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).

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Heiros Gamos

Hieros gamos, comes from the Greek hieros (ἱερός) meaning “holy” or “sacred” and gamos (γάμος) meaning marriage, or Hierogamy, which is a “sacred marriage” that plays out between a god and a goddess, and often a ritual played out between two human beings, as man and woman. This term is reflected throughout cultures showing up in alchemy which is Arabic in its root but which have other roots in China and is explicit in Hindu yogic practice and can find threads in Tantra. Additionally, in my own journey I found that this same practice was at play in ancient Babylon for instance. But what did I know of Babylon, really? Very little. So I dug into it and found that yes, the culture was rich with this heirodouloi as it is called in the Assyrian. It has a number of inventions down through time that eventually centers around a shepherd king Demuzzi and his consort Innana in later periods.

The hieros gamos as a royal ritual is the creation of early city-states built on the wealth provided by agriculture. Far from putting an end to the “primitive” village cults, they expanded and stylized them with forms that were derived from, and were variations of, earlier symbolism. One of these is the sexual union of the king and a “priestess” as an episode in the lengthy Babylonian Akitu (New Year) festival. The model for this rite is already given in Sumerian myths and temple customs. It is true that existing knowledge of religious practices among the common people of the ancient Mesopotamian world is inadequate, but it is known that in this world the main ritual procedures for the entire populace were carried out through the mediation of rulers and religious specialists of various kinds. Around 2100 bce King Gudea had a temple built for the god Ningirsu. Among the rites performed in the new temple was the sacred wedding ceremony of the god and his consort Baba, lasting seven days. Apparently such a marriage was an expected part in the liturgy for each one of the important deities already present in Sumerian culture, as it was later in Babylonian cults, and still later throughout Assyrian and also West Semitic cults.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/hieros-gamos

In Western regions of Europe the concept of a god and goddess go way back to earliest antiquity. The Arthurian legend was itself likely an echo of this same concept, but leaving out the goddess, instead the king being fed and nourished and made whole once nature was itself also set right (a ghost of the feminine presence most likely-the role of Christian monks who sought to defang the deeper origins of this kind of story). Earlier rites were those performed at Beltane which was said to involve the people involved in sex in the fields. This idea goes way bath to Neolithic times and the idea of nude as well as clothed women imparting fertility to nature as a fixture to some traditions.

It bears mentioning that next to a sexual union between heaven and earth, of the type of Ouranos and Gaia in Hesiod’s Theogony and Dyaus and Prthivi in the Vedic texts, there exists documentation of supreme beings that are often called “bisexual.” Such a being is both one and two, male and female at the same time. Being two in one, divinities of this type are more properly called “androgynous” than “bisexual.” The ancient Mexican supreme being is Ometecuhtli-Omecihuatl (“father-mother”). These will show up in the Gnostic mythos as a teaching tool for how to reach the Christ (more on that later).

In yet another instance I was shown in the early days of my awakening a strange structure by a guide who explained that a large group of people, perhaps, I guessed from the looks of it, a dozen people who were involved in in a ritual in which they stood on a large circular stone with clear incised lines cut into it, resembling something like a pizza. At the time this image which showed up in my inner vision in the Spring of 2008 (and its very short explanation) made little sense to me at the time except for the fact that it involved a group who had merged ritually and spiritually into what I thought was the stone itself. This was something that was akin to a very oblique reference to something that I would then see later, a kind of cosmic breadcrumb having to do with how souls move into a deep form of relationship (my guide said nothing about how it might show up later which is something of a hallmark of his that may have to do with not wanting to spoil the discovery or to make me too expectant of the outcome, which seems to always involve the element of surprise). Then, over a decade later, I would see this very object in a documentary on treasure of the Dacian Kingdom who once ruled in an area now known as Romania (being overtaken by Rome in the first century C.E.). After seeing the ritual complex where this stone was lain I had a flood of memories that involved someone who I know today. While details were little on this memory, it seems that I was one of the people, ten total, who engaged in a ritual of union that as best as I can tell was done in order to unite the regional chiefs and their spiritual consorts, which would amount to priestesses who had been prepared for this role. My hope is that more memories surrounding this life will emerge in time since so little is known about these people (Constantine does show the same hats that the Dacians were shown to wear on his Arch which sits adjacent to the Colosseum in Rome which are also the same hats that the Magi wear in the earliest depictions of them). This particular form as it appears in the photo below doesn’t show up in any other ritual complex anywhere in the ancient world. Because of how remote the region was where the Dacians lived, it is likely that while they did get around through trade they were able to develop their own rituals as they saw fit, and this form, as unusual as it is, was one of them. If you look at it you will see that there is a walkway to the platform where one single person could walk, in line, one at a time. Sometimes I do wonder whether this was the origin of the concept of the round table, and if not, then how coincidental it is in its use.

Everywhere and everywhen there was this effort to connect humans with the gods and goddesses, to establish a link to a higher or more expansive sense of existence. Pharaohs did this, insisting that they were descended of the gods. Kings and Queens in Europe had their “divine right” which was another nod to the magic of the divine realm and their unique connection to it. Over and over, rituals exist that help to cement this notion while also helping to aggregate and cement the power of ancient leaders. While this in many ways became institutionalized through the royal lines, the truth has always been that the higher self exists within each person and this divine line can be traced back through the soul in every person. Even the death of Jesus, which was more pagan than Judaic, has echos of how the death of the god, the shedding of his blood will renew the land, or in this case, the souls of his followers. One receives the special divine juice through their connection with the man who also is a god as well. In many ways the Christian god-man is out of place as a Judaic invention, for it does not exist anywhere in their tradition but instead does exist within Roman myth. Romulus (750 BC), the founder of Rome was himself born of a virgin and on the last day of his life, ascended into heaven. He returned three days later to explain why he had disappeared in the midst of a storm. Very pagan. Always was. Ezekiel 8:14 is one of the texts in the tradition of Israel that strongly opposed most of the religious customs connected with the hieros gamos; it tells of women who (ritually) bewailed the fate of Tammuz (Dumuzi) at the gates of the temple.

In Babylonian religion, the rule of the supreme god Marduk, just like that of his divine partner Ishtar (the Akkadian name of Inanna), is not limited to one area. Although the goddess’s myth shows her as not altogether successful in her journey to the netherworld, she does return and her rule is emphatically presented as universal. In contrast, in the earliest myths, Dumuzi remains associated with pastoral life, and the impression is given that rule on earth has its limits; this same impression is also given in later times. Such rule, however, must have its basis in the hieros gamos.

That the certainty of rule over the land and its well-being is of the utmost concern is borne out by the king’s determination of destiny. Just as the god Marduk’s rule was established when he received the “tablets of fate” (in the Enuma elish), the king shows himself as king in fixing the rules and regulations that keep the universe functioning properly. The ritual by which he does so is complex, but it is related to the Akitu festival, and the sacred marriage itself is to be regarded as a “third form for the determination of destiny” (Pallis, 1926). Clearly, the union with the goddess is of paramount importance for rule on earth.

Priestess in Egypt were said to have intercourse with men in an effort to educate them about how to cultivate their own inner power. For this they were called temple prostitutes, sadly (but it is possible that in their day they were in fact revered for their work helping to ‘wed heaven to earth’ with the pejorative term coming along later by those who didn’t understand the ritual or the importance of the work as is so often the case with the “great unwashed”). In one instance, I had a memory of watching an initiation ritual whereby women assembled in a darkened room who were presented with a presence that whipped through the room which had the look of a spiritual fire that moved into each priestess in turn. This energy elevated the priestesses to a new consciousness. What I was witnessing, I suspected, was their union with the sun god Ra since the presence presented as masculine energy (again, a balancing of energies). While this could be attributed to a flight of fancy, two other people observed something similar to what I saw, and then many years later I read an account of a woman who had been regressed to a life in Egypt where she described the same thing I had seen two decades prior (everyone lined up facing a large black wall with these small slots cut in them and this was where the presence of the god came). In this case, instead of union with the god in human form, these women had a direct line to some source energy that was made active or through which they were made aware (perhaps through years of training). By being in touch with the god they were also in touch with the goddess (as physical representatives on earth). It was through the interplay of these two energies that one became aware of the greater reality of the creative at a cosmological level. Numerous cultures saw this union as a way of helping with the crops and also balancing events in the world for favor from the gods.

I think that the culture that got these concepts in their most egalitarian strands are found in Mahayana Buddhism where the grace of the feminine and her love serves as the bridge to the divine, but also in how the divine union is seen as the two in one (as exemplified in the Mayan god-goddess mentioned earlier), which is an androgyne, which is similar to the early Christian Gnostics who wrote of the syzygy, the result of innermost union of the two opposites which they saw as feminine and masculine within us all. Out of this union, they insisted, flowed the Christ consciousness, and it was through their both ritual and inner practices that they managed to reach this deeper realization (which the works clearly show). This also shows up in alchemy quite clearly most notably in the book The Chymical Marriage. All of this has captured the imaginations of those who are “twins” of the soul as twin souls or twin flames. Numerous other myths are tapped by them giving them the sense of antiquity and legitimacy (which tends to gloss over the real reason for the connective, which is to date, always karma).

My observation from the beginning of all of this (awakening via kundalini) has been that physiologically these opposites are rooted in our neurophysiology of the left and right brains. Far from masculine or feminine, they are enough of opposites like man and woman that people try to wrap mythologies around them as we have done for centuries in the form of “divine masculine” and “divine feminine.” The truth lies deeper still and represents an end to this duality in favor of the realization of who we are in these vehicles of flesh on an adventure both in body as well as in mind. I think that the myth isn’t necessary in order to understand the forces at play and to understand ones relationship to the universe, but we do love our myths! It is my sense that the beginning of enlightenment involves understanding things as they are, and while the mythos of the divine pair continues to be all the rage it wont be alla mode to consider what is really at work under the skin. I think that if people did pull back the curtain on this, it would instead reveal truths that most are unwilling normally to see or acknowledge. It will however in my estimation reveal how we are built for divine union and that this is all an inside job. And who do we find when we go there? At first it is like a God but as the experience matures we find paradoxically that the seed that is “God” (take your pick which one) was always inside of you and that when the union happens in its fullness no one will be able to discern where the God ends and the human begins, and here is one important clue about our relationship with the divine (which many are loathe to admit). In this is the secret, which most regard as a mystery (until it is known). Yes, the sky will light in sacred flames as the last of the sacred cows goes up in flames. Our myths are themselves like rafts that get us across conceptual hurdles which are then destroyed once we get to the deeper truth seeded within them. And what then? A sweet silence, and in that silence the secret of all creation which is that the opposites never were opposite but were always one….just as we all are one. And yet, we go about it all wanting to make it out to be more than it is through the clever trick of myth-making. It is more than the myth, but it has always been that. When we grasp, though, we invariably reach a corpse. Look not to your conceptions but consider that those have always been projections of consciousness which in its most limited of ways, shows us imperfectly the way, perhaps like how a metaphor helps us to see the truth, not directly, but by way of something else. We usually wind up worshipping the metaphor instead of something else. So what else is left?

If you must still play at the gamos game then recognize that you have everything that you need inside of you.ere the light of your awareness joins with another light, different from you and yet seeded with the same truth as you. It is possible though that in so doing you can also rob the relationship of its polarized charge (but also put to an end the war of the sexes in a traditional female/male relationship). It is possible though to attain to a still greater light if those so engaged are brave enough to travel to the next greater height (where there is still another greater summit and so on endlessly). This is the hardest one to get, for it involves what the ancients called “righteousness” (alignment with the divine will). As this unfolds, or blooms, karma is shed and the desire resolves into greater and greater levels of bliss which itself turns to a stillness with supreme fecundity, not unlike the notion of the Tao, which exists in such stillness and yet brings all into being. This is the essence or core of the supreme consciousness. Like a frozen explosion, ever expanding but without expansion, a grand paradox lying at the heart of all creative energy. It is the primordial seed lying within each of us. The primary union always is inside of us, and when we place such importance on the outward expression, it will always fall short because how poorly our expectations are usually constructed. And yet, even in them lie the seeds of greater realization.

