now be filled with Presence, awareness, and peace.

Progress to this goal can be upended when the person yearns for the intensity of kundalini and how it makes them feel. Work can cease or slow down because the self is afraid of losing that quality. But what will you lose? You will lose your inner chaos, the fear, uncertainty, and deep yearning for something that you are not yet anchored in. You will yearn to find the matching chaos (intensity of experience) in others, in experiences, and material things. You will look for it in all of the places except where it matters most, which is in your own consciousness. We do this because we have a half-blind sense that there is something that we hate or dislike about ourselves, but what it is we just aren’t completely sure. The risk is in losing all of this and finding peace.

Some people are so inured to this inner loathing or emotional dis-ease and chaos that they cleave to an energy that is still burning intensely because of the remaining junk it is shining through. The self gets used to this and craves that intensity while not realizing just how incredible being clear within can lead to yet another new doorway opening within consciousness to what we might call the Super Self. Before clearing is done, we dip into this world (of the Super self) but are only tourists in that land. We come back “here” to our squalid little prison of mind in order to feel some semblance of normal. But it isn’t normal. It is only normalized. Habit.

I have watched as teachers in the field of Western Awakening have “grabbed back” their old traumas in order to fold them back into their experience and teaching in order to keep that ratty old blanket near them.

They do an amazing job rationalizing how their grabbing back is actually high-minded and part of the new paradigm. I keep seeing this with one awakening influencer whose way of weaving her own dysfunction or neurosis back into what appears as an enlightened piece of thinking is quite brilliant.

It’s done in a way that makes a sort of sense if you share the same blind spots as she does. It’s well crafted. It also acts as a sand bar in the healing process because her work depends on another person who is broken who defeats the partbers’ efforts at trying to escape the old patterns. The reason you can’t escape the fallen world, or have hitches in that process is because of another person who is holding you back because that person is operating from the wrong density of consciousness! It makes a kind of sense IF you fall for the idea that you are somehow powerless in some way, which is the wound that binds and blinds the people who are drawn to this kind of work.

What they don’t see is that they alone are responsible for where they are and are not dependent on another person. When divine union relues on another to get to a certain place, it is no longer divine union. That’s because it isn’t based on prior notions we have created but depends on a much simpler requirement which is simply BEING THERE. My being there is up to me, up to how I navigate through my consciousness to arrive in the state of innermost union. It is very simple. Another person can be inspired by my state, and can even be entrained by my own consciousness in order to “get” where I am, but it is always an inside job.

I bring this up because I have even done something similar in the past myself. It always sought to justify why I was still hanging on to some hard harsh emotion often centered around my being wronged or hurt by someone. It always created a blindspot in my awareness and kept me from seeing the whole picture. There is no substitute for doing the work.

For me, I would have never known how to divest myself of old stored trauma’s and little glitches hither and yon were it not for awakening. That said, yogi’s have been preparing as part of their preparations for a long time, and you don’t need awakening to do it. You can start today. Luckily, there is a branch of therapy now that is called somatics which recognizes that the body has a role to play in storing memories. As I have mentioned earlier, I think there is a physiological basis for this with the rich accumulation of neurons throughout the body.

It may be that the body becomes the annex or graveyard for the unresolved issues that the brain would prefer not to be burdened with. It may have a basis in our survival as a species.

The good thing is that there are so many forms of somatic work from yoga, chi gung (or gong), ecstatic dance, acupuncture, reiki, Trauma Release Exercise (TRE), cranio sacral therapy and massage that focuses on the meridians and facia as a way of releasing stored energy in the body. There are also variant that practitioners have developed that use clusters of these somatic therapies and even ones that may represent new modalities that also work.

I had several therapy sessions with a Kahuna healer that worked miracles for me, and I have had a massage therapist who understood stored emotion who did some digging into areas where I was having discomfort to help release them. In the field of substances, ayahuasca has gained significant use for aiding in releasing stored junk, as has a similar substance from the buffo alivarius (sp?) frog from South America. Hypnosis can work very well also for some people when the therapist is open to helping with relieving stored emotion. I think the trick is in finding which one works best for you.

What I have found is that when I really get into my body I become much more aware of the feelings of resistance that are present and then, by not being overly left-brained about it, I use intuition in finding ways of moving that open that area up. Instead of moving in a way that is locked up and stiff, the body begins to flow in new patterns. Sometimes being open to doing things differently can make all the difference. After a while, you can begin to feel those blocked areas open up and there is this greater flow of prana or energy that is hard to detect at first, but can result in a building sense of bliss. It’s interesting how guarded we are against allowing ourselves to feel good. Is that some Puritan sensibility rattling around in our heads and hearts?

There is a reason why breath work is so useful in relaxing the body: it is the one “in” to the autonomous nervous system that is easiest for people to tap into by using their breath in a way that signals to the brain that the body is in a relaxed state. It works so well that you can be in a high stress state and use breathing in the right way and you will in a matter of moments feel much better. Is it any wonder this is used in meditation work so much?

The interesting thing about doing the work ahead of awakening is that it can sometimes clear the way for awakening to happen. I credit an interaction with someone who effectively acted as a confessor for me where I was able to dissolve a long standing frustration and guilt I had about something that had happened earlier in my life that left me frustrated in trying to understand what it was all about and left me feeling like I wasn’t doing enough. When its you against the universe it can be very easy to dissolve those old hard feelings. When that happened, I felt eighty pounds lighter and within three days I was having my first bout of non-dual awareness. That cracked the cosmic egg for me and people began coming out of the woodwork to supply me with just the right tools to aid in my next steps. It all happened like clockwork. They say that when the student awakens the teacher appears. In my case it was a long chain of experiences and events that had something to teach me and each one got substantively deeper into the weeds until I found myself in entirely new territory. It’s enough to make you believe in a higher power (probably because that is indeed the case).

I will say that in some ways I felt like I was the last to “get the memo” and I had the sense that something was up, I just wasn’t in on what it was for a while. It was as though every move I made was perfect for the moment and it may have been that if I had known more about what was happening I might have engaged my left rational brain and ego and caused the process to stop. It was very much like feeling as though there was a deeper wave coming in from consciousness that I found was created in a space within that I had no control over (and that was the point). The right brain is not a “doer” but has all the power to comprehend but perhaps not to act outwardly. Instead, it receives and what it gets is from the higher realms of consciousness. This isn’t something that you can parse rationally, but this other (right brain) mode of thought seems to know exactly what needed to be done as it needed to be done. It can leave a rational minded person feeling out of sorts. Get used to it. Be ready for the mystery and don’t try to control it is my advice. Once the tipping point happens, you will need its wisdom to get through it. Its a bit like having a cook in the kitchen that manages to get it done much faster than you could ever dream possible. You spend a lot of time just watching and observing, learning to be content not to stir the broth or to make sure the sauce is being seasoned correctly (it is). Eventually, you will find that the cook is actually you, and this might take some time to work through.

Doing the work before awakening will help prepare the ground for later. The idea that awakening is some novel state is itself wrong I think. It isn’t for the chosen few or people who are somehow special. I think it is how we are meant to develop, but it is a shift and a big change at first. It can be disruptive to your life at first, but in time you will come to see that what was lost in the shift simply didn’t serve you.

