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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A Tantric Initiation

I never set out to be a tantric. I was a seeker, my one guiding light was whatever enlightenment might be, I was only ever going to find it within. So I sought.

Through a series of fortunate events that fell into my lap, I was brought to a new state, what I would later learn was a kundalini awakening. Barely into the awakened experience, some nine months later, I was gripped by the energy and felt myself open up in a way that I had grown accustomed. Never having read up on any of the Eastern practices, I stuck with my sense that all of this was found within, as surely it was. No teacher, no guru, no books to lean on. Just pure direct experience. When you do that, when your mind is not distracted with what others have had to say about it, you are free to experience teachings (which is a direct experience of the phenomenon) directly, for surely they will come IF you have that inner reliance on the guru within. I will say that it seemed tantra found me, tantra came to me to reveal itself.

One aspect of my and others’ experience is that you can be taught through visionistic experiences, which are things that seem to come out of left field or out the clear blue. On this day as I sat writing to a friend in my sun room when the energy came on strong and my mind was directed to an inner image that emerged in the presence of this energy (which was not distinguishable from me), the experience unfolded. I was shown a giant loom on which there were three different sets of threads. Two made up the warp and weft of the weaving, which are the threads that get moved up and down, and are the threads you normally see when you look at a loom. These make up the length of the cloth. I then saw a third set of thread which was pushed through the gap between these two thread sets with a shuttle. I watched, and as I did, I felt directly what each of these threads represented. The thread sets that moved up and down, making room for the shuttle to move were the opposites in our world and in ourselves, what some might call yin and yang, lunar or solar energies, or the feminine and the masculine in our own consciousness. Yes, “masculine-like” and “feminine-like” qualities in our own individual consciousness, because what I was being shown referred to all of us (and all of nature too). These were highlighted by my experience with the kundalini awakening so that they rested in my waking awareness.

The third thread, this I could feel was a universal energy of bliss, the more hidden part of the experience of bliss. Its presence in our lives was based on how we focused our awareness on them. As these two opposite set of threads moved around this central thread on the loom, there was a corresponding pulse of bliss that could only be described as orgasmic, and while it stimulated the body, it was felt as an energy that flows through the entire body in the most pleasant way. What happens when sexual energy is liberated from its lower realm is made to flow through the entire body? It becomes a finer and finer material, and a force for healing our entire being. The lesson in this vision, which was an initiation into tantra, was that there is within all things this connection to a field of bliss.

Here on earth it seems that we need to learn about the power inherent in the opposites and here is where it gets to be a mystery: does the movement of the opposites create the bliss or is this bliss already there, waiting for this movement in awareness? Causative effects break down here as the question might be which comes first the chicken or the egg? Certainly the movement of the opposites into union seems to create the bliss effect, and yet the lesson for me in this initiation is that the bliss is always there. It may be that these elements themselves act outside of time at a certain point where both possibilities are equally valid and operate together. In this experience some aspects of linear time and the resulting phenomenon of cause and effect appeared to break down or may have been shown simultaneously (cause and effect being shown in a different relationship to one another).

So I saw this vast loom, which I called the loom of heaven, showing me itself and teaching me what I would later learn was the core of tantra, which is that our fundamental nature is bliss. Further, what I also learned by doing some reading on classic tantra in the years that followed was that tantra itself in the Sanskrit means “to weave.” Had I heard this before? It wasn’t likely. What did I know about tantra before this? Nothing except that it was being touted in the mainstream as a way to great sexual experience but with a mystic Eastern twist.

What I saw on this day was that this was not about sex but was instead about our potential as humans to experience untold bliss within ourselves, and that this bliss could heal us of so many issues that we have when we ready ourselves for it. The effect of this bliss has been that it has loosened my grip on narratives in my mind that somehow I am a victim, that it is the fault of the world, my parents, my culture, or its institutions. I soon found that all of my inner beliefs were being upturned in favor of a much more direct line of sight of a fundamental state of my being that had none of those old stories as part of its pure presence.

That isn’t to say that tantra does not tie into sexual experience, because it does. The same letting go that I felt sans sexual activity was not that different from the moment of release and deep surrender that came with physical orgasm. The difference here was that I wasn’t having sex, and the rush of orgasm was instead felt as a steady state, or a constant state of orgasmic energy whose result was no longer about mere release. Instead, I was in a spiritually aroused state that kept me more or less in a state of surrender. In that surrender you find how easy it is to let go of nearly everything you have supposed, assumed, or taken on in your mind about how you think the world works. This is a great healer of the mind and the effects have been wide reaching in my life.

My initiation came without a teacher and without any previous instruction. Instead of reading in books, I paid attention to my experience and learned to feel as deeply as I could, which allowed me to pick up on elements or qualities of the experience which I would later find were in books on tantra, the ones taught by Tibetan lamas and by Indian practitioners. It was only years later that I attempted to read outside of my own experience because I wanted to see how accurately I saw all of this while also being able to find the places where I had blind spots, or were things I hadn’t considered or experienced directly.

I am not saying that you can’t learn this by way of good books on the subject or from others. You can. You do though have the capacity to know this information directly for the simple fact that this is not something you go down to the market to get but is instead inside of you. Remember, someone at some point invented tantra, which was based on their own direct experiences. That person had no one teaching them. If you approach this like a child with an open mind and practice basic checks on your process, it is possible to be an initiate in the same way.

Doing this requires some rigor and willingness to step directly into the fire of universal bliss. Doing this acknowledges that it could be messy at first. Your awareness will grow as you go through this and what seemed true or a condition of your experience can change, sometimes from one day to the next. I see plenty of people who drag their old junk into tantra when they write about their experiences, and the point I am making is of course you do. We all do. The point also is that you are dedicated to change and transformation. It may seem too simplistic to say that the desire or mindset to improve will result in improvement, but it is true. You will. Setting your intention is considered a key component in this line of inquiry. It releases you from the busy part of the linear mind that asks, “But if you don’t have it already, how are you going to expect to magically get it later??” That part of the mind drops away in favor of the more feminine part of the mind that says, “Shush. Be quiet. ” It then whispers, “It’s a mystery…” And so it is. But this is a mystery based in a truth about our nature, about who we are once you begin to distance yourself from the station your mind has been tuned to for decades now. The line from the Kate Bush Song Cloudbusting is operative here: “Just saying it can make it happen.”

The desire to learn more, to dig more deeply using your consciousness (without necessarily knowing how that will happen) is possible even without a teacher. To do this you need to up your game in becoming increasingly more and more sensitive to the emanations in consciousness and what comes in teaching moments such as these. I would add that trusting yourself and your senses is another important prerequisite. “But how do I know whether a teaching like yours will come to me too?” Realize that the teaching was something in my own consciousness. The information was always there, I just had to allow myself to feel deeply into it in order to grasp its meaning. There is no one correcting you or directing you. You are instead like a magnet pulling out the iron of the universe or being like a bloodhound who is on the scent but has no earthly idea how it is that it can follow such a thing. And yet it happens. The information is there because it is a part of you. You aren’t going to the market to buy eggs or butter. You are looking within yourself and it is there that the whole of the universe can be seen or known or experienced. We can do this because we are energetic beings, and every single one of us are built the same, you simply have to want to find it enough. Trust yourself and your abilities, which at this point may only just have begun coming out into the bright light of day.

I know how strong the urge is to seek out a teacher. In some cases it can be helpful, but what I have discovered is that humans don’t think the capacity to know is within them already, which leads to chasing after teacher or book or guru, never acknowledging that the capacity