These highly ritualized forms of inner knowledge which come to us from antiquity serve to show us that we have been aware of certain elements in our consciousness which became codified as a feminine and masculine dynamic, a quality that existed in each person most certainly, but got played out in grand rituals of union. These unions, I insist reflect a folk-ways understanding of qualities that can lead us to an enlightened state, and with our knowledge of our neurophysiology we can begin to see the source of this material. By doing so this does not lessen the power of these forces that are within us all, but instead helps us to fashion ways to get at this duality that is brought into greater unity, with the reward being the enlightened state. Some traditions described this union within in more direct terms, but still dressed in imagery and belief. Without a clear understanding that this may have all arose as a result of a union of left and right brain mediated by meditation practices whereby the habitual need to rely on one hemisphere over the other was overcome in order for a deep and abiding unity within to be known. This unity was itself transformative, resulting in a changed person and a renewed consciousness. This isn’t to say that the old rituals didn’t work, for they were likely close enough that they did the job, but our knowledge and understanding does evolve and now we can see how all of this served to advance consciousness albeit in a somewhat elitist fashion, and is now something available to all people if they are willing to do the work. Yes, sacred cows will evaporate, ideas will change, and certain mythologies will be seen for what they are, but in so doing we can begin to face who we are in order to better understand how to bring greater change on the Earth. This transformation of consciousness has the power to improve our world because when everything is seen as One, we naturally want to preserve and care for that unity as though it is ourselves, which it certainly is.

Post Script: It is useful to recognize that in nearly all traditions that have detailed explanations of the enlightened state that there is always an acknowledgement of a union of opposites within the person who experiences this state. These opposites are described in various ways but often tend toward a masculine and feminine quality. This is true in the Indian schools of thought most notably when describing kundalini as a masculine and feminine (solar or lunar) force that merges together from two energetic channels called the ida and pengali into the central channel where the effulgent experience of cosmic mind happens: the shushumna nadi or channel. Here in the central channel, the deeper and more accelerated state is known and it is in this place in consciousness that the two are not seen as separate as all duality has merged into a oneness of being and awareness. Likewise, in the gnostic texts of early Christianity they describe how two opposites merge into a new unity which they describe as a divine syzygy, which is often referred to as an androgynous state. Additionally, in the writings of the European alchemists they describe and chart out the progress to an ascended state as the mixing of masculine and feminine qualities in consciousness until it births a new form of consciousness, which is dependent on the synthesis of these two opposites. This has always been an inside job and the union of opposites always happens within consciousness. For all the talk of the divine feminine and the divine masculine, the real union happens in a personal way before the light of a greater awareness is known. This doesn’t stop people from ritualizing this union by working out the story or process between women and men throughout history. it is an important nod toward understanding the first principles of this larger realm of awareness. These ritualized methods can misdirect the mind to a certain extent if the person takes things literally. At the same time, it can also serve to bring the horse to the water, too.

A Waking Reminder

Just a note, I don’t know who needs to see this, but for those who have done clearing work, the act of allowing the force of prana (often expressed as kundalini, but not always) then you are familiar with how this works. If you aren’t, there are numerous modalities that can help, with or without an abundance of prana present. Many of them involve movement of the body: deep tissue massage, chi gong, ecstatic dance, acupressure/puncture. Whether the stuck emotion is in the body or there is an important feedback from the body for unlocking stuck emotion, the body plays an important role.

The release of stuck energy is a bit of a rabbit hole, though, and this is because the energy body has five nested aspects that make it up, which is your full energetic expression on this plane. This means that you can clear an energy center once, twice, three times, and on up to FIVE times. It can be a bit mystifying sometimes. When it happened to me, I wondered if I had somehow missed something. This was the result of these layers of the energy body that in the Sanscrit is called ‘kosha’ which means sheath. The energy body is like a multidimensional nesting doll, with multiple aspects all nested one into the other. This is why you might have a fabulous clearing of the root chakra only to come back the following year to be at it, clearing it again.

Koshas are like the layers of an onion.

The clue here that you aren’t just clearing new material you managed to store away, is how the center feels each time you perform a release. It is like entering a room, say the living room, and it feels completely different and even looks different as you enter each of its different aspects. It’s possible to clear a center five times, and each clearing feels as if you are in a different space.

Clearing the heart center years ago left me wondering what was going on. Hadn’t I already had a dramatic clearing already? I shrugged and figured it would make sense later. It did, luckily, as I found by accident the concept in yoga of the koshas.

I found that by clearing material in the heart, it got hard for me to relate to certain people the same way as before. Turned out, we shared an energetic arrangement and karma that created a kind of tense ‘cord’ between us. I was able to observe what dissolving that glitch in me did to another person who was not ready for change. Now this is highly individual. One person might just feel an emptiness tied to peace, but another person who is invested in their inner junk could feel unsettled. I saw how many of my releases definately impacted my then-wife who, it turns out, was not a person interested in doing any inner work to speak of. Meltdowns ensued within 12 hours of each release. This happened over a dozen times. The important thing to remember is I never told anyone about my releases as they happened, so this type of coincidence goes beyond coincidence in my book (most likely probably 🙂 )

This work has also meant that by releaaing so much, it effectively allowed me to step over the wall of people’s own limits as a personality on Earth to go into the realm of their soul so that I could feel the sublime character of souls in communion….even as that person could not feel what I felt and seemed incredulous about my insistence that I could feel what I felt. Since all of our hopes as social creatures is to have the other share in the experience, it is like having someone meeting you in a restaurant but who can’t see you when you show up. It has happened before, and it is a sign that real substantive work is being done. It can also be lonely, too.

Just as an aside, this is why I often say traditional methods of psychic protection are not that effective by putting up resistance. What happens perceptually with ANY consciousness is when you change your energy signature to something finer, it is difficult for others to see you or sense you etherically. Lower level entities can’t hook into your energy neither can they see you since to see you would mean matching your vibration. This is to my experience the only real “protection” from untoward influences. Your energy doesn’t contain unhealthy desires that can hook or be hooked by something.

That said, I am not convinced that the goal is to ever be without desire (and their corresponding hooks) because even the Dali Lama admitted not long ago that some desire is noble. Me, I think some desire can be of a very high quality that avoids the coarser qualities that may have been present in our nature or consciousness at one point in our development. Some desires lead us to God. And no, that union isn’t one that is devoid of junk, but full of a live that isn’t divided, which means all aspects of love are present in that moment, regardless of how embarrassed you might be about it. Mystic union is in fact heresy were the Christian church to know its fullest reality. Luckily, we have other arrows in our quiver.

The work for me was a slog at first. As time went by by sense that each release would acrue to a better state that woukd be persistent and not subject to swings from amazing bliss to horrible depths of shadow…a dark night of the soul. I dug myself out by digging deep. To dig deep you just need to feel deep and allow your intuitiin to guide you. It might not be perfect, but it is far superior to anything your rational mind cooks up. With the rational is also the most restrictive form of ego. It has forgotten that it is a budding creator. The path to understanding this is the feeling part of the self. Doing this is so simple many people make it too complicated (I did). It drives a simplicity along with a joy as you realize that all of this is a creation. Are you creating a sense of limitation and the poverty of heart and mind it brings? It doesn’t matter how rich you are because this is about feeling. Learning to conquer feeling opens up a vast dominion that is what you are.

I hope you can put this to use to assist in freeing yourself. . .

The Dacian Empire Revisited

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about a very unusual discovery that took place involving a documentary released in 2020, a conversation with a guide in 2008 and a past life memory that emerged as a result of the confluence of these events.

In 2020 I saw a documentary entitled The Hunt For Transylvanian Gold. It was streaming on Prime, and had made the rounds on Netflix too. In one very short scene there was shown the ruins of a ceremonial center in present day Romania that had images of a large stone disc that my guide was talking to me about in 2008. It looked exactly like it. It was the same size, same thickness, and had lines cut into it.

I know how that sounds…weird, right? Well, at that time in my life, my awakening had just turned a corner of sorts and I was getting a lot of inner activity with a guide who had seemed to make a return after first emerging back in 1985. As he explained to me, it wasn’t that he was ever absent, but that I wasn’t always able to tune into the range where I could hear him. All of a sudden, I was hearing him loud and clear after my awakening intensified in the wake of questioning what people were saying about aspects of the experience. I always thought that need brought him back, but no, it was the other way around. I had shut down and my ability to hear him seemed to go completely away.

Among the things he was telling me that early April during a walk to the waterfalls near my home here, was an object he made sure to show me. It was a large stone disc, about twenty feet in diameter, that had lines cut into the surface so that it looked like a giant pizza. There were something like 8 to twelve triangular sections. I wasn’t sure of the exact number, but it was easily in that range. My guide was telling me about how this stone had to do with union and that this was related to the work I would be doing in my life. I was walking along deep in thought trying to understand what was being told to me. It seemed that what my guide was showing me was how a group of people had merged and had become part of this stone disc. Huh??

I struggled to understand that one. What was the reason, the point? It was like my guide was trying to explain something to me, and try as I might, I wasn’t getting all of it. I wrote about this in a blog post in 2019 or 2020 when I saw the documentary. In it they showed an image of a disc that was part of a large ceremonial complex. It was uncanny.

The large divided disc in the ceremonial center

It is easy I think to try to make something you have seen fit into a random story line that seems to be a fit, but there is a curious second element which I never connected with this part of Europe that bears mentioning.

Many years ago I read the epic tale by Marion Bradley entitled The Mists Of Avalon. The story is an effort to give the Arthurian legend a more pagan and thus gaian twist, which means Druids and priestesses to whom the Druid priests answered to. In one notable scene, the main character, Morgan, is remembering a past life that involved her warching as Atlantis burned and then sank beneath the waves. That memory was trigerred by being with a man in the story. She could see tattoos of serpents around people’s wrists in blue woad, telling her that this man was a follower of the goddess and the hirned god. The thing that was curious about this was I never saw them as tatoos as I read the book. Instead, I saw them as golden serpents that wrapped around their arms. These serpents “burned” as Bradley wrote, because the serpent power, which was kundalini, was the sacred fire, the grace that inspired people no matter their belief system or their epoch. While Bradley’s story was historical fiction it always felt like she got more right about those days than she may have realized. It is a small detail but it is another one that supports the possibility that I was once with these people called the Dacians. The height of their civilization when these ruins were built was 100 BC to 100 AD.

When I saw the documentary, though, the whole story had me shaking my head in disbelief. There were those gold serpents some 30 years later! Still…maybe I was jumping the gun. Maybe it was all just coincidental. I considered that even as my gut screamed I was on to something from my past.

The Dacian gold serpents

So who were these people? To learn that, I went digging in the Romanian archives.

“The Dacian bracelets were created during a period of great flourishing of the Dacian culture, known in history as the “classical Dacian era” (1st century BC – 1st century AD), in which significant transformations took place at all levels: political, economic, religious and cultural. This fortunate context was greatly influenced by the fact that in the 1st century BC, for a short period of time, King Burebista united under his reign most of the regions inhabited by the Getae and the Dacians into a “great dominion” with borders reaching as far as the geographical area of today’s Slovakia.

“The last great king of Dacia was Decebalus, during whose reign the kingdom became a political, economic and military power again. Located on the border of the Roman Empire, which it had successfully faced in the past, Dacia had become too much of a threat to Rome. Thus, Emperor Trajan decided to eliminate this danger and, following the wars of 101-102 and 105-106, Dacia was conquered and transformed into a Roman province. This is how the “classical Dacian era” ended.“

Statues of Dacians on the Arch of Constantine in Rome

Above: Representations of Dacians on Trajan’s Column. The nobles, the military chieftains, are the ones with their head covered. They were known as tarabostes or pileati. The others, commoners, without head covers, were known as comati. The images are engravings from Pietro Bartoldi’s 17th Century album.