This work can lead to being less reactive and that can lead to lasting peace, whether it is done before or after awakening. However, the choice of being happy will always be yours to choose. If you think the process will somehow make you happy on the other end, that just isn’t so. Like you choose what thoughts you think, so too do you choose your emotions. When you do release work, you are no longer a slave to the stored emotion that was once there so whatever got released is now no longer sending out waves of hard to control emotion that pops up for some unknown reason. This work results in not dwelling on the things you once dwelled on and the old triggers are simply gone. This is done piecemeal, so be patient. It is like chiseling away at a mountain side. This can take years, but if you stick to it, the day will come when you turn around and see that you have just moved a mountain of things.

When you can learn to see that no one makes you feel any way at all is where you can much more clearly see who owns what. Yes, there are people acting out of ignorance and a lack of awareness all the time. The world is full of this, and everyone has their day when they lose their shit. Billions of people having a bad day once a month is enough to make crazy stuff happen all the time, so be patient with people. Most often compassion and understanding is stronger than a judgment. Simply demanding that the world conform to your vision of what it must be is unrealistic. Instead, people have this inner compass in them and they just need help feeling it. You don’t need to draw a road map for them because all of this is mediated by feeling and the courage to delve within. It’s hard when you are being preached at to do this. Sometimes a good example is more powerful an agent of change than anything else. If everyone tended to their own backyards we would be in a much better place. You can’t get a flower to blossom by demanding that it do so. Watering it and caring for it will do more than anything else, and the same is true for people.

Westerners are now more aware of all of these tools than ever before and it will take time for people to use them and to find their way. There is though an inexorable force that is pulling at each one of us and that force is a light that is pure love, an example for how we each can eventually become if we stay true to our efforts and our desire. And while many will say desire is the root of all suffering I can’t say that I agree. I think expectations that are rooted in the old “catalog” of past experiences, which will almost always be unrealistic in the present moment are the chief reason why we suffer (with a lower case “s”). Desire can be coupled with expectations that may be entirely out of whack with what is and in that case, you suffer again. Desire though can draw you along a path for decades with no results in sight, but will help you reach your goal. It is even possible for desire to be just that, pure desire, and when it is alloyed with the right kind of mind can be a potent vehicle for change. Ask the tantrics about this, where the way is not around an issue but to go right into the thick of it and use bliss to cleanse the whole place of its error. You can’t feel bliss when cleaving to the rational. Only in surrender does bliss come in a way that it remains as a constant companion. Before, after, or during…it seems all paths are possible, so don’t sweat the small stuff (it’s all small stuff).

Advertisement

Why I Am Here

Part of me didn’t want to come here, but another part had made a promise to.

This world is like the womb of heaven. It awaits its opposite to bring heaven to earth. It is how the soul guaranteed that we would enter into relationship: with ourselves, with each other, with matter itself. Our myths contain elements about this union of opposites. I see them as much in us as in the world…for we are a part of it. We are learning about the aspects related to creative energy. As our relationships often bear out, we are imperfect with it. These polarities exist in our two brain hemispheres, our two sides (left and right) mirror it as do the sexes, the yin and yang. The great secret is it has been in us as well as outside of ourselves.

This relationship is multidimensional in nature, existing at many levels at once. It is in the atom, the cell, the soul, and exists as a unifying element that can lead us to our salvation. It can also lead us to our doom if we refuse to understand it.

Presence here, to be more realized, has always meant breathing awareness into this world, into ourselves, to bear heaven to earth, to recognize a trinitarian consciousness whereby two opposites within merge and birth a third consciousness, a synthesis of the two, an ascendant aspect or quality in our consciousness that leads us each to a greater life, better awareness, and with time: bliss. Some fold that quality into higher vibrational relationships that offer redemption and cleansing. It can also be done alone, and is done alone (even when in relationship). It is along one end of the spectrum of awakening dealing with the archetypes of the divine feminine and masculine.

This redemption isn’t achieved by believing that earthly existence is somehow flawed, broken, or inherently bad. It is instead waiting for us to make it into what we will. Each one of us has a part to play. You need only listen to your own inner voice. The Buddha within points to this inner knowledge as did the Christ…and both tend to point away from physical life as some ultimate answer seems to loom. The ultimate has always been here in the power of the present moment.

The delights here are a mirror of what exists in spirit. They always have. To what degree are we each good at translating that reality here on earth? Right. There is a lot of work to be done.

I find that the way into this work is to regard our experience here as filled with possibility and adventure. The sensual need not be eschewed, for our desire isn’t a force leading to our downfall, but to its opposite, if we can realize what the forces are at work: opposites not made to snare you, but to teach you. When we surrender to them a transcendent quality in us knows just what to do.

Be an earthling, take part in its wonders, know that this is a place to learn, a place where we each agree to dream an experience that has in the past felt like a “fall” into density. I came here to raise that dense vibration up by adding something to it in my own personal experience…to experience it, to share it, and then to tell at least one or two more souls about the alchemy that our souls and bodies bear. So much shame that was not necessary.

For me, the height of the spiritual is seeing the physical as an important part in the cosmic play. This is not a place to be feared but a place to be redeemed…and we are the ones whose beliefs need to be remade and redeemed.

Physical and spirit, two ends of a spectrum. I leave you with the words of a man who got it:

A New Project

Life is full of surprises.

Copyright, all rights reserved

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.

Thanks for stopping by!

Ghosts

We invited our ghosts in with a gesture now long forgotten. They have been haunting us ever since. We love our ghosts for how they ride us, making us feel like weaker versions of ourselves, defeated. We are such curious creatures for how much we love what we dislike. We protest against such truths, but there it is.

A gnawing sense that all is not right in a marriage, we tell ourselves that it could be worse, or how we swallow so much and brush aside what offends our hearts until we turn ’round to find ourselves dunn-hearted, isolated, and alone in our theater of ghosts. Jobs we love to hate, politicians, the line at the store, the broken clock, computer, or way home…we love to hate it all. Why?

It takes great love to not hate ourselves for this, but to summon that love that, when felt, extends to everything it touches, including ourselves is one of the kindest of things we can do not just for ourselves, but for the good that will come to those around us. We take those parts of ourselves, in love, like how a parent loves their child, in order to show ourselves the way to a better place, where the ghosts are free to live their truer lives – no longer unknowingly grasped within our hearts and bodies, no longer held to a less than perfect expectation that our underwhelm has trapped them in. In so doing we appeal to the greater lights of our becoming to incrementally find our way home – which is itself a constant process as we go. What once was profane is rendered sacred, what was empty is now full, and what was forgot is remembered.

Awakening Isn’t A Mystery

There are a handful of methods that have been used down through time to liberate the mind from the shackles of its previous life, leading it to a new dawn of self realization. The methods are all very similar and they involve looking within. So we have meditation and there are visualization exercises, too, designed to bring about a condition that happens once this inner switch is flipped.

I hear those who say “you cannot induce awakening intentionally…” but you can. My old friend Jensen, who I spoke to not long ago after not being in touch for close to a decade described his experience for me when he went to a recreation department class on kundalini meditation….and awakened kundalini. I have a close family friend who went to a Vipissana retreat, the method that Guatama Buddha recommended, and it was there that something shifted and her life was forever altered. I had gotten the sense that this old friend had become awakened but wasn’t using terms that described it directly, so I asked her if she had had any remarkable experiences in the last few years. Vipissana is a retreat where one is silent for about ten days and meditates the whole time. Gopi Krishna sat in the early morning hours bidding an energy rise up his spine and it did, forever changing his life from then onward. I was given a meditation technique whose central method was to quiet the mind. I had meditated up to that time for years and no awakening. Once I was given this technique, I had results immediately. Within a week I found myself suffused in a brilliant white light, and wondering what had just happened was enough to cause the brilliance to vanish. I had managed to begin using a part of my mind that was usually shut down so much that I didn’t fully know that it even existed in me. I thought that it existed in other people, that it was something that people developed over lifetimes. While I think there is some truth to this, call it a gradual ripening into a place that is suitable for awakening, I also observe that there is something much like a switch, and one of the ways to it is through meditation. I know that my meditation got me there, because it was only after meditation and the use of hemisync discs that induced a deep theta state, that I entered into a period of high strangeness that culminated in a full rising event of kundalini.