“The political and religious center of Dacia was the great fortress Sarmizegetusa Regia, on Grădiștea Muncelului (almost in the center of today’s Romania), with numerous houses, workshops, warehouses, but also with water supply systems. Near this fortress were several shrines and altars, which formed an impressive Sacred Zone, with walls, stairs, paved roads, canals and other stone arrangements, as we find in the Greek world. In Dacia there were many other cities (called dava), which permanently housed a large population, and which were important centers of craftsmanship and trade, but at the same time central places of political and religious life.

“The royal polyspiral gold bracelets are the most original creations of the Dacian artisans that survived through ages. They were made of Transylvanian gold, beaten in cold and then punched and engraved. The utensils used were wooden and metal hammers, covered with leather, wooden anvils, as well as sets of iron chisels and bronze punches.“

Between 1996 and 2001, the entire Sarmizegetusa Regia area, the last capital of the Dacian Kingdom (inscribed on the list of monuments of humanity in 1999) was targeted by the activities of organized crime groups, which practiced archaeological poaching on a large scale. An exceptionally large number of gold and silver objects were exported illegally. 14 of the 24 bracelets that had originally been spirited out of the country were returned.

A hilltop site belonging to the Dacian culture

The bracelets as they are called, were buried in a number of different locations as caches, we suspect, to keep them safe from an invading army of Romans. With enough leaders lost in battle against Rome it is possible that the gold was forgotten or the location was only known to a few. An article in National Geographic on the subject said that these bracelets were offerings to the gods. I felt myself stiffen when I read that. These pieces were buried in numerous locations away from ceremonial complexes. If, as those at National Geographic insist, that theae were somehow offerings, where is the surrounding supporting structure that ought to exist?

My take is different. They were ceremonial, so they were used. They were power objects in the sense that everyone who used them were focused on the same energetics.

We also have the possibility that the culture practiced ritual union in a ceremonial context and this union was used to help strengthen the culture and to provide meaning for their spiritual practice.

It is also likely that they had developed their spiritual understanding to a significant degree. All of this was prior to the influence of Orthodox Christianity which would seek to convert everyone it could, wiping away any memory of the forces alive in earth and all of life that was tied to recreation, healing, and fertility.

My sense is that these people knew about the interplay of opposites and how awakening played into this. It is also quite likely that these people weren’t as shut down and didn’t suffer from the results of that condition to the degree others did, with less of a “veil” needing to be pulled away. This would make them appear intimidating to the “civilized” Christianized people who came into contact with them because such a state roots you in a very different reality concerning your creaturehood.

This Christianization wouldn’t happen until a few centuries after the Roman soldiers had invaded and took control over the region, though, because it wasn’t until the third and fourth Centuries AD that Christianity was legitimized or made legal (and the state sponsored religion) by Rome. Their conversion would have happened more gradually, first by Rome, then by Christianity. This would be repeated numerous times all over the world. It would happen in South America with the Spanish instead of Rome providing the civillian force to bend the culture when it would appear unseemly for the monks to do so. It would repeat in North America with the empire-in-waiting that began as a confederation of colonies and evolved into a nation that would later act like a new Roman empire (as it does today). It is curious how this pattern developed. Regardless, my sense was that these people, of which so little appears to be known about their spiritual lives, did what all people who live close to the earth do: they brought earth into the equation spiritually and that naturally included the concept of the family unit of the creative duo of feminine and masculine as an engine for creation seen in all things.

The Taoist concept of yin and yang, for instance, naturally gave room for the masculine and feminine together. Christianity did not: it had a god who behaved like a vengeful emperor as any notion of the humanizing effects of the family unit didn’t exist in this later model (present in Judaism but now being adopted by Christianity around this time period). Once seen in the earth as a force, it would be seen in all of life, and might even be seen in the forces that move air and push the earth through space in its travel around the sun.

People like this tended to be aware of the cycles created by the revolution of earth around the sun, even if they didn’t know its true nature in the larger scheme, they did know that the days and years had a specific repeatability to them as the erected standing stones in France and other regions reveal (a stone that is centered so it frames the sun on the winter solstice for instance).

The documentary raises the specter of the gold bracelets as being cursed because so many people experienced negative outcomes while hunting for and seeking to spirit away, the gold out of the country. I am not superstitious, but objects that are used communally can have energy associated with them that appears to have effects on people later who unearth them. In the documentary, which was more about buried treasure and the theft of priceless artworks in gold, the documentary uncovered how one of the discoverers of the location of the gold wound up dying a mysterious death later. The documentary suggested that the objects had a powerful aura about them.

As all of this was shown in the documentary, I found myself bothered, upset even, with images that were emerging spontaneously in my mind. When these happen in this way, my ears prick up. It felt as though I was picking up on another age, a time that came from our legends having to do with a time when there were dwarves and fairy folk….except there were no fairy folk or elves, but there was a time out in the expanse of forest where a people lived who were pagan and who lived close to the earth. And following me around was the pattern that has been present not in all of my lives but many of them: the inner union within consciousness that liberates a bio-psychic energy that reflected that union in the physical world. As many would use their consciousness in a lopsided way, often, I found myself wanting to scratch beneath the surface to this more luminous state I have sensed was there, could be there…..must be there.

An overview of the ceremonial grounds

I have seen a life in Babylon where the leaders of the country participated in ritual fertility rites of heiros gamos. Enough details flooded in that I found myself being able to identify the leader. If you happen to have a life or two that was known to history, being able to identify details from memory that later check out is a pinch-me kind of moment. When I was researching the region where I had lived as a Miwok in California in the 1800’s I found an Army memo describing a raid on their fort by the Indians who lived in and around Yosemite. That memo described a memory I had twenty years earlier to a “T.” There were no other attacks on a fort in that area that were written about in the record. What are the chances?

So it was an unusual pinch-me moment when I met someone who I knew from this life in Romania. It’s easy to secobd guess and doubt, but one thing I have learned is that when you really feel something is right from another life, it probably is. We just think getting to those memories are hard work. They seem that way, but in reality aren’t. If you are like me, you might get a small cluster of memories or impressions but precious little else. Why? Sometimes the bridge to that self isn’t as strong as it could be, some material would prejudice you in regards to a lesson you keep trying to learn and you need “radio silence” in order to solidify the lesson. Sometimes. Some lessons, once learned, are done with. Other lesons are like a seven course meal that is digested in parts.

It all happened effortlessly where I could feel the tug, the pull, the flow of that edge of bliss as I held off going any further. I knew exactly where we had met. Union, and heiros gamos again, a pattern showing that for my higher self, this work is some of the most important I can think of. While the stream of energy is powerful, we have decided to collaborate on a book on the subject of union and awakening. There is a lot out there that seeks to cast this experience as something closer to myth than anything else, and I think it is time someone gives a new perspective. I am not even going to say the “twin” experience isn’t real, but I will instead show how it is related to awakening and the sacred. It’s an exciting prospect especially since the book will be illustrated, which should help to emphasize and enliven the work in peoples’ minds.

Memory of past lives isn’t that hard, but you don’t get there via the rational mind. The feeling side is much more constructive and doesn’t throttle down the intuitive flow. Many things you are interested in now are experienced in other lives. Twice in two lives as a leader I embarked on building projects that included pretty amazing adornment and decoration. Today, I am an artist who makes objects to decorate the home. I am not a king. I also have a strong interest in leadership and good governance. But what I am saying here is your lifetimes often share a lot in common with where you are now…and the best way to explore is to playfully imagine. It wont seem like anything serious, but for this reason you can often find some gems. The position is one of feeling. Don’t let ego, pride, or ypur rational mind get in the way…feel it out. Oh, and if you tell me you were Cleopatra, I am going to have to say it wasn’t likely since so many in the past say they thought they were someone famous like Cleopatra. But who knows, someone out there might have been her actually!

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.

Memories of Babylon, The Goddess Inanna Sagurra, And The Language Of Light

Inanna

Many years ago I came across a writing that was attributed to a goddess named Inanna. In it she was asking for her lover, Demuzi, to come and make love to her. While reading this ancient poem, I felt the echo of awareness present in that ancient tradition with the power that is within awakening, which I contend, is the result of a unity of the opposites of our nature (and the hemispheres in our brain). I shared it with a friend at the time who was knee-deep in the concept of divine union and she agreed that it was an important chapter. That was about 2010.

Fast forward to 2017. I am corresponding with someone who I suspected I had known whose work I had read online a few times and wound up having a most unusual dream about. Driven by a sense of familiarity, I found that there had been something there, but where and when, I had no idea. Instead of trying to shoe-horn it into a narrative, I did what I do nowadays: I waited. One evening while checking on my glass furnaces in the studio, I heard in my mind a clear voice that said “He was a lead general in the army of a king…” This was my first bread-crumb and it did what tantalizing lead-ins always do: it opened my intuitive faculties wide. Suddenly I saw a space, a bedroom and a window that looked out onto a courtyard. Details rose up spontaneously all around me. There were no glass windows, but shutters. I saw here there, tall and willowy, but dark and rich in body tone and skin. She wasn’t from here, I knew, she was from further North…maybe closer to Turkey, I thought. How I knew all of this, I couldn’t tell you. I later learned that what I was seeing was very much on-point. There she was, like a message from the past, one iteratiin amongst many, and many frustrated until I learned that it’s not my job to pull people out of their own tar pits. Still…there is this love that always moves us to want to help. “They have to grasp what helping themselves mean. Until then, they remain conflicted and in desire.”

The building was massive and tall, and my take was that this was a palace, although this would make it an ancient palace built in a desert country. When I thought about where this was, I found that I could feel it out. Was it Arab? No. Turk? No. Certainly not Persian. Not Judean. Not Roman. Not Greek. And then as I felt into it, there arose a clear thought: “This was in Babylon.” Iraq. Assyrian. Aruk, Ur….I began to see moments, like snapshots, from that life. How dry the land was and what lengths I went to to see that water got hauled up to the palace for bathing and for growing flowers and plants for my wife (later I would learn that we were king and queen of this patch of desert) was testimony to the care present. Yes it was a desert, but I will make it into a garden…

Fast forward two more years and I was doing much the same again, checking on my furnaces late at night, and in a quiet moment, thinking about the memories of this time in Babylon. Up until that moment this memory was completely anonymous, a kind of ghost, something I could not prove one way or the other. As I crossed the floor of the studio in the exact location where I had received the first clue, I received another, which was like hearing a conversation that had been interrupted for a couple of years which I was now getting to hear in its entirety. It went just like this: “….He was a general to a king, who then became king.” With that one extra detail, that one extra data point, a trove of information began to take shape. I had seen the room, I had seen outside. I saw a cast bronze “keeper” that held the shutters open that looked like a bit like a star with many points. I later looked this detail up and saw the same image depicted on relief carvings of the royal family of that time—it was star anise, an herb used in cooking at that time. It was so revered that it made its way into all manner of decoration, it turned out.

I saw plants growing stories below in the courtyard, a place I knew they would not have normally grow. Great effort was made to keep this garden alive in this desert land. I saw myself, what I looked like, a dark-haired man with a barrel chest who was busy keeping a kingdom going. What I realized, too, was with the addition of “..and who became king” I might be able to find this man since serving as a general to a king and then becoming king was akin to finding a unicorn. Commoners, who might serve under a king, hardly ever rise to a royal station themselves. How often does that happen? Right. Incredibly rare, if it happens at all. So I looked it up.

There were plenty of generals that served under Assyrian kings, but there was only ever one general who went on to become king of present day Iraq. That man was the father to a king who was written about in the Old Testament Bible as Nebuchadnezzar II. His father, Nabopolassar, had ascended to the throne by way of what looks to have been a coup, a moment when the new heir to the throne showed some ambivalence about taking power. That was the man I saw in a bronze mirror. It was in that gap that I stepped in and essentially said, to heck with this. We need to take our country back.