Was I intentionally seeking to awaken kundalini? No. Was I seeking to wake up somehow? Yes. It had been part of my life for many decades before this. I was a seeker after all.

That said, there are people who haven’t used meditative practice to awaken. There are people who woke up in nature, walking down the street, and one case describes being scared to death nearly as the “jolt” that brought on awakening. I wasn’t meditating when kundalini rose, it just happened as an outcome of a process that began much like an automated system produces an end result. All of the changes that took place over the course of five months were autonomous in nature. I was little more than an observer watching and wondering what these sensations were about.

To be clear, not everyone does this. Awakening processes are all very individual and each are unique. Looking back on it the process I was going through was being driven by something inside of me, but I was clueless as to what all of the symptoms meant over those five months. Clearly, I was hallucinating some things…like the voices I heard and the Native American drumming and singing, all may have been psychic energy expressing itself. The dreams, which were like a giant inventory punctuated with brilliant and vivid imagery of water and light and a mysterious language embedded in water and light, made me wonder just what was up.

Some people I have known awakened when they met someone. That in itself was enough to trigger them. In one case, with someone I have interviewed for the site, the person had known the other in another life and they shared a karmic thread, one which they didn’t see for what it was, and was taken by the power of the draw. Ultimately they didn’t resolve their karma together, they each resolved it individually.

Buddha said it right when essentially he said no one makes you feel a certain way or makes you react a certain way. You do. At the root of karma are our honest reactions and feelings. Some feelings are based in beliefs and thinking that are not aligned to our truer higher selves. Is it something that the cosmic judge will put us away for forever? There appears to be no such judge, save for our own inner compass. In NDE’s the only person judging the person was themselves, and no one, not a one, being sent to hell. Yes, there are accounts of people going to a dark place they thought was hell, but pay attention to the account of the NDE closely: in every case the person winds up in the light.

In my research it appears that awakening is essentially like a near death experience in that there is a communion with the energy that represents “the light.” Not all awakenings involve a white light like mine did. Some involve vibration, heat, sound, or other representations of energy. At the end of the day, this is what out minds and bodies are trying to explain to ourselves or to interpret, which is that awakening is at its core an energetic event. Along with these events can come karmic relationships, and they wind up being powerful movers sometimes. But for as powerful as they are for inspiring change, often the change is limited in all truth. It is, though, enough for most people. It “gets your attention” as one person once explained it to me. It certainly does. But beyond that, what does it materially do? I myself really thought I had to work something out with this person who I had karma with. I even knew what the karma was, as I have seen most of the karmas from others who I have known who were like this.

We think that it is something we create together, but in truth, we don’t. All of the karma that I ever worked through was always something that I worked out on my own. It is rare to find someone who is as engaged as you are in wanting to work through the same set of issues as yourself. My “twin” often went into meltdowns when I tried to push the energy to begin clearing our karma. Something inside of her simply resisted it. She wasn’t ready. No harm no foul. And sitting alone, a number of years later, I thought that I had to work it out with her, and in so doing, or trying to do it, I asked her what it was she needed from me. Her response surprised me. “This awakening helped me so much. It changed my life and kept it from being ordinary…and I am a better person for it. What do I need from you? I don’t need anything from you: I am happy!”

And just like that, it was done. Poof. The karmic threads fell away. But what was it that did it? What was holding up the train? My feelings were holding up the train, that’s what. I thought there was something I needed to do. There was nothing I needed to do. It could have been over years earlier, but I labored under the false assumption that we had to do this together. It’s a good thing that I reached back to her all those years later (seven years later in fact), because if I hadn’t, I might still be feeling this draw created by the charge of feeling like I owed someone something or that something wasn’t finished right or done. Except that it was in everyone’s mind but mine.

You might be like this somewhere and you don’t even know it. You might be taken in by the love that you feel. It’s good to feel it, but I can tell you it wont take you anywhere significant because the force is for your change, not anyone else. In order to go anywhere significant with another in such a rarefied environment, you need to be exactly the same and respond and want in exactly the same way. This experience makes you think that you are one, that you are twins. Yes, we are ALL ONE, we are, but goodness sakes, we also have free will and individuality and for as much as the Advaita people want to say it, self is real and ego serves an important purpose in learning while here. That means that individuality is the real wild card.

I have tried to help so many people over the years and what I have found is that the bulk of the advice was unheeded or not acted on. And you know what, it’s perfect because at the end of the day a person has to be ready to see their lessons in front of them. In fact they have to own them before they see them.

A teacher once told me to be careful about telling someone something they weren’t ready to hear because most often people will reject perfectly good advice because it comes from the outside. Not all information from the outside is bad. In fact, we each have blinders about our issues in life. A close friend can see our junk so much easier for the simple reason that it isn’t theirs and that they don’t have the same blinders. But after that, as for what to do or how to do it, fagetaboutit! It really has to be an inside job from there on out. But listen to your friends when they are trying to waive you off the runway when you are trying to take your jet full-throttle across the runway. They might just be seeing the tire that is flat that you doggedly are refusing to look at. And yes, that is a metaphor… But even more importantly are the people who think they have insight into your life when they don’t, when their insight is little more than their own beliefs wrapped up in such a way that they are fooled into thinking what they have created is genuine. Already two such people have described events they knew to be real when there was nothing to them…at all. They convince themselves they are psychic and so they are…no matter what. They may have been at some point, but somewhere something happened. It’s a bit like the Hollywood psychic saying, “I see a woman in your life right now…” with the respondent saying, “Yeah, no woman in my life, nope…” Only to be followed with, “I see you received a promotion!”

“I’m self employed, so no promotions really…” Humility and self honesty are critical components to this. Mercy…where was I?

The most successful methods shut down thought and keep you present and aware. You aren’t shutting down, you are shutting down the monkey mind. When that happens, you are that much closer to the recognition that takes place that everyone experiences, which is nonduality, the awareness and experience that everything is One and everything is connected. Kundalini, is one step further than that where the portion of consciousness that is able to understand what nonduality feels like then takes it one step further and beings a process of churning consciousness in the hopes that something breaks free. While the Hindu systems of yoga and meditative practices all say do this work before you awaken Westerners simply do not do this work. the good news is that kundalini itself will cleanse the system the Hindu call nadi, and much of the fireworks you read about as it relates to awakening in the West is attributed to clearing that kundalini can do. Nadi are seen as channels in the body that carry prana. The meridian system in Chinese medicine maps out the same energy even though it is called chi (qi). Going back lifetimes, the idea of union within was learned through the systems alive in various cultures I have lived in that have ritual forms of union like hieros gamos in its many different incarnations. In this there is implicit an understanding of awakening since they involve elements that are identical to one another.