At this time in its history, which was around 620 B.C., Babylon was ruled by a king from another region. Babylon was effectively being occupied by those who were not native to the land, Assyrians. Nabopolassar roused his troops, offered them positions in the new government if they helped him topple the heirs to the throne after the king Ashurbanipal died, and achieved it.

The most important take-away from that life was how important it is to appreciate what it is that you have and what you have built. I saw how people, despite how easy they had it, were unhappy creatures, and it has underlined to me today how solitary some journey’s are. While we always want others by our side, there is also an element of the solitary vision that is part of this interesting duality which seems to seek to evolve itself in the breach between the two polarities.

I also knew that my wife, my Queen, knew about sacred union of the kind that was practiced in those days. This was known later as heiros gamos, which is essentially how the ancients “let in” the gods and goddesses onto our plane of existence. This practice would be described or explained as fertility rites where the god and goddess join in union with the king and queen in order to help bring the rains or fertility to the fields. You see this same imagery in the Arthurian legend, for example. In that culture, Beltane was itself a practice whereupon the people would go out into the fields to practice ritual sex because it was believed that this brought fecundity to the crops and guaranteed a good harvest. As I read about the culture at this time sure as shooting, the King and Queen would take part in ritual sex, the heiros gamos, each season as part of their religious ceremonies. Why not all the people? Why just the King and his Queen or a temple priestess? This is something that I have wondered about for ages to be honest because I have always seen this as a fault in our psychological DNA. It is always an authority who told us what was what, or who performed the important rituals. Even today we want others to do this kind of work for us: to tell us the truth, the way to go, the way to meditate, the way to wake up, or once awakened tell me what’s what….just hold my hand and please tell me what to do and where to go!

Why is that? And yes, I was certainly part of that. It may be one reason why I stand for individuality today to the degree that I do. “No guru, no method…” has been my very Van Morrison-esque mantra. All I needed was my Queen, the one whose very presence was electric, whose presence crackled with this magnetic quality born out of knowing herself. It was this person who I instantly recognized today in the writings online of a person I didn’t even know. It was like a needle in a haystack kind of experience…except there are no accidents. What I learned though was how important it was to let others be where they are and not feel like I have to be with them because we were together in the past. Not everyone is the right match either. The desire for energetic connections is very seductive, but without a day to day anchoring in the physical, these unions are like plants that grow reedy and thin like grass under a pail that gets little sun….it arcs toward what it thinks is the light and the energy of the creative gets ever stronger because that is how we are, we are creative beings, so the energy seems stronger but it is because it is trying so hard to reach completion. “Not this time, apparently” said the voice in the back of my heart. So you let it be a grand love but it is one that cannot manifest in the present. In that was an important lesson to me today. It might have been a lesson on offer back then, too, because sometimes our patterns can follow us for thousands of years and through countless lifetimes. I just can’t see how living this way would make anyone happy. Luckily, it is only mind to wonder and not to know. Peace be with the past.

In the wake of this, I have been a little more interested in Babylonian culture and history. What I know about it encompasses what is taught about in Sunday school and touched on in early elementary school, which was how Nebuchadnezzar II created a new dynasty or empire. I realized recently that the poem of Inanna about her lover Demuzi was in fact Babylonian, and I was reminded of my memories. I looked up Inanna and began to realize that she was an incredibly important goddess, a goddess that would be copied by other cultures and would become the Great Mother in Western regions. When you read about Inanna and the hymns written to you, the sense is that the Babylonian culture revered the feminine. I do wonder about this, though. In India, there are more goddesses than gods in their pantheon of deities and yet the culture remains mired in a class system that has a built-in misogyny. I suspect, though, that these beliefs or images emerge through very real beliefs held at one time or another, as cultures tend to be a kind of amalgam of centuries worth of movements that come and go much like clothing styles do. Each leave their mark on the cultural memory of the people such that a period a thousand years ago of fervent reverence for the feminine may be eclipsed, or diluted by other concerns that come along later. I suspect culture, then, is a giant patch-work or anthology of different views and concerns that are the result of particular periods in time.

For Inanna, she appears to be nearly everything to the people of Ur in 600 B.C. and earlier Babylon. What is so interesting is how the name sagurra or even sakura is associated with Inanna’s name in the scholarly works. It looks like to me that sagurra or sakura (as it is alternatively referred to) may be part of her name, but a part that most Westerners don’t know about. These are a bit tricky to find because there has been so many thousands, hundreds of thousands, in fact, clay tablets that have been unearthed that span thousands of years worth of Babylonian culture. Many were carted off by the British and lie in vaults, photographed along with their accession data, but without translation. Many of these tablets were little more than shopping lists, or inventories to aid in keeping records. In some, however, important cultural details are included. The use of sagurra/sakura is curious and there is no explanation about the significance of this name or designation, or its background. This was found in the article published by De Gruyter in 2009 by Åke W Sjöberg Entitled In-nin sagurra. A Hymn to the Goddess Inanna by the en-Priestess Enheduanna

I often wonder if light language as it is termed isn’t in some way tied to this epoch in history. I know it may sound odd, but there is a story about the universality of language that exists in the Old Testament Bible, and that story is tied to the Babylonian culture. What I suspect is that this story is itself an old memory about how language could be made to be universal through speaking in tongues, something referred to as glossolalia.

When I first heard someone speak in tongues in this way, I found, surprisingly, that I could understand parts of what was being said. What I found was happening was that the nonsense of the language made it impossible for me to use my logical mind to tease out the details, and the less rational and larger-seeing part of my mind was then engaged. I found, quite to my surprise, that I felt like I knew what was being said, but it wasn’t because I understood what the person was saying in terms of an easily decoded vocabulary. Instead, nothing was known about this language, but it was (again, I suspect) the sing-song quality of the language that put me into an altered state which had the effect of opening up my own innate telepathic abilities. Otherwise, none of this encounter made any sense to me. I had this whole dialog in my mind that I somehow “got” as a result of hearing this woman speaking in this language…and it was pretty crazy because of what happened next…

Later, the person who was speaking in this language told me what she was going through, and what she was describing in her language, I was stunned to find that I had picked up on all of the main points that she had been “saying” despite the fact that her language had no reference to English or any other language that I am myself familiar with. What I am suggesting when it comes to light language, which I suspect is the very same thing as glossolalia or speaking in tongues, is that the sounds of the language access certain parts of our minds which are naturally intuitive and psychic and those pathways are opened up through the process of speaking in this way. I also suspect that this is an old capacity that we as humans have had and I also suspect that this is what is behind the story of the Tower of Babel, except with a twist.

“Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'” (Genesis 11:4)

I point this out because what it does is it helps to show that we have had periods in our past when we were more developed psychically than we may realize today with our languages that serve to so narrow down experience as to make accessing these numinous realms impossible. What we need, spirit suggests, is a language that can open us up to our larger innate potential, and I suspect that what most people would call “nonsense languages” are precisely what is necessary. If you talk to someone who is familiar with light language you will likely find that what they say is not a normal language in the way that we think of it today, but in some cases is a language that has the capacity to convey states of being or energetic states and feeling states in a single word or term without the customary descriptions that take place with languages that we use today. A word in light language can act as a key to open the soul or energy body to a certain experience. This language, then, can work as a triggering device, a kind of soulful technology that uses sound and “words” but in a completely different way. I suspect, since language is always contained and processed in the left brain in humans, that this language is a language that is used by the right brain and as such does not have the same kinds of rules pertaining to it as English, French, Arabic, or Persian does. It is interesting, too, because Hebrew contains within it what appears to be a memory of this concept for how words could cause things to happen in consciousness. In Genesis certain Hebrew letters were used to spell out the creation. If you dig deep into the Hebrew language you see that there are all kinds of references made to each letter (such as a numerical counterpart for instance) and this all gets very mystical very quickly. When I say this, I mean to say that it looks like Hebrew may have been used in the distant past as a language for speaking to the soul directly.

At this time in antiquity, all the people spoke the same language and their minds were befuddled so that they could no longer understand each other. I find this interesting. is this the memory of an age-old capacity that we have had for a very long time to understand this type of language regardless of the language that we ourselves speak? Additionally, it is commonly known in Christianity how the Holy Ghost is what brings on the speaking in tongues. The Holy Ghost was known to be the feminine aspect with the Godhead and that godhead was not found outside a person but was inside of them. The implications of this knowledge, then, are immense, and also is congruent with the work that I am doing on Early Christianity and how the early dogma started out as something quite different….before it began to be changed or misunderstood or misconstrued. That, though is for another time, but it is interesting that the feminine is found here in all of this because the feminine itself is the quality in each person and is found in the nonlinear right brain. It was in bringing the union of the two opposites together that sacred union was known within the person, this is literally the genesis of being resurrected, or reborn, and also of kundalini, which was being taught in the earliest day of Christianity (yes really). All of this is to point to how the feminine is in all of us and can be honored and brought forward. It is literally the missing link in ecstatic experience and in enlightenment. This is the opposite end of the electrical circuit, not switched into the “on” position.

It is interesting, too, to note that the person who is credited as being involved in the building of the Tower in Genesis was a man named Nimrod. When we look in Babylonian accounts, we cannot find a similar character as the Jewish tradition describes, but what the story does do in Genesis is to explain that Nimrod was one of the first Babylonian kings. What I suspect is that there was a memory of the babylonians having a means for speaking to others who didn’t speak their native tongue and this became, over time, to be thought of as a universal language that all people spoke (and that might be true in a certain sense: we may have had a much greater facility for glossolalia in our past). This story might help to chronicle how human beings fell away from using this inner language of the soul that was a kind of nonlinear and non-rational language. All of this in a place where a goddess was revered.

All of this may look like a giant rabbit hunt (first one path then another), but what I suspect is that as you go back through time you reach periods when the goddess was revered. When that happens, I contend, you find a culture that is much more mobile in its consciousness. Men, revering women, are much more ready to see how the qualities we ascribe to women are also in the male, and vica versa. Inanna was seen as a goddess of love, nurture and sex….but she was also seen as a goddess who could make war. She was a goddess that could make the rain showers come to help plants thrive while also sending storms that could also destroy. If we go back far enough, we likely see a time when the priestesses of Inanna spoke in this language which some call light language in order to reach the states and to convey the information that they would bring back from those alternate states of mind. It is interesting, too, because the priestesses of Inanna would use a drum in their work and it is well known now that certain drum beat frequencies can induce different brain states. It is possible to go into an alternate brain state, such as a theta state through drumming alone. When we see drumming in so-called primitive cultures we also find visionary work being done. Many shamanic cultures utilize drumming or repetitive sound within certain frequencies in order to induce the brain states necessary to begin accessing what many call “vision space.” This space is marked by the lack of any reference to time and as such one could easily see or sense the presence of shamans in that space from other times and places, even thousands of years past or hence. Amongst the Lakota it is observed that when one cries for a vision, the place they enter is the same space that all other visionaries have been. This isn’t because the Lakota have unlocked something special for themselves alone. They recognize something that many other cultures also have recognized, which is what we might call a “field” of nonlocality that has more to do with states of mind as a “location” over their being a “space” in spirit. As such those who long for the days of the Goddess can find themselves very close to her in alternate states of mind….something that is happening to a greater degree today with all of the awakenings.