After attempting to awaken and not succeeding, what is missing may be your being ripe for the experience. When someone I know attempted to force an awakening years ago, I was witness to someone who was off her rocker for most of the time. It sounds harsh, but it was true. Was this person always this way, I wondered? Maybe. Or maybe what kundalini did was to drive the shadow out into the light….with the exception that this person wasn’t letting go. She just wasn’t ready. Friends questioned whether she had actually had a real awakening. It was real, even if she forced it by utilizing my energy in the etheric. And on the flip side you can have someone who wants to awaken and despite all efforts, they just don’t or can’t. Any number of hurdles stand before them. You can lead a horse to water, but we all must learn to drink ourselves. The woman I knew in 500 B.C. had in her an inability to be happy where she was. Other than that, she was an incredible person. That pattern is still playing out today and there is nothing that I can do to change it, and now I am at peace with it being that way. She will change once she knows that it is an issue for her and can really see it for herself. Telling her it is an issue would likely cause her to get upset and angry, even go into denial. She has to figure it out on her own. She has to get to that place where she really think that she was the one who had it all figured out (even though people may have been trying to tell her this for years…who knows really if that is so, but these things have a way of happening like this) And really, that is good because waking up is about growing up spiritually. It will only ever work when we take those steps to the water ourselves.

Awakening isn’t a mystery though…not as deep a mystery as we would like it to be. We may not always understand it, but it is a phenomenon tied closely to our consciousness (because it is a function of it) and as such it is not some exotic phenomenon. It isn’t for the lucky few, the elite or chosen. It is a state that everyone can experience when they are ready. I once tried to explain this to a friend and I said to her that awakening is like a second puberty, a growth into a new state of being. You are still you but this energy has helped to divest you of a lot of the programming that was cast into you since infancy. And to what end? To know more of the truth both of reality and of ourselves.

It’s Worth It

I wish I could tell you about what I feel. There are no words to contain this. I do try, though. My being is a swirl of bliss if I let the reflexive thoughts stop. That bliss would make me blush, running red-faced from the room. Hours have been spent lying down, unmoving, caught in the grace and transcendent wonder as worlds would shift and move through me like some cosmic broadcast. We are all like radios, I thought. I would realize my capacity for realizing dimensional aspects of reality and the Source which I could not explain using words was the best way for grasping this new realm of experience. It was curious, too, how just a look could contain it all. This is perhaps why love is so powerful because at this level, it may be one of the few states that can contain and be aware of the multitudes inherent in reality. Feeling, I found, was how the universe lives and breathes (and responds to you) while the rational was designed to be limited because the feeling mind isn’t. Like man and wife, they compliment each other. I became a lover, but one who, in time, was content to be alone, the beloved alive in my heart.

I was shown that this love was not divided out but included all forms. Like every Christian mystic, I was found wed to God, or like yogis deep in a trance of samadhi, I made the realization that love is the way. People don’t know this but in Luke Jesus uses three different forms of love to ask Peter if he loves him. One of the forms of love was erotic love. This passage was mistranslated by scribes in order to obfuscate the true meaning. Most Christians just think Jesus is trying to point out that Peter denied him three times. That wasn’t what was happening at all. Jesus was describing a love or encompassing a love that included all loves into one. It was not divided like my love, it was all of it in one go. Somewhere the power of this teaching got lost and there is not more about it in any of the sources coming down to us. Whether Jew or Hindu, the experience is the same. It was so for me, as well.

A friend and I spoke for the first time recently about my experience and he asked what it was like. It was the first time I had ever tried to explain it to a person who hasn’t awakened. I tried as simple and direct an approach as I could, saying, “You know that moment when you can feel the point of no return in orgasm?” He nods. “I feel that as a spiritual and physical energy all the time.” My friend said what I thought he would, which was, “That’s gotta be frustrating!” I replied, “At first it was. We are taught that we have to throw this energy away. I learned that when that energy accumulated, a thresh hold was crossed where this energy began healing me, transforming me. I could have become desperate, and sometimes I am, but it’s like the energy is there offering a chance for transmuting it where this unspeakable mystery is found…”

I feel like I have been disabused of my old habit of feeling, which is to always think of bliss as just sexual. It’s funny how the sexual bliss is the door to another finer state. It’s quite something. Maybe I’m not like Gautama Buddha who was said to have found solace in being able to feel such bliss without a partner. I am singular and happy, but we are social creatures who I don’t think have found peace with having intimate relationships while being so “spiritual.” There’s always someone who thinks this is about being a guru or a teacher and then the old memes get dragged out and it becomes a show. Maybe we just aren’t ready for this to enter all aspects of our lives. Such capable levels of deep communion can be scary sometimes. I get it. I’m still sitting here catching up with how awe inspiring nature is. Talk about the ultimate technology of the gods..

It’s been worth it to have been through so much. I stuck with it, stone by stone, grain by grain. After a few years I turned around and found my mountain had moved. Everything seemed so big at the beginning. It was like living in a blizzard of energy. Instinctively I knew my job was to drive the energy higher in order to…..to what? I soon learned what. I availed myself of every opportunity, every method, every happy accident and synchronicity that led to a release. I was in the belly of the dragon for years. There were times in the first few years when it all seemed bleak, but persistence has paid off.

I will also add, there are more things to heal, but the difference now is I don’t feel defeated by them. Every single thing dealt with was like acruing some cosmic grace that never went away. I have found great solace in this. I also found myself drifting away from “normal” human understanding. I fit less and less. That too was an adjustment. I would feel out of sorts, but then find a new angle with which to be able to relate to people I know and love.

Twenty four years ago I was awakened out of sleep by the angelic being who had appeared in my room only weeks before and I was told at four in the morning to go outside. There in the dark, he said “Look over here..” and motioned to the woods. There I saw a long hallway open up, kind of like something out of a Maurice Syndak story where the boy’s bedroom slowly turned into the wild outdoors. This hallway began tilting downward uneasily as I heard my guide say, “This lifetime is the conduit through which lifetimes may be healed or redeemed.” That hallway was shaken like a bag of potato chips to get the last bits out that were left. I was being shown how this would go and that my guide had been there since my birth, “Watching over you.” I realized the next day that this had happened on Good Friday.

Maui

Since then, I have been reminded, like on my trip to Maui, that I am the “doctor” for my soul. I was connected almost immediately to a past life on Maui with a man who had become stuck, mired in a poor definition of what being male was all about, and in a fifteen minute direct experience while driving along the coast, I was able to telepathically show him the way to feel. This was a past life of mine that was unfolding very quickly. He was taught to be the tough guy who didn’t talk about his feelings to the point that he was miserable. When I hear about “toxic masculinity” I think about how little our culture really understands how the culture carves out behavioral niches that are not natural or healthy for men (or women). A lot of toxic masculinity is the result of cultural expectations put onto men that are not natural. But what man feels like he can emote and not have his woman feel her stomach turning or feeling like her man is weak…because we misjudge just how attracted we are to these programmed responses. Men are silent strong and quiet. We support and the quieter we are the better. Don’t talk about your feelings as you really feel about them (millions of men quietly wanting to explode from holding it in or so disconnected from feeling that they don’t even know what the heck their feelings even are)/ While being the mute male sure makes women feel secure, it is making men neurotic in the same sort of way that women have difficulties with unrealistic expectations put on them as well. Okay, so in that moment I could enter his heart and show him how to feel, to bring in what he could not allow himself to feel (which he really needed but equated with being feminine or being weak). Immediately, there is this expansion, this joy that was completely new and then this guy lying in his hammock began crying for the first time in decades in his hammock. Crying because his life had been made into a kind of emotional sepia tone image. When I reached him, there was a tear coming down his eye already, but it was not a tear of feeling deeply, it was more the tear of a man who had been put into a vice and then crushed for about forty years. He had been holding it all in for so long and he was miserable. And with those tears, his hardness was gone. It bled out of him like puss from a wound. I had to pull over to cry, to let all that emotion out and to move it along so I didn’t get stuck, too. To him, my past life gentleman, I was like an ancestor spirit coming to him to give him that good medicine. Me, I just knew right where to go to find him perhaps at his worst point in time. I just had this feeling like I had to go to Maui, but not for the reasons other people go there. It felt like I really needed to go to get something done or to see something…it wasn’t really clear. It was ironic, too, because there he was, dressed in traditional Hawaiian garb, lying in a hammock near the beach, looking at the sunset in what most would describe as paradise, and he could not have been more miserable. All of this was done by way of feeling, and being open. Truth is, I don’t know much, a lot of this involves me being led by a more capable self. So when my guide showed me all of those doors in that hallway and explained how this life would be a life where I would be able to clear and cleanse my soul going back lifetimes, he wasn’t kidding. It has been quite the ride and there have been no dull moments. I am glad I am alone because if I were to describe this to a “normal” person, I would likely wind up in a hospital.