I will also point out that the Goddess, in whatever form you might take her, represents at the level of the archetype, a quality not just in women but qualities in consciousness itself. When we take the archetype of Shakti and Shiva we see a description of the potentiating of the left and right brains, of the logic (male) and the nonlinear nonlogical (feminine) parts of the human physiology regardless of sex. As such, kundalini, depicted as these two sexual forces (opposites) rise upward to join in union because when the two opposite forces in consciousness reach union it feels orgasmic, hence the reference to men and women as one. In the early Christian mythos, the father and mother join together to create the third, the Christ, in what is seen as a divine syzygy, which is described androgynous and capable of drawing from both sides of the self. These systems are describing not a sexual quality but a spiritual one since both men and women both can experience both sides of this dynamic. This is not a desexualization of the person but instead a drawing together of the two opposite forces (as contained and processed by the left and right brain in both men and women) which results in all of the lights and sounds and explosive qualities that we generally ascribe to kundalini. This is why the twin serpents meeting at the crown were used to describe the experience in the Hindu tradition. The Buddha, upon awakening, expressed joy that he could feel this level of bliss because it mean that the didn’t need to be with a woman in order to achieve this. That was one person, though, and I find that path uninteresting to say the least, but it does speak to what this energy can do. The images below are from present day France, are preChristian and show a man who has developed control over the serpent, his own vital force and energy. This has brought him into a harmony with all life around him.

When we see the goddesses along with the gods you typically will find a spectrum of ecstatic experience and an awareness of what we call awakening. Curious, isn’t it? There is evidence that this was known in Europe with the imagery of the Cernunos, which was found in Gaul (present day France). In Ireland, snake imagery was tied to vital force and was throughout the culture, despite St Patrick’s efforts to “drive them into the sea.” Early Christian imagery contained many references to the serpent in Ireland, just so long as the locals didn’t admit that they were anything other than the one who deceived Adam and Eve in the garden. In the case of the Cernunos, the man is shown in a number of depictions holding a serpent and no other animal.

In ancient cultures the serpent represented vital force and an energy in human beings tied to a mystic realization. So universal was it that we see the serpent even being used in Asia and Meso-america under the same banner as elsewhere. In the case of Quetzalcoatl, the serpent would consume the human in order to take it on journeys of the spirit. On the one hand the serpent could be problematic, but on the other, for one who had mastered it, a path to the divine.

It was Moses who also “raised the serpent” in the desert. We are told that the cast brass depiction of a serpent on a staff was enough to cure snake bites, but it may be that this is an old memory of a time when people were being awakened and by meditating on the image of the serpent, they could complete the process of ascension and find relief since the “serpent” of awakening rises (just as it can also fall or expand out into awareness). It seems unlikely that a person could look at such an image and be cured of snake bites. I suspect that the origins of this action on the part of Moses was lost to the average person and so their best guess has prevailed (albeit one that doesn’t make a lot of sense). The point being that where these images are found we find ecstatic experience and a greater awareness of ourselves as energetic beings that exist beyond this one world. The curtain of perception is pulled back, intuition increases, and insight grows. Since the feminine qualities in consciousness are part of this, we would expect to see female imagery, perhaps in the form of forces in nature or in animals or expressed as a woman herself. In the case of Inanna, she was seen as pretty much the whole kit and kaboodle. The hymn in part follows.

“You alone are majestic, you have renown, heaven and earth…..not….You rival An and Enlil, you occupy their seat of honour. You are pre-eminent in the cult places, you are magnificent in your course…..The great gods kissed the earth and prostrated themselves. The high mountain land, the land of cornelian and lapis lazuli, bowed down before you.” And then a few paragraphs later: “…mercy and pity are yours, Inanna….To cause the heart to tremble,…..illnesses are yours, Inanna. To have a wife….to love…are yours, Inanna. To rejoice, to control…are yours Inanna. Neglect and care, raising and bowing down are yours Inanna. To build a house, to create a woman’s chamber, to possess implements, to kiss a child’s lips are yours, Inanna. To run, to race, to desire and to succeed are yours Inanna. To interchange with the brute and the strong and the weak and the powerless is yours Inanna.”

SOURCE: https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section4/tr4073.htm

Additionally, Inanna (Sumerian) is also referred to as Ištar (Akkadian) who is also tied to the morning star Venus. She has an aspect that is dual: she is a nurturer, but she is warlike. In many ways she is a study in contrasts, and it appears to me that her many faces are the result of how the people felt they needed to invest her with qualities that the people themselves wanted to possess.

She is included in the epic of Gilgamesh as a lover who he ultimately rejects because of how her other lovers were cast aside and destroyed. In Babylon, Inanna was part of the “sacred marriage” between king and the goddess, which helped to assure abundance to the land and its people. It is not clear whether this was an actual ritual that was performed by the king each year, or whether it was just an idea, a spiritual construct that the people believed in. I myself have a memory of what this kind of union entailed because I learned about it from this lifetime (among others: it seems that this is a pattern for me where I investigate many different aspects of spiritual union here on the planet).

What we find existing with rulers and the gods or goddesses in the past often wind up being qualities that each person actually had within themselves, but may have been a power or knowledge kept for the ruling elites and out of the hands of the great unwashed. Additionally, scholars have argued that the reason why in graves images of Inanna/Istar are more prevalent is because of her connection to the underworld or the spirit world. What I contend is that this world is not a place we go to but is instead part of a focus. We are focused now as physical beings, but that focus will shift once the body is dropped. Do we go somewhere?

Do our death stories suggest that we travel somewhere? My experience suggests that these are all belief constructs and all depend on the person involved. We experience the tunnel, I suspect, because that is what we experience at the beginning of our physical life, while exiting from the body of the mother and into the light. In today’s experience what do people see once they go into the light? Why, they see “the father” of course! And in our physical life, this is also what we do here, as many births attest to on earth. I was the first person to see my children when they were born as most fathers are. When we die we speak of god the father who we see. It is curious to consider how these experiences appear linked.

SOURCE http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/inanaitar/

Ishtar evolved into Diana and Artemis in Asia Minor and Aphrodite in Greece. Interestingly, Inanna was worshipped by the Babylonians as the “Queen of Heaven” since the virgin Mary has been referred to this also. The belief in Mary as Queen of Heaven received the papal sanction of Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam (English: ‘Queenship of Mary in Heaven’) of October 11, 1954. Never mind that the Babylonians had beaten the Christians to the punch by at least a millennium! While Christians shrink back in horror over their images being tied to pagan images, I think it is all part of the great mill of the gods: we are all made in lines that are interrelated. We all seem to need our gods and goddesses to represent certain things as part of a larger curriculum of our evolution here on the planet. I know how that might sound, but I think that knowledge of the feminine waxes and wanes as we go through different epochs of development. Additionally, I would not say that the past was necessarily better for women even though Inanna was revered. In some cases, and in some cultures women’s lives were better. In Babylon, the first laws were written to protect people. The idea of a minimum wage comes from Babylonian law as has the concept of a woman being able to own property and to proceed with a divorce. I think there were times when things were better for women, and that our development has not been linear. We are, I think, readying for a kind of explosion into a new realm concerning our identities as humans and not all of it will be good, but not all of it will be bad, either. There will be people who go to extremes and others who will strike a perfect note that will catapult them out of ever needing to come back here for another incarnation.

What we know, though, is that these stories repeat, and the story of the Christ is itself a recombination of a much older story that had already had several incarnations in the world. Virgin births amongst god-men was common. Anyone who had been sufficiently different was said to have not been born of humans in some way shape or form. Inanna was one such god-woman who would serve as a template for others to come after her. What I find so interesting is how it may be that in the old times the concept of speaking in tongues may have been something that didn’t emerge just within Christianity, but was instead a quality in humans of just about any culture. This might also be a nonlinear and nonliteral language that concerns itself more with intensities of states over traditional word formation and symbol usage to help depict sounds, but instead symbolize qualities of consciousness. I have seen the symbols of this language in dream and in vision and what I saw is surprisingly similar to what some have drawn who claim to have seen this language. It’s a rather remarkable thing to have seen it and then you see someone who you have never spoken to who has the language on their site or they blog about it or they mention it in conversation in passing. If you have experience with this, I encourage your input. Am I full of it, or does any of this resonate? I suspect though that because of how the issue of awakening has followed along with me throughout many of my lifetimes, that my time In Babylon included elements of this as well.

Did the priestess of Inanna speak in that unified language described in the Old Testament? Was there a form of communication that was as much a part of the nonlinear right brain as spoken language is of the left brain? I am also reminded of Enki, the Sumerian God who, along with other creator beings, came to Earth to create human beings using a technology that may have been part genetic engineering and part hybridization. The Anunnaki were said to have been off-put by how humans spoke. They made a lot of racket. Was this because the language was so linear in nature? Were the Anunnaki telepathic? Are we experiencing a pattern of awakening and a return of the feminine spiritually that has been seeking to assert itself down through time? If so, I think it is high time that we get it right. We can begin on that path by being thankful, grateful for what we have and for what lies ahead for us to yet create. Being able to expand awareness of this innermost feminine can help the world in many ways. Perhaps Inanna calls to many of us from across the centuries still. The ancients once said that we are the ancestors to the gods….so perhaps it is true that the gods are creations, in part, from our own creative imaginings, or are at least in part at various stages of the process. Perhaps we make the gods and goddesses into our image as much as they make us into theirs…

A Quickie…

The Case For A Private Teaching By Jesus Gets Stronger

One outcome of my awakening experience was my personal discovery of books from early Christianity that had been largely unknown until a large cache were discovered in the desert of Egypt in 1945. One book purported to be the secret teachings of Jesus to his innermost circle. What I realized, or thought I did, was that these books were describing awakening with a pretty high degree of specificity. It wasn’t only that, but how they appeared to veil the teachings in many cases by using descriptions that made it difficult for anyone not having the experience to even know what the writers were refering to. It was to my mind like a way of coding the teachings just enough that it made it hard to understand. This may have been intentional, but it could also have been the result of not having a specific enough vocabulary with which to do the describing.

This might sound strange, but let me give you an example for what I mean. Not long into awakening, me and a person who awoke along with me (a country apart, didn’t know each other, this all happened from a distance) we both referred to what was happening to us as “it.” That was how sophisticated our vocabulary was. We had no reference point, no context, nor a teaching to guide us. Overnight, innexplicably, we had a tellepathic connection (which was proven numerous times each week). “It” fit though, because how on earth would you describe “this” (we used that term also)? It also kept what was happening to us from prying eyes and ears since who would understand or believe it? There was no real context in which to put it in. When that’s the case, you create a language or vocabulary for it much like people who are dealing with it do today (witness the use of words like “downloads” and “portals” to refer to aspects of the experience). You create your own vocabulary to help describe what is happening to you.

How could it be, I wondered, that these books were described as heresy by certain people within the church when they so clearly revealed a sophisticated understanding of a very rare state of being?

When I first found these books and realized they were pretty clearly describing my state, I considered that it was a conspiracy that they were not just shoved aside, but that in many cases, the books that were part of an unnacceptable take on Christian thought were destroyed. Now however, I am realizing it was little more than a conspiracy of ignorance…and an easy trap to fall for by anyone who was not in the know, who hadn’t had the experience, or wasn’t initiated into the system.

Was it as many scholars have asserted, that these books were jibberish, mere speculation, and could not be tied to Jesus at all? Was it true that as some Orthodox apologists have said, that these people, called “Gnostics” were late-comers? Were they forging documents, slapping Jesus’s name on them in order to give their own “wild speculations and fantasies” more caché?

I have learned that the opposition will say just about anything in order to put a good man or woman down. Maybe this speculation was right, and my initial gut sense was all wrong. There were times when this certainly appeared to be the case.

This question put me on a 15 year journey where I made myself familiar with early Christianity. I didn’t spend years in seminary getting my doctorate in divinity, nor did I learn Greek or Hebrew. I knew next to nothing about the field and I just couldn’t square my sense that these early Christians were on to something of immense importance versus what those in what would become known as the Orthodox church had to say about these teachings. Something didn’t add up.