I do a lot of listening inwardly and outwardly…and I also realize that I have a turn of mind that allows me great flexibility emotionally so that I can be what these past selves need me to be in order to get over their own humps, glitches, and limits. Every time this happens I feel as if I am rewriting the past and improving the present and future lifetimes and timelines. While its hard to travel physically through time, your consciousness can travel back with ease! I can only imagine the ripple effects this will have. Has this ever played through your mind, the implications of this work? If nothing else, I was able to help a number of people in my soul, all past lives and one future lifetime, to reap greater reward through this awakening. No matter what happens, the ripple effects will be spreading out through time and consequence…

Sometimes I tell my higher self that I’d like to help others, too, but it tells me that in my evolutionary spiral, it is better to help myself so that in other lifetimes my purpose can be dedicated solidly with serving others.

There was a time when meditation was tricky. I would drift into another energy state, but it never went anywhere. I wondered what I was doing wrong. Only after opening up this powerful energy did I realize how solid our “veils” in consciousness can be. The rise of kundalini found me pierced from bottom to top seven times. It was as though I had been pierced and opened so that the flood waters from the cosmic could come in. They did. I had to navigate tsunami waves. It wasn’t always easy. With practice and familiarity, it got easier.

Sometimes “it” felt like a challenger, but it wound up an ally. It depended on what I brought to it. After months of struggle, the same struggle over five months, something finally clicked and everything went quiet. I mean to say, no thoughts. It was as novel a condition as weightlessness might be the first time in the body. After that, a great peace was available to me. I will also say that despite such a wonderful outcome, I would find plenty of instances where I would choose to be upset about something! We are so very human. Note to self: you can become a yogi overnight but you will still have to pay the rent…

I think that I think differently now. I rely on the grace of the universe saving me sometimes. It is tricky to be both Mr. Cosmic and Mr. Business at the same time. When I rely on God or the universe, it always seems to work out perfectly. A customer who is used to worrying about things, was put off by my peaceful demeanor recently. It was funny because she was speaking as though the thing out of place with me was this devil may care attitude that I seemed to have. Perhaps there is this idea that artists starve, that it’s a problem and since I am an artist, that is what must be happening. It isn’t happening, lol! “It must be so hard for you as an artist…” people often have said, and I kind of roll my eyes because it isn’t that way at all. It is a business like any other.

People incorrectly think that this is me not caring, which is my bliss state, when I care very much. I just don’t care to think about or worry about the same things other people worry about. I get how the visionaries tend to all get killed: they are no longer bound by the same steering forces and are no longer governable or controllable. People can look at you funny… It’s been worth it though.

It’s worth it to see my breath, so full of bliss, enter this world. I pray that it can be a gift to someone somewhere. I am not much of an evangelist…no religion, or guru to be found. I find I am just as J. Krishnamurti was on his pathless path. When you rely on yourself, an abundance of wisdom makes itself available to you. The more you rely on it the greater the wisdom that pours forth. We aren’t aware of the deep well of knowing that is available to us. You are one life among many. You are a child to a still-larger self. You exist outside of time. You are instantly god-realized in that part of you outside of time…and it then seems to be the task of these selves to realize their own divine lineage. Everyone is like this, I think. The answer seems to be found in our becoming limited in order to learn the most precious lessons, which often is about how to experience limitation and to touch one thing at a time, rather than constantly embracing the All in such an all-encompassing state.

All the work has been worth it. Keep at it. Follow your gut and heart while remaining open. If you can feel something with all your heart, that something will come. It seems like it takes forever, but every single ounce of it is accounted for and as the load drops, the soul becomes light. The bliss, which we once thought was to be used, or even thrown away, is now seen as The Way, a part of who we are. Instead of rising and falling, it is steady now. Hardly anything lessens it now. I am glad to have been able to show one person the way to bliss. If we all did that, the world would be a much better place. I talked to their soul about it and in one week the switch was flipped. I pray it has remained. If we can each do this, we would have a better, more peaceful world, perhaps.

It gets better. Stick with it. Surrender. Be a devotee. Within you is all the wonder you could ever imagine. Your divine parentage makes it so.

All My Love,

~ Parker

Let It Through

Not around, but through. Don’t resist, let yourself feel what you had refused yourself. For all the reasons. Trust the innate goodness of your heart and your soul.

Let it flow through you, no worries about what might happen. Let it happen.

We often let go best when we feel into it without that reflexive grasp. Why do we do that?

It’s a mystery. Let them be mysteries and away they will go.

Does being reminded of what doesn’t align to the one true light help? Or does it remind you of what you aren’t here for?

I wish you all the great works in whatever way they work for you. In the end, it will be about a love that knows no boundaries nor limits, and confounds so many rules we have made to try and control and contain it.

Breathe it in, let it through, this is how all sacred flames are kindled.

Follow-Up On Energy Spike

Not long after what I would describe as an over-the-top energy event, I had a new wrinkle that surprised me.

In the midst of feeling like I may have been responding to turmoil in the world by getting blasted with energy, I received some suppliments in the post that I had ordered just before this latest spike. The irony is that one was a human growth factor precursor and another that boosts testosterone. Like I really need it, right? Was I crazy? My intuition said I should get them, sense be damned, it seems.

I began taking the suppliments about two weeks ago and found that they helped to moderate the very high bliss with sensual energy down to something that made me feel more like I was in my body and more grounded. Curiously, this led to less sexual/sensual bliss and more of a feeling of physical energy and groundedness.

It was like drinking an espresso before going to bed in order to sleep. You wouldn’t have thought that would be what I should have taken, but it helped a lot and it has boosted the hours that I work. I’m not sure that is a good thing since I am working seven days a week now and I really ought to take more time off for myself.

I was curious to see if it was just my imagination. After going off the suppliments, the pranic energy came roaring back like before. I found that I missed this feeling of being grounded. Instead, I found myself meditating on a feminine presence that served to ground my energy. I am under no illusion that this is an aspect in my own “subtle psyche,” which is that part of us connected to, or aware of, other lives lived and available for tapping into them for insight and help in gaining awareness into certain psychological states, for instance. In Gnostic terms, this is the szygy, the blend of like-masculine and like-feminine into a unity, that unity that serves to give vigor or life to kundalini.

As the last weeks have shown, a major operation has been underway in the U.S. under Biden and the allies, which has been to induce an invasion on the part of Russia so the U.S. could slap on sanctions and then legally sell it’s LNG to Germany which once was being sold by Russia.

With the propaganda machine being ratcheted up, casting this as being about democracy, the invasion would stop if Ukraine did what Russia has called for for decades: remain neutral and stop attacking the separatists in the Dombas region. Instead, the U.S. has been determined to ignite a new cold war with Russia. The maniacs are in control, and they are trying to play on our patriotism to push their agenda. Meanwhile Condaleeza Rice says on t.v. that Putin invading Ukraine illegally makes him a war criminal. God help us all. Invasions, the U.S. stoking a new cold war, unnecessary actions that suggest a deeper agenda…and all of this perhaps causing the ripples that I would feel as an over the top energetic response?

I am glad to find that my intuition was on the mark in regards to the supplements, I am feeling much more peaceful. None of it made any sense, though, not conventionally. Is it possible to get these effects as we age? I am sure a lot of this post doesn’t make any sense either.

I work weekends so yesterday and today were my days off. While I ran some errands, I wound up back in the studio cranking out new work, working until past nine p.m. when I realized how late it was and that maybe it was time to relax and go to bed. That in fact is what I am about to do. That’s the news from the wilderness…

Baptism As The Path To Awakening

Jesus’s Baptism by Giotto

While we do not know for certain why, John the Baptist showed signs of being at great odds with the ruling elites of Jerusalem in the Jewish temple. John was himself in the wilderness, we are told, and showed every sign of living the life as an ascetic: he wore simple clothes and subsisted on honey and locusts. A man like this would be freed to some extent from having to work in order to survive. This would have afforded him more time for contemplative prayer and meditation. Ascetics like this often were mystics, people who sought to know the thoughts of God. There is evidence that John was just this, that he became aligned to the divine compass that rests in all of us. How so?

Baptism as it is practiced today was very different in John’s time. Today we sprinkle water on a child’s head and say their sin is forgiven, their path to heaven is promised. But baptism by John was a different affair. We know through the disciples of Jesus, which took up baptism as an important precursor to discovering the kingdom within that it was imperative that the person want to be washed clean with all their heart

And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is the water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? (37) And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest.

Acts 8:36-7

While in Acts the baptism was couched in believing Jesus as the son of God, baptism was developed as a critically important way to free people from the division that previous sin, that which separates our hearts from the heart of God, could serve as a mechanism of release for people. All you had to do was to buy into it (believe). John was doing this in order to remove sin. John was setting souls free.

One important step toward awakening is cleansing the self of those things which divide us from the light that shines upon us, in us. In every way, Jesus explained that all of this was found within. It begins like a smallest of all seeds, the mustard.

Ritual cleansing baths are an important part of Judaism. John, I note, took the idea of cleansing one step further and created a way to free people from the burden of their past. What is remarkable is that John broke with the temple practice of blood sacrifice as the way to remit sin.

By whose authority did John do this? In his day John would have pointed to God. As any prophet, mystic or seer can tell you, this God is found within us. By John’s own perceptiveness and his desire for a better more peaceful way, he invented baptism. His own authority stamped the method with effectiveness. Yes, just saying it could even make it happen. John and Jesus both understood the role that belief or faith had in the work they did. Anyone employing methods like these understands the role belief plays.

People think there is magic in baptism, but it is entirely empty in truth, it is instead entirely filled by ones faith in it. By the same rule, baptism can be a hollow act if you don’t approach it correctly. There is evidence in the scripture to show that the early ones knew how to do it so that achieved its desired impact. One’s own faith is what works the magic. Does God forgive the sin? No, instead we do. God is always ready to forgive, but it is we who must prepare ourselves, to make our minds and hearts right to be forgiven. At any moment this can happen because of the abundant love that God has for all. We must be able to empty ourselves of the coarse stones that hides how ever-present this love is, how all-encompassing it has always been.

This would easily be counted as heresy today, but that is just how far the faithful have wandered from the core of these rituals. We think there is magic in just doing them, but that just isn’t so. If drinking the wine doesn’t make you feel closer to Christ, it’s your fault. You really have to let your imagination take you for a powerful ride. You had to be ready to give everything up to receive the power of baptism.

It’s important to understand how baptism was performed. In the earliest days a person left all of their garments and went into the water naked. This is one reason why there were furors over women in the early church baptising people. It was considered scandalous for a woman to be performing this with people who were naked. Women did, however, perform baptism. Sadly, baptism has been altered from its original form where one strips away the covering, the guile of the self, to come to God utterly naked. This ceremonial stripping away of what protects and hides us was an important ingredient to the process.

Being naked served to do two two things: it helped a person to surrender to the ritual. It is hard to hide your soul and heart when you stand naked in the water. It also emphasizes how the body will be washed clean of sin. If you believe it will happen, then it will. That is the true magic of baptism, which relies on belief. But who really is letting go of the sin, the burden? You, of course. Most people think of baptism as the method that works it magic. Baptism was a mechanism to help bring a person to a state of surrender: the grip on what needs to be let go is softened, and if the heart is ready, it goes. The more you let go, the less you have standing between you and God. We have forgotten these principles today. In fact, every baptism is done fully clothed. Besides, what’s the big deal, really?

Something happens to a soul when it is unburdened by the weight of the inner division that divides us from the divine; we suddenly are relieved of that which had been weighing us down only moments before. This adds buoyancy to the heart, and brings one ever closer to the divine presence. It is a trapdoor into the soul and its connection to divine presence. Release the right block or stone holding up the dam and the whole eddifice can come tumbling down.

Humans are made up of a series of these blocks or “stones” that serve to keep out the light or the water of life. All awakenings proceed in the same manner: surrendering to the powerful force that undoes us, that, like a physician, removes those things that keep us from the divine light. You didn’t have to be a Jew, you could be from any faith, from any walk of life. The church created the impression that you had to become Christian if you were to enjoy the benefits of the true light.

It’s quite possible that John was in the wilderness because he was not accepted by the temple priests as legitimate. While his method of baptism was drawn from tradition, it also departed from it. There is no mention of John taking money for his services, which would have been different from what happened at the temple in Jerusalem. This may be why he was in the wilderness. It may also be that John saw the corruption there and chose not to participate, we don’t really know for sure. What we do know is that John developed this method on his own and was offering it to others, which stood as a method that bypassed the temple methods of tithing and sacrifice that were filling the coffers of the temple.

It is worth mentioning that during this time the temple priest began hoarding the Jewish coin used for tithing to the temple. This was called the half shekle (also shekel), as no coinage from a pagan Rome could be accepted. This created artificial scarcity and drove the value for coin up. People from the region would come for yearly blessings and religious observances, bringing a bushel of grain or chickens, doves, or other valued resources which would get converted to the shekle. Under the hoarding regime, what took a bushel of grain could end up costing two bushels, later. That’s some pretty bad corruption for you. And who of conscience would want to deal with a system like that? This was the world that John and Jesus found themselves in.

Jews weren’t the only tradition to practice a cleansing of self for reaching the divine, however. The Native American sweat lodge or inipi is an important precursor to receiving divine guidance. One had to cleanse ones self in order to be closer to the divine and to be able to receive its guidance. The Hindus describe a process of cleansing energy channels where they knew past emotion can be stored, a process that also achieved a closeness to the creator. Much of yoga is concerned with this process of cleansing.