I have realized that while I lack the background in the history of early Christianity that many scholars in the field have, I have something most (perhaps nearly all) do not: I have the experience of awakening with all of its dizzying effects, signs, and symptoms. I have read at length even scholars who specialize in the Gnostic texts speculating about the meanings of the gospel of Thomas or Philip. My sense from the beginning was that these Gnostics were the real deal, and that these works constitutes a “lost Christianity” as Bart Ehrman has described it. Having said this, I will also say that they go far afield from the words of Jesus as we have come to know them. The difference between an esoteric system and an exoteric one (the Gnostics as we refer to them ate esoteric) is that esoteric systems have much greater production of documents because the followers keep having experiences and writing about them. In the case of these early Christians, they believed that the Christ was revealed to be within a person (some Gnostics considered Paul to be a bit of a hero because he writes in his letters that God revealed to him the Christ which was within him when he was struck by a blinding light on his way to Damascus). For the Gnostics, then, the crucifixion lost much of its importance because they found salvation from the awakening to the indwelling Christ.

I ask you: what teaching by Jesus ever made anything appear to be outside of ones self? The kingdom was all within one, and seeking was done inwardly. Those who “seek him” were seeking a quality that was already there. It is worth noting that this is precisely what most Eastern traditions that describe awakening say. It is also a completely different story that Orthodox Christians have put forward since about 100-130 A.D.

I will say, however, that there were times in my work on this subject where it looked like the Gnostics were a later “invention” or movement and could not be definitively pinned to Jesus. I was, for a time, considering that for as insightful as they were, there just wasn’t a connection to Jesus’s life. I got used to the idea that these were amazing people who spun their own insights into what the Christ was all about. Maybe they were a seperate development that still managed to “get there” even though they came later.

That was before I found out about the work of Walter Bauer who did a study or survey of documents from earliest Christianity, who, in the 1930’s (and before the discovery in 1945 of this cache of early books in Egypt) determined that heresy came first and Orthodoxy came later. Orthodoxy, based on Bauer’s work, placed Orthodoxy a hundred years after the heretics (give or take a decade or two). Source: Orthodoxy & Heresy In Earliest Christianity

Heresy has always been described by the church as that branch off of the “main vine” that represents a divergence from the central truths of the dogma (see church father Origen since he originated this concept). This begged the question: how could this be so in light of what Bauer found? This may have been the result of the church, a group within it, seeking to hide the truth about how things were in the early days of the movement. It could have been as simple as ignorance by another group who didn’t have the deeper teachings (and thus could easily not understand them even when they saw them).

Then there is the troubling reality that Bart Ehrman points out in his book Jesus Interupted which is that most of the discoveries we have made in the last 100 years of Christian documents are nearly all Gnostic (which is used to describe this group of Christians today—gnosticism meaning ‘one who knows’ or who has inner knowledge not attained through books or instruction alone). Ehrman asks pointedly, did the Orthodoxy not have anything to say that there have been so few new discoveries of Orthodox books or letters during the same time period? It is plausible, then, that Gnosticism was far more robust, engaged, and involved in the matters of Christian thought than the early heresy hunters would have us believe. The historical record is certainly showing us this in spades in this regard. In Bauer’s work he points out letters that show that the church gave up trying to convert Asia Minor because the heretics were so numerous and resistant to their message. It would be easy to just say they were deluded and utterly lost, but it hides the fact that this was a situation that had always been described as no big deal by those in the Orthodox wing of the church, something more like a few flies that needed to be swatted away as the Orthodoxy has tried to represent it as. No, “heresy” was much more developed than Orthodoxy was, and at a very early period. It begs the question as to which tradition was the original or earliest one.

When I think about what happens to our leaders today it is easy to see how each side in a political campaign seeks to demonize and dethrone the leader who is in the opposition. Those with the loudest voices wind up being heard and believed. We are well aware of the sentiment that the winners of a war get to tell the history as they want it told.

Orthodoxy won the war of ideas not because their thinking was superior but because they were more worldly and systematic in their willingness to take down what they considered an opponent. You can easily see just how harsh the rhetoric was by reading the writings of these noted antiheretics like Tertulian, St. Justin, and others like them. In fact, we know a lot about early Christian “heretics” because the diatribes about them were so long-winded (and detailed) by those who were opposing them. Christians don’t like the idea that there may have been a larger story here because they have lived with a version of a story they have come to know and love. But to say that a belief system is right simply because we have lived with it for 1600 years or more is not evidence that it is necessarily right or the final word. It only means that one group stamped out another group such that their knowledge base was silenced.

Yes it seems strange and foreign, and yet this is just what archeology has revealed and the voice that was silenced was showing us the very keys to the kingdom. These keys as I call them are a suit of methods that appear in the so-called Gnostic writings mostly found in the Nag Hammadi Libray but that are also found in documents discovered earlier like the Pistis Sophia. These documents describe the same phenomenon as those in Eastern schools of though which describe the process of enlightenment.

I am not suggesting that these people went to India, but managed it on their own and that the “ressurrection” of the soul was achieved by attaining a quality that one culture called Christ while another called it Buddha. As such, this knowledge wasn’t predicated on belief alone, but pointed to a universal quality that every person has regardless of race or creed.

Rumi, the great poet and mystic once wrote about how we all squabble over the names of things and that we try to differentiate the light falling in one place as fundamentally different from the light falling in another when it is all the same source, the same thing. I think Orthodoxy tried to do this in an effort to carve out its own seemingly unique niche when in fact it had discarded important elements along the way that would have enriched it tremendously.

The Mar Saba Discovery

Then along comes Morton Smith in the 20th century. Morton Smith claimed to have made a discovery of a book in Mar Saba near Israel in the early 1960’s that contained writing by Clement, a figure from early Christianity. Clement quotes lines from a book that he calls “Secret Mark” which was, as he described it, part of a private teaching Jesus gave to his closest followers. Clement emphasizes that these teachings were never spoken before the uninitiated, a situation Jesus cautions about even in the synoptic gospels when he refers to swine and pearls, those who were “without.” In this case, Jesus was pointedly obfuscating his teaching so the Gentiles could not understand lest they be saved. The book was intended for the “perfecting” of those who were followers of this Jesus.

Morton Smith took photographs of the document and when he returned later to examine the book again, it had vanished. It has not been seen since. Here’s the thing: forensic examination of the photographs themselves have established that the book is an authentic document of the era. Christian apologists go so far as to criticize the writing as being “too Clementine” which to me may well be enough to prove the point. The writing style is consistent with what historians know about Clement, who has many writings attributed to him. Those within scholarly circles who are Christian apologists set upon Smith in attack after attack, however.

The letter was about one thousand words and had been copied onto the endpages of a seventeenth century book which no one had ever mentioned before. The find shook the scholarly world, although it’s existance made hardly a ripple in popular Christian circles because the letter denounced the group involved as heretical. That seems to be enough for any reasonable believer of the faith, but it raised important questions for many who find the discoveries of this kind to be suggestive of what Bauer had found to be the case and which continuing discoveries like the Nag Hammadi Library texts had done two decades prior, which was whether we have been told the whole story. Here is an excerpt from an article in The Nation about the discovery:

These heretics, as Clement and Theodore saw them, claimed that they possessed a secret version of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus, they believed, had taught his followers that they were freed from the law and could do whatever they wanted without sinning. According to one of their Christian critics, Irenaeus, they actually thought they earned salvation by “doing all those things which we dare not either speak or hear of, nay, which we must not even conceive in our thoughts.”

The Nation, Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith, January 8, 2009, Anthony Grafton.

It is worth noting that as a result of scholarly research we now know that it was Mark’s gospel that was the earliest of all the gospels. While Clement denounced the teachings in Secret Mark, he did not say that this Mark didn’t exist. Here we have a proof that books like Secret Mark were later destroyed by the Orthodox church, with copies that have yet to surface. Consider what would happen if the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of today were against you, what would you do? Would you perhaps hide away the books that you do have in order to preserve them? If your books were unapproved of, they would be destroyed with fire.

While some scholars like Ehrman have suggested that the Nag Hammadi find may well have been an effort on the part of local Christians to free up space in their libraries by burying the collection several kilometers away, I am reminded of an email from Elaine Pagels recently that the burial of the NHL documents is well within the same time frame as the letter by Bishop Athanasius, written in 365 A.D. which spelled out what books were to be acceptable for use in the church. Every book Athanasius mentioned in his list is contained in the New Testament today. It was Athanasius’s letter that would set the die for all that would follow. Anything else would come under scrutiny and risk being remanded to the flames. Remember, before the printing press, books were copied by hand in what could take many months to complete. Burning one book or two could end an important thread within the early movement. Back then, in the first century, stories abounded about the life of Jesus, an oral tradition, that was only later written down after Jesus’s death.

This article is helpful to gain the full scope of the issue about how the New Testament was formed.

My thesis has been and continues to be that Jesus was a man who attained awakening. The books attributed to his private teaching happen to also describe what is known in India as kundalini. While there isn’t compelling evidence that Jesus had gone to India, there is no good reason to suggest that in order to awaken he would need to study under an enlightened guru either. It’s possible he got instruction locally from John the Baptist, or the Essenes. We just don’t know because for as a man as famous as Jesus is, there is a huge gaping hole that is unaccounted for in his life in terms of time. I never studied under a guru and managed to trigger the first initiatory steps into awakening on my own. Likewise, it is quite possible that Jesus did the same. All he would need would be a quality of intense curiosity and a drive to seek. I suspect that this is just what Jesus meant when he said seek and ye shall find. He sought, and he found. But what did he find? He described it as a world that was within each person. At no point does Jesus ever say that his kingdom was outside of himself. All of this was an inside job. So meditation would have been part of it, something Jews of the time were well familiar with. The right kind of meditation would do it, nothing fancy, but something that would serve to achieve a first release of inner emotional material followed by inner inquiry.

It turns out that I did precisely what the heretical Jesus prescribed, which was to remove what keeps one divided within the self. This is actually a prescription Jesus mentions in the gospel of Thomas and mentions in the gospel of Phillip. The way I achieved this was through a conversation with a holy man when I felt a long-standing frustration guilt, and frustration with the universe, afterwhich everything began to change. I unburdened myself of a giant knot that had me tied up for decades, it was almost like an insurmountable impasse for me at the time.

I suspect that the story of Jesus’s baptism was like this or served a similar purpose for him because in the Gnostic texts he is teaching about how to attain the kingdom by resolving what divides you within, and a teacher always relays to his or her students how they achieved it themselves. The elephant in the room is if Jesus was God why was he going to John to have his sin removed? Why did Jesus need baptism? He obviously felt like he needed it, and instead of seeking the God, according to Orthodox scripture, which had always been within him. It’s a huge leap around the question that Christians never seem to ask. I think that it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask and actually makes loads of sense once the private teachings are known and taken into consideration.

With John, who claimed he could relieve the burden of sin through ritual washing, or baptism, Jesus was relieved enough of his own burden for the first flashes of “the light” to begin showing through. Jesus also spent forty days fasting and praying in the wilderness near where John was located. I will point out that this is the same approximate time that the Taoists prescribe for awakening the secret of the golden flower, their take on the awakening process. Similarly, in Hindu practice the number of 40 to 45 days comes up a lot for a time frame. It takes some effort to break through the veil of the earthly self to attain to the “heavenly” one (regardless of what tradition you ascribe to). Orthodoxy glosses over this precisely because it knows nothing about these practices. Then, when presented with the very means to do so, they cried foul heresy. The kingdom thus was found and then lost within a few short generations. The apostolic era came to an end not because of some God-ordained event with dubious reasoning but precisely because people no longer had access to the teachings that would have kept the era chugging along nicely. All of the signs of the holy ghost, and of awakening, were gone because the knowledge had exited the building.

If Jesus had awakened, the libertine attitude shown in the works of some of the Christian mystics like the Carpocrations that Clementine was speaking out against in his letter mentioned earlier has a very good chance of being true. Awakening pushes you beyond the normally accepted mores of the time by virtue of the fact that the energy of awakening vivifies and stimulates the body in new and novel ways. The Hindu describe it as a libidinous force, a creative current that leads one to new levels of bliss that are experienced and described as orgasmic. It’s not that it is literally so, but that this is the only way to aptly describe it so it can be halfway understood. Awakening absolutely impacts the master glands of the body resulting in high outputs of all sorts of hormones. Kundalini a sexual energy? I have always felt that the energy of awakening stimulates all sorts of things, including libido. Kundalini does much more than just stimulating libido.

Many people who are awakened know about the futility of skirting issues. No, the energy seems to push us to leap headlong into the cleansing fire that is the holy ghost, the feminine aspect, what in India would be called Shakti or the Ida current. All of this is consistent with awakening, and there is no reason to think it wasn’t the case with Jesus.

The problem with the Orthodoxy was that none of the secret teachings made any sense to them. How was it possible that by finding the savior within, the Christ, one washed away ones shame of human sexuality? Or guilt, or any other issue that represents stored emotional material that awakening can help the person to clear? Awakening can do this, though. It cleanses and returns you to a renewed mind and state of being. It is a salvific force.

It is now more likely that Jesus did have a private teaching and that the synoptic gospels represent only a thin slice of a larger picture. While Clement railed against this “Secret Mark” as heretical, I ask the question: says who? On whose authority? Why should I pay any attention to someone who was never included in the private teachings of a realized master? Even when Jesus says “No one comes to the father except by me” Christians don’t consider how that statement could mean something significantly different than what they assume it does. In Jesus’s day he was the only person around who had attained to the level that he had, so yes, Jesus was the only game in town. Like any great teacher, if you wanted to get there quickly, you studied under him like any teacher anywhere who had a grip on the esoteric or hidden things.

Mauro Biglino – Translating The Old Testament Literally = Aliens

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimana#/media/File:The_Celestial_Chariot_(6124515635).jpg

Now for something completely different. Following disclosures by the U.S. government of some of what it knows in regards to the U.F.O.’s (rebranded now as Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon or UAP’s), it may help to learn of a project that was undertaken by a linguist that may have shed some light on our ancient past as it relates to the ET presence on the earth.

Mauro Biglino was tapped by the publishing arm of the Vatican to perform its most up to date translation of the oldest versions of the Old Testament in existence. This work, which took some years to complete, included 23 books total. Some books the Vatican decided not to publish since they went against long-standing beliefs concerning what people have long-believed to be the “real story”.

Biglino was familiar with the process that other linguists have performed when translating these documents in the past. A system is used that assumes that certain words in Hebrew result in specific types of translations. In Hebrew there are no consonants, which means that the reader must bear in mind the context of what is being said in order to arrive at the correct words intended. While this isn’t a problem for the bulk of Old Testament reading in Hebrew, there are instances where words can be changed. Biglino thus went to work making a literal translation rather than using the standard program for translation that had been in place for a very long time. While the Vatican approved and printed 17 of his translated books, there were others that they did not publish. In those unpublished works, our understanding of what was written is brought into question, with the result that the Elohim of the Old Testament reads more as beings that came from the sky, who mingled with people of the Earth, and who were involved in the affairs of humans for many generations.

Using his knowledge of other languages like Sumerian, he goes into the Sumerian creation myths and finds that the stories told are startlingly similar in them as those in the Jewish tradition, often bringing up similar people (sometimes with different names) serving the same roles from one culture to the others. In The Jewish tradition there are angelic beings called the Watchers that show up in the Sumerian tradition, for example. In some cases, stories in the Sumerian tradition do not show up in the Jewish one, but bear so many similarities as to the nature of the characters described that Biglino suggests that these may well be the same people, the same story, describing how humans were created by a race that came from the stars. Sound impossible? Judea and Babylon are not far removed from each other, and Jews were taken into slavery by the Babylonians during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. But, we are told that the Jews had Genesis well before this time. Was it possible that the two cultures had previous contact? It does not seem out of the question.

When Biglino has debated Hebrew and Christian priests on this matter, many have agreed that his translation work is accurate, what they don’t agree with are his conclusions.

From a video presentation Biglino has given explaining some of these issues he says: “Actually the Bible says that we were made using a certain amount of material which contains Elohim’s image and that has been cut out. Now everyone today knows what we are referring to when we say that we take something that contains the image of an individual that has been cut out, it’s the DNA. With all probability this biblical tale is the summary of the Sumerian tablets tale, in particular the “Enuma Elish” that is when the Sumerians tell about the beginning, but where the Sumerians are much more precise than the Bible, because the Sumerians who never thought of creating a religion. They never built a temple, never talked of Gods,the way we mean it, but they spoke of those people….with respect because they were much more developed technologically.” (see video below) Is this merely a coincidence, an appearance, a conflation? If so, then in Biglino’s work, these types of things happen a lot. After a while, it can begin to strain credulity and it gets harder to not see that the Jewish stories and the Babylonian ones weren’t taken from the same root story, which describes how beings called the Annunaki came to earth, described the solar system and the planets within it, and where earth was located in that order (really!) and performed a process that sounds remarkably like cloning or a hybridization of earthly beings (primates) into the species known as humans.

It all sounds incredible, impossible, and this is why you should listen to Biglino explain what it was he found when he translated the Bible in a way it had not been translated before. Biglino suggests that the reason why we have the stories that we do is in large part due to how the translational method has hidden what may be the real truth which has been right under our noses the whole time.

In one tradition, they were beings that came and developed a breeding program, describing what sounds to modern scientific understanding to be a cloning process, or taking a primate and blending their own DNA to produce a being (human) who would be bred as a worker inside gold mines that the Annunaki needed for their home world. What is so interesting about the Sumerian stories of the creation of human kind that it is hard not to see it as beings from another world coming here for a mining expedition. What is curious is how in the Sumerian stories, they describe the use of the gold that they mined, which was suspended in their atmosphere to enact a change in their climate or planetary condition. At first the Annunaki were able to find gold easily, but later had to dig for it and this was where the breeding program came into play. In the Hebrew tradition, much of this material is left out. Biglino describes how the two traditions are describing the same story, with one being an abridged version. Biglino explains that once the literal translation was made, the story was quite different. Instead of one God who created humankind, it was instead a group of beings, and not all of them were on equal standing with one another. Yahweh, for example, was put in charge of a relatively fringe group in a desert region. He wasn’t given the best people or the best location. To hear Biglino explain it, the story takes on a very different implication.

When you read the Enuma Elish and see how similar it is to the Genesis account, what I came to realizing was that these two stories may well have come from the same earlier story which people in the region had been telling for many generations. What makes the Enuma Alish different from the Genesis story is that it includes much more detail. Same story, one shorter, the other longer. The longer story describes how these beings, the Anunaki, came to Earth and began to create a new species of creature on the earth. The story reads almost like a record of all of the failed attempts, pointing out that when the efforts at creating a being (a human) weren’t working, the head Anunaki offered his own (genetic) material from his body, thinking that it would somehow be the answer. But, this turned out to be disastrous. If the Anunaki were divine beings it seems that all of this fiddling would not be necessary. The account reads of numerous failed biological experiments: one being upon being made urinates constantly until it becomes dehydrated and dies. Another has its organs on the outside of its body. Still another does not have eyes. In each case the humans are created in what looks like a vessel like a bath which is situated in the ground. In all cases, humans are made using the blood of the gods. When you look beyond the talk of gods and goddesses, the story reads as a group of people who came who wanted a work force who would serve them. The deeper you go into the story, the more details that surface that look….well…consistent with physical beings instead of gods. Biglino points out how the Anunaki asked for humans to make burnt offerings because their chief god liked the smell, that it was favorable to him. He goes on to explain that during the Apollo missions, the material from the suits was used to create a scent that astronauts were provided with in order to get them used to the smell of space. It turns out that when astronauts were coming back into the capsule from being on the moon that there was a smell that was often described as smelling like burnt meat. Biglino asks the question, did these beings like this smell of burned meat because they were space-faring beings who had grown accustomed to it? In the Jewish tradition, the Elohim (which is plural not singular—itself a paradox since YHWY says that there are no others “beside me”) are told that they are the “Chosen” People. In modern day abduction literature the ET’s tell many abductees that they too have been chosen. When Biglino translates the encounter that Moses has with the Elohim on the Mount it begins to read like an ET encounter in which a heavy object which flies, comes up to the Mount and shows itself to Moses. Moses is told that he has to hide in a cleft in the rock or else he might die from exposure to something coming from the object. In the traditional translation this is because the glory of God is so great that it can kill a person. But how can a spiritual quality physically kill a person, Biglino asks? This reads as a physical effect that causes a physical outcome. What is interesting is that when Moses comes down from the Mount, part os his face is burned from his sighting and his close proximity to the craft. He has a cloth covering his head as it was in the full sun and he later felt poorly enough that we then went into his tent for the rest of the day. Moses sees the Elohim because he tells the voice in his head which has been speaking to him that he needs some proof as to the reality of the being and what it had been telling him telepathically. He explains that he needs to be able to tell the people below that this phenomenon is real and he isn’t just hearing voices in his head. You can perhaps understand his position: he is their leader and now he is going on about how he is hearing this clear voice in his head telling him what to do. Up until now the voice has led them out of Egypt, but humans are humans and require continuous proof if they themselves are not witness to it.

Here you can see his presentation from which the above quote is extracted:

The complete presentation can be viewed in the next video (below). It provides a lot of the background concerning the work that Biglino was tapped to do for the Church and how it proceeded. He also explains how he searched the roots of the words that he translated literally, which will help to explain how his translation take on a very different meaning especially the earliest books. If you would like to skip to the most relevant material, go to the 10:00 mark in the following video, which is where he goes into the translation and meaning of RUACH, the beginning of unwinding this translational tale.

It is worth mentioning that in India they have detailed descriptions of flying craft called Vimana. These devices are described not in a mythical fashion as one might expect with a chariot of the gods, but instead reads like a users manual. No allusions, no parables, no mythic language. One such vimana is called the chakra vimana. Chakra means disc. Flying disc. This is the same description made of ET craft. What gives? According to Biglino, similar craft are described in the ancient texts like the Bible but their meaning has been hidden behind the way in which the translations were made to turn ET’s into gods. If you watch the video you will see how Biglino dives into the device that David uses when he fights the giants. Biglino explains that this device is described as a communication device that brings the Elohim to David whereupon he is taken up into a flying object and taken to the Temple where others get out. Biglino goes to Ezekiel and the object he describes there is drawn by a technician at M.I.T. and the result? It certainly sounds and looks like a flying ship, and not altogether different looking than the description of the Indian vimana.

There is also very compelling evidence of early Christians being aware of an ET presence, which they called the Archons. This is largely contained within the mystic writings of early Christianity and were pushed out by the more exoteric wing of Christianity which would today be known as the Orthodox church. In 100 A.D to the mid second century, however, the mystics existed alongside the exoteric-minded followers of Christ. In their books, specifically The Hypostasis of the Archons (p.161, The Nag Hammadi Library, John Robinson, ed.) and the First Apocalypse of James (p. 265, The Nag Hammadi Library, John Robinson, ed.), the Archons are mentioned in some detail. In the Apocalypse of James, Jesus is explaining how beings called the Archons, Described in the Hypstasis as looking like an aborted fetus, come in threes and attempt to take souls by theft. Only by performing a series of declaratory statements can one escape their efforts to take the person. In the Hypostasis of the Archons it is explained that these beings exert a form of synthetic reality called HAL which makes it seem as though they are like gods (but they are not), and also that these beings are often involved in wanting to interbreed with human women. The Gnostic Christians, as may be clear, were not fans of these beings, but how they describe them suit the modern abduction literature in some pretty amazing ways. In the modern ET literature (Budd Hopkins, Whitley Strieber to name a few) it is widely known that the ET grays perform their activities in threes and are able to take a person “by theft” or, that is, against their will through a form of mind control. In the modern abduction stories abductions always take place with three of the alien grays (there are some instances where this does not happen, but the “three” grays are a regular occurrence in the literature).

It is worth noting that books like the Hypostasis of the Archons were scrubbed from any mention in ancient or modern Orthodox Christianity. It was only in 1945 that these and over 50 books from this line of early Christian thought reemerged in an amazing discovery in the desert of Egypt near the town of Nag Hammadi. This was the same year that a giant trove of Jewish scrolls were discovered in Qumran near the Dead Sea. What is so interesting about this mystic strand of so-called Gnostic writings, is that they describe the process of awakening and its many effects. What these early Christians caught onto was nothing less than what the Hindu describe in their own texts as kundalini. It is interesting how when given some of the most sophisticated documents pertaining to the process of enlightenment, the church has chosen to remand them to obscurity. I will also point out that there is a high correlation between awakening and encounters or awareness of ET or other intelligence which could be called “galactic” in character (not human) which those awakened report communing with or having a sense of connection with (some suspect that they have had past lives AS ET’s, and this turns out to be somewhat common in the abduction community, too).

Further, when the Gnostic Christians began to explore the spiritual dimensions which were opened to them with their practice of seeking, they found what many find: a presence which underlies all things, is wedded to every molecule and resides within it, and is a silent presence that observes creation. Encounters with this presence were described as a pure white light in which existed a consciousness of a being that was pure love and compassion. Just entering into this light in meditation would change a person. They then saw how the God of the Old Testament was at odds with what they had themselves uncovered. They then created a myth to explain why the God of the Old Testament was so different from the God which they had discovered and it played out this way: The world was created from a failed attempt at creation, what is called a demiurge. Sophia, the feminine aspect of the divine went off and tried to create a world on her own without the father. This explains why the world is the way it is, because it was “begotten” imperfectly. Sorry, ladies, it seems men from the past can’t help but heap blame on women. While the story of the demiurge seeks to explain why things are they way they are, I observe that this was done in order to make sense, to do what many people do when faced with contradictory accounts in Biblical stories both Old Testament and New, which is they seek to harmonize them in some way that then makes sense. In the early Christian harmonization the God of the Old Testament is jealous and wrathful because he wasn’t really God at all, but a being that arose from an improper creation. Well that explains it! The real God was there all along. Me, I see people who were looking at an imperfect being, which could have been a physical being, an Annunaki from elsewhere, who acted like a god or who was raised to that status over generations in the old stories. When I awoke and began feeling the presence in the Light, I had a similar reaction: the God from the Old Testament does not cohere to my own direct experience. Was that “god” in the Old Testament even a god at all? When Jesus brought the “new covenant” was this equal to his pointing to the old God as being at odds with the God which we find when we seek within and which other cultures might call the Tao or Brahma, The Great Mystery, etc.?

Could it be that in our past we had contact with races from other planets, races that took an interest in us, perhaps even creating us using local planetary stock along with their own D.N.A.? In the abduction literature, those individuals who claim to have been taken onboard ET craft to be examined and who had sperm and ovum extracted, among other things, have reported that the ET’s told them when their captors were told that they had no right to be doing what they were doing said, “We DO have a right. We MADE you.” Now a human living today, unaware of our ancient past as far as the Annunaki and the creation myths are concerned, this might be impossible to hear, but given what Mauro Biglino and others have to say on the subject, it might be a relevant retort.

It might seem impossible to splice D.N.A. from a completely different species from another planet to that on another planet. However, consider that the universe is a very old place and it is not out of the realm of possibility that life here could have been seeded not just by comets, but by space-faring civilizations with an interest in spreading the genome far and wide. In billions of years it is not out of the question that what we think of as our D.N.A. could be part of a much larger subset of a D.N.A. spectrum that has a lot more in common with life on other planets than we might want to admit. Just the fact that nearly all ET’s are described as a “five star” (one head, two arms, two legs) arrangement could reveal that evolution of life beyond our planet may well have proceed along more similar lines than we might believe is possible (either seeded far and wide or a factor present in cosmic evolution). All ET’s are upright humanoid looking beings which, in some cases, have very different features, yet they tend to have all of the same features that we do (but in different proportions—smaller ears or noses, larger heads or eyes, etc.), but it is this kind of similarity that poses a unique question. Are they a version of us, or we a version of them? Or, is it just possible that cosmos-wide, all of nature, terran or not, there might be a preference for advanced life to share certain traits that wind up being common?

Most believers recoil in the face of the possibility that their cherished notions might be part of a different story. I have always been interested in the “marginalia” of our world because as is often the case today’s myth often had a way of becoming tomorrows certainty. The universe is a much stranger place than we could ever imagine.

~Parker

Diving Into the Multidimensional

I am beginning to accumulate some interesting material having to do with how we are in other times and places. This type of material has been accumulating for some time now, but more recently more information has been piling up. What has been happening has been allowing me to observe how other lives have been in the past, as well as the future, and what may be dimensional in nature. Having several of these memories and experiences already I am finding just how powerfully certain patterns have tended to emerge when it comes to people I have known. Being able to know these people in several instances has been eye-opening. I am going to give you the Readers Digest version because the other versions were much too long just trying to tease out all the details. And boring.

In one case there is someone who believes they have known me in many lifetimes even though I have no lifetimes this person has described. I have thus far mapped out lives lived for the last five centuries before our own today and all of the time has been accounted for. It was curious to me why this person has thought this. When I look at the pattern that has existed recently and the pattern that I saw in action during the 14th century when I DID know this person (it was a passing encounter of a person brought into a court room where I was a magistrate), it helps to underscore how it is possible through one chance encounter that we can create karma that is then worked out later (with the actual person). it is also interesting to see how that person then came to believe that they had had lifetime after lifetime with me dealing with a particular pattern in our relating (when it turned out that it was actually that person’s own pattern they were working out). As I scan through time I simply haven’t known this person except for that one time in our local time line. In that encounter the person had been involved in acts of slander and fraud and was being brought before the court. It wasn’t a pretty scene. There was this feeling that the person had that he was being unfairly treated. It was so strange and such a distorted view that this person was taking that it led me to having very little patience with the person. I just wanted him out of my courtroom. That person was taken from the court room yelling and screaming invectives at me and everyone else. And the karma for me? I just didn’t want to hear it. I passed the sentence that was required. I showed no compassion, and that was my hook in the karmic drama and then the karmic draw that would result later. To the person who was being taken out of the courtroom in such an unceremonious way, he was simply misunderstood, all the while ignoring how their own actions resulted in where they were at the time. That was his karma and how I responded to the spitting and sputtering angry ball of rage in the courtroom was mine. It wasn’t any more complicated and no more involved than that. In the current day, this version of that person was involved in slander and deception, too, something that was directed at me over and over (like it was some strange habit or a complete inability to control themselves–weird). What it has revealed to me is how little, sometimes, things change. Patterns. How do they rule us? How do we break out of them once and for all? I know it might be easy for me to say how I have been able to break long-standing patterns by simply awakening, but I have had a front-row seat to be able to see how these have played out with the people in my life.

I get that patterns are the challenges that each person faces, so I am not ready to act as judge this time around (although that experience was pretty dreadful to be honest). I had an experience with a dimensional aspect of that person, though, in this life, and it was very telling. This dimensional aspect was encountered while in an altered state and it happened long before I met the person that was the reincarnation of the man (now a woman in this time) in my life today. The being was not human in this case and while the context was itself a bit bizarre, the pattern that emerged was identical to the one that would play out with this person in my current life here on Earth. In both this life and in that dimensional aspect, both counterparts were involved in forcing an energetic connection. In each case the result was the same: the connection was forced. You might wonder how this is even possible (I know I didn’t think it was) and I will touch on it a little later. I haven’t discussed this with that person and I haven’t written about it because it is so strange and hard to believe but it happened. It is because of my experience that I don’t believe much of what is said about “twin flames” and the “twin soul” concept. It is a lovely idea if only it ever really held up to any amount of scrutiny (which is to say there is none—it has been held within a lovely vessel called belief and little else).

In another case I was able to know both a present-day self, a past self, and what might be an extradimensional aspect or a past life in another location other than earth (I honestly am still working on figuring that one out). It is kind of interesting because this is almost the same kind of arrangement as the previous individual. By seeing what was told to me by one aspect in a series of discussions that were part of an experiment to communicate with this aspect which lives off-planet, I was able to see how that life and being compared to the earthly version of itself. What is so interesting was how a certain deception that took place during the course of the discussion phase with the off-world being showed up in a more mild way with the earth-bound self alive today. I can’t say that the pattern with the counterpart living on Earth is as difficult or alarming as the one that is with the off-planet one. But what is interesting is how certain aspects link all three together. In each case there is this issue of not being completely forthcoming in regards to their position in the current time, although after seeing a hint of it in one I pressed the issue with the other and found a raft of things communicated that hadn’t been communicated before. Bingo.

I wasn’t sure up until I tried to press a few buttons to see if there would be a reaction, but it can be easy to find out if you understand the patterns and have a good enough sense of what might cause aspects of those patterns to rise to the surface. It was enough to help confirm to my mind that what I had read in the person in their other aspects that it was fairly consistent in the present day here on earth. Once that was done, it was clear that yes, the person in question was aware of what I had been seeing from a distance. It was actually a relief to know and it provided me with a clear path free from karmic material that had previously been hanging around in an odd sort of way. It was great to know for sure what was what. It isn’t often that you feel relief when someone moves on. Interestingly I have found relief in both examples.

We all have these patterns, native to our own inner journeys down through time. In some cases patterns are resolved and they do not crop back up again in later lifetimes. In some cases those patterns can be like a deep groove in the heart and soul, difficult to erase after countless lifetimes bearing those same traits. I know that these patterns can be healed or erased, but it takes being willing to do so and it also takes some pretty radical self-honesty in order to do it. I know how hard it can be but I also know how easy it is once you are ready. But you have to be ready. Once you get there the idea that we are going to forgive the “other” winds up being ourselves. Buddha had something to say about this which is that no one “makes” you feel a certain way. it is all about you. This is an inside job made difficult in our current environment when many people are shifting into a world where we are so careful about not upsetting anyone that we wind up not being honest about where our reactions actually come from.

While I think patterns rule the roost in our lives, I think it is also important not to make your mind up in a definite way. I wasn’t able to paint an accurate picture until I received confirmation from one of my examples I have discussed thus far. In fact, I spent months being unsure whether that person was even aware of the material that I was picking up on. When people aren’t aware of things like this, telling them will tend to be met with resistance. Sometimes they are unable to hear you. It just isn’t part of their awareness toolbox. So this has been an opportunity to just sit back and observe to see whether what I was picking up on would rise to the surface.

I don’t know why, but knowing this has given me a great deal of peace. It also serves as a lesson to me for how I might have friends or acquaintences that might not be the best for me in my life as it is today. It is like being able to see the future in a way, but by creating a triangulation effect. Does that mean it will always be that way? Could it change? On both sides, certainly. However, so many of our “draws” are karmic in one form or another. It isn’t that we are here to work it out with them, it is that we are here to learn to undo our responses and reactions that caused it in the first place (our choice of reactions). In my case every single karmic issue involved me forgiving myself for feeling something less than divinely aligned. Anything less than that often points to karmic issues….at least that is the view so far. And things just keep getting easier and easier as a result, too. Quieter, calmer, and less chaotic or turbulent. It is easy to get addicted to the intensity of an earlier awakening, so much so that it can serve as a kind of handicap, a velvet prison sometimes. It isn’t that everything goes bland, it is that when the alignment increases, the energy that is experienced is simpler and more direct. All of this is a work in progress now a decade and a half in.

What I can say though that reflects into my own life is that more doors than I could imagine are opening once I catch the scent of my own soul purpose. The thought that someone who doesn’t really know themselves could understand who I am resolves into one of those important light bulb moments. Gone is the need to be known by others and here is the growing desire to gt to know that part of the authentic self which I have spent the better part of this lifetime getting around to knowing. It isn’t a short cut, no, but it’s the fastest way that I have yet to find. That is hopeful. I don’t know that I would have gotten to where I am without awakening. It isn’t for everyone, but such is the nature of the tail of the cosmic tiger.