Now you might look at this and say, “This has no similarities to baptism!” But you would be wrong. What is key here is psychology. All of these methods work as psychological triggers….if you buy into or believe them. Under the skin, they achieve the same thing.

Rumi once wrote that people argue about the light saying one is better than another when all is light and none better than the other. All of these cultures knew and practice a similar method because it works because of how all people universally divide themselves from their heritage of children of the creator.

When I awakened, I clearly had released a long-standing issue that had me at odds with myself and the universe. As soon as I let it go, I began having symptoms tied to awakening. It was as though a path had been cleared for me where my awareness was freed up to know the fundamental truth of my being as tied to the divine. I didn’t reach this because of a belief or any expectation of any return from having done this work. Likewise, the work of John worked just as much for Jew as Gentile in his day. Jesus’s work and message worked for all-comers. Jesus saw the benefit in John’s work and began to employ it because it worked when done correctly.

To me, this method reveals the compassion that John had for the spiritual suffering of people. He went out of his way to do this work. Imagine this man, holding you and pushing you gently into the water and pulling you back out, pronouncing how you had been washed free of your sin. To do this, you had to trust John, you had to bodily place yourself in his hands. You had to be ready to let go.

Something powerful happens when you are with someone who has achieved this same type of release, also, which has been a well-known principle in many traditions. A teacher is more effective when they embody the knowledge of how the method works? You better believe it. Each person whose heart is open and ready can feel it since it is a deep spiritual truth, and that truth actually has a life beyond just the teacher (as long as followers don’t fall away from the core principles of the method). It was so powerful a method that Jesus went to be baptised, and when he did, his own connection to the divine was in that moment realized.

We often want to think that Jesus was different, but what I see is a man who wanted his own inner sin to be washed away. No one bothers to look at this, though, within the church. It’s as if, as how the institution has portayed it, that baptism was somehow different for Jesus. The elephant in the room is that people were finding relief from what had them divided from the divine. It is entirely reasonable to think that Jesus sought out John as the physician of his heart and soul.

Division within the self serves to hide or obfuscate our deeper, truer, nature. A person not burdened by unresolved feelings of anger, frustration, fear, or guilt, is much more able to understand and glimpse their deeper fundamental nature as a spark of the divine. The same appeared to be true for Jesus, since in the moment as he emerged from the water, something powerful had happened. It may have been more effective for Jesus than others, and this may also be why he adopted baptism as one of the ritual practices that now make up the Christian faith.

While my awakening wasn’t initiated with a baptismal event, the event that took place was, I suspect, identical to how baptism worked in the old days, which was that I was given the opportunity to unburden myself of an inner tangle of emotion about a past even that I hadn’t been able to resolve. I had a slow burn of frustration, guilt, and anger that had been burning a hole in the pocket of my soul. This angst was as much directed at myself as it was the universe for having sent a challenge spiritually that I felt I had failed in the face of. What was so interesting was once this initial release and subsequent shift took place, the challenge completely resolved itself. It could be said that this challenge to my system set up the conditions where enough pressure was brought to bear to serve as the force that would break through the wall seperating me from the depths within. Once I was able to just let it all go, everything changed from that moment going forward. For me, this one stone removed from that wall I had built caused the wall itself to weaken, ultimately allowing the water of life to stream into my awareness and initiate the changes to get me to a better place. It resulted in years of removing barriers I had erected to the divine.

These stones, all of them, were knots of emotion that only served to drown out or hide the soft flow of life-giving water/light of spirit. This all began with one initiatory act, and I suspect that this was also what John, Jesus, and many others were doing some two thousand years ago. Baptism washes away the lower so that the higher may be better glimpsed. It’s not a guarantee of awakening, but one in a series of steps that can work to bring a person closer until they can see the Christ or saving grace that is in us all.

Paul, in his letters explains it as not something that came from without, but as the Christ that was within. He said that God showed him this in his road to Damascus moment when he was struck by a bright white light. Paul wasn’t a believer at all, and was actively persecuting Christians. He waa shown this Christ within himself. Only then did he become such a vocal proponent of the movement. It’s kind of beautiful when you think about it. A tent-maker going around persecuting followers being baptised in the spirit of the Holy Ghost. That’s what happened to Paul. It was so sudden a transformation that he was blind for three days. This could easily have been a condition we call hysterical blindness. If true, it was because Paul needed some time to catch up with the new reality he suddenly was facing. Blindness can manifest it times like these when you are still unable to comprehend the about-face that happened. This underscores just how sudden his awakening was. This is not unlike many awakenings today. It’s quick, really in a glimmering of an eye and there it is. Boom. Say goodbye to Kansas.

This kind of experience was often spoken of in terms of dying to the old self in order to realize a new life, which was the Christ. Paul wrote of dying daily as he came nearer to Christ, a process identical to awakening.

This was one reason why the esoteric strand or sect within Christianity which we call Gnostic today took Paul as their hero. It was this esoteric strand that was best positioned to understand and convey the very keys to this kingdom, which rested on inner seeking and then discovery of a spark which could be kindled into a great light and a realization of the divine hidden within us all. These descriptions were incredibly similar to those found in other cultures which describe the process of enlightenment.

The conspiracy to destroy the Gnostic sects, which contained so much understanding of these and other sacred rituals by the Orthodoxy (that came later) was a conspiracy of ignorance. Within several generations this more secretive group of sects were driven from the institutionalization process we call Christianity today.

What John, his disciples, Jesus, and his disciples knew was that one of the most important aspect to the work they were doing rested on belief in an important way.

Today, we refer to belief in scientific terms as the “placebo effect.” While we tend to denigrate the power of belief in our modern culture by renaming it with a “sciency” moniker (placebo) belief, regardless, remains an important power of mind. Sign up for, say, a drug trial, where you are a subject who might get a new type of antihistamine as part of a study, and you can glimpse what this power of mind can do. It is known that a certain percentage of participants who believe they are getting the drug and not the sugar pill (the placebo) but do get the sugar pill, will often exhibit physiological reactions as if they are actually getting the drug.

While the placebo effect has its limits in terms of how it can heal, it is a significant enough of a response to begin turning the tables for many touched by it. It helps to show how belief can drive the power of the mind for positive change.

John and Jesus knew about this and even explained many times (Jesus specifically) that it was a person’s faith or belief that had healed them. In first century Judea where access to medicine was nothing like what we have today, the effect of their belief made a huge difference in how people felt.

The Orthodox sect of Christianity claims that the books of the Nag Hammadi Library are heresy, but what interests me is how sophisticated the teachings are and just how probable it could be that they represent, in part, a private teaching by Jesus and his followers. Scholars seek to attribute some of the writings to a man named Valentinus who had a vision of the risen Christ and lived in the first century. Valentinus wrote about how he had visited a direct disciple of Paul who explained to him that Paul had both a public and private teaching. The disciple, named Theodus, taught Valentinus about this inner or secret teaching. While this itself does not prove that Jesus had an “inner ministry” there are indications in the synoptic gospels that Jesus did not teach openly to Gentiles, preferring to teach in parables in order to veil the meaning of his teachings, which happened in Mark and to a degree again in Luke. Every tradition on Earth that has had an esoteric wing which hides certain teachings in order to protect the uninitiated from what could prove to bring awakening before the student was ready for the experience.

Baptism was the beginning, one step in a series of passages to free the self of the burdens that exist in a person’s heart. This today would be called “release work” and it plays an important role in luving closer to the divine presence and allowing ourselves to be transformed by it.

.

Plant Medicine As An Ally In Meditation

Copyright, Parker Stafford

I was given weed recently as a result of my describing what took place this Summer where weed had made me more psychic, something I wrote about here at WTI.

Alone finally last night after the holiday goings-on, I decided to get ready for bed and go through a meditation after using the weed I had been given.

I used a very small amount, about a pinch, about 3/4 the size of a pea (if that). This amounted to two regular puffs and one fraction of a third. This was a very low dose, although the version I used was described as being a strong hybrid version. I put on my headphones, pulled up a Monroe Institute Hemisync program from the Gateway Experience, and listened with headphones. This particular audio helps to induce deep Theta states, and while there are directions for relaxation and breathing, most of it is designed for your own inner work. The audio lasts about 45 minutes, just enough to get you there.

Everything happened very quickly. Before the narrator/guide began his first comments, I already felt a presence of a male who was speaking to me in this bright excited voice who seemed to be positioned above me who extended his hand saying, “Take my hand and I’ll show you all the places you can go!” At this point I was already dissociated from my body and traveling through what looked to be outer space. I remember having an experience like this before many decades ago where I moved out of my body and began seeing a starry sky and feeling that the stars were actually consciousness. The sensation at the time was overwhelming and it put an end to the projection because of the state of overwhelm I invariably would fall into that kept me from further projecting. This time, I thought about this and as I saw all these stars, I didn’t feel overwhelm but instead felt a stirring warmth in my core where there was only love. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I acknowledged this love as the next step in my evolution and the evolution of everyone on the planet.

I was interupted by the narrator of the audio a number of times as he made suggestions for how to breathe and relax. I was there in seconds, I was ready instantly and kept having my meditation interrupted by this voice. It didn’t trip me up completely though, it was more that I paused my meditation and waited for the voice to complete what it had to say since it pulled me out of the “broad mind” state as I felt pulled into a more linear language-based state (rational left brain). I’ll have to work more on that in the future. I found myself back at my body after expanding outward through both space and dimension, which all took place very quickly.

I noticed during this whole experience that my third eye had become very active. This time, though, I could feel the third eye pressure at the bridge of my nose. My third eye is now a vertical band that goes from my nose all the way up to my hairline. When it activates, it is usually felt as a large dot on my forehead with a sense of energy and even something that feels akin to tightness of a sort. This tightness isn’t inhibiting in any way, it signals that my third eye is activating in a strong way. It is more that this tightness is the result of these bands of energy that flow around it and out of it. When this happens, it is a sign that I can begin to see clearly beyond the physical if I focus my mind correctly with the third eye center. The two work together in bringing information through. I was aware of information streaming into different parts of my brain which would get routed to the third eye as the lens used to see into the realities that these intuitions represented. Likewise, I was aware that the third eye could see into the mind to pick these things up. It was a fluid dynamic system where informatiin flowed both ways.

As I thought about this, the third eye energy shifted up into its usual place which was mid-brow up to the edge of my hairline. The whole area constitutes the third eye for me, which is akin to a long extended flame of awareness and sensation. The Hindu seers who paint the tilak on their foreheads are using an image of how I experience the third eye. Two vertical lines with a cental line in the center all corresponding to the Ida, Pengali, and Shushumna nadi. The Ida and Pengali merge in union and balance in the Shushuma, the place of boundless bliss. Below is a photo of the tilak as it is worn by mendicate monks. There are variations of the tilak, so the one shown below is just one of a handful of versions used.

I was also met by a small presence that I can only describe as dwarfish that spoke and moved excitedly as it began showing me the energy lines in my legs. I had gone from standing on a beach to being up in the hills in a tropical location atop a flat-topped roof of someone’s house, which was where this being began pointing out the energy lines in my legs.

I was in this kind of environment because the hemisync audio uses ocean waves as part of its audio. I naturally found myself standing on a beach, and later moved from the beach uphill into the mountains above where I landed on a slightly sloping rooftop. The being was showing me where the energy lines crossed in my legs when the narrator broke in and it made it hard to continue. I will see about going back to this in another meditation. I knew or could feel how others had mapped the energy body in not too different a way in the past in meditations much like this one, and I thought how easy it was, not the arduous task as I had originally had thought it was.

I was keen to get into the leg chakras because I could feel how there was some blocked energy that resided at the junction of the torso and the legs. It was curious how this energy trailed off behind me, right around my behind and extending out like coat-tails behind me. This awareness has always been one of the great gifts conferred by awakening, and the awareness itself has been enough to dissolve countless blocks in my field. At one time many years ago this awareness would make me feel defeated by the sheer volume of material present to still clear. Now, though, it existed more as a remnant, a trailing bit of material near my lower back.

What is worth mentioning is the back trouble I have been having since November. The week of Thanksgiving was where it came to a head after driving to see family. It was so bad I couldn’t move from a sitting to a standing position without the use of a broom handle which I used for about a week to get up from my couch. Luckily, I somehow managed to keep working even though all I wanted to do was to lie flat on the floor. I have been slowly rehabilitating my back muscles so I can move more freely. What would have taken weeks if adjystments by a chiropractor I was able to do on my own and now the sore muscles are in a much better place with slow and gentle stretches. It was I think not a coincidence that I was having this tightness along with the enhanced awareness of the stuck energy near my bottom in this meditation.

I soon decided to drift off to sleep after this took place. I revisited the idea of telepathy before going to sleep but every person who I put my mind to seemed much too vivid and in a tangle for me to even try another experiment along these lines. I did however find a part of my mind aware of one person who I kept feeling like I was communicating with during the meditation, like a quick check-in contacted me and there was an important message waiting for me from tat person when I checked messages this morning.

I say this only as a reminder about the things we can explore, learn, and discover. We are all inheritors of a noble light that is supportive and loving. We go and experience things that are part of our present “set and setting” and experiences are part and parcel of where we are at any moment in time.

I will note that up until this summer, I have only ever used natural methods for reaching accelerated states of being and awareness. I have also been an advocate for this approach for many decades (using it myself exclusively) since my early twenties—in the late 1980’s. My experience this past summer made me rethink this approach. After being able to reach these ecstatic states naturally, I have considered what some substances might do to help further expand both awareness and experience. While I have no interest in being a heavy user, I am considering this as one wrinkle among many in this entire process.

If weed helps me to hone in on the remnants if blocked energy, then I will consider future meditations using very small amounts to assist in sharpening that awareness. I don’t sense that weed opened my third eye, that initiation took place in a meditation in late 2006. Rather, my intent to do this meditatiin was set on “finding out what I might see ir discover” with my third eye dutifully responding to that intent and also aided by the much more fluid state I found myself in as the weed began to take affect.

The goal for me is to learn how to emulate these states without outside substances. I will mention though that even the food that we eat can have a significant effect on our physiology not unlike weed has done. I have found states of bliss after eating cantaloupe and other melons because it served to modify how my body responded to the energy of the awakened state. Just being well hydrated can change how I feel. Taking vitamin D has had dramatic effects on how I experience bliss, for example. So weed? It may well be one of many plant helpers that I can use to help open up my cognition and awareness to valid physical and nonphysical states, not as a distorter of experience, but as a liberator from an inhibited state to one that is not as inhibited.

I hope you are getting a break and have enjoyed the holidays. If you don’t hear back from me, happy new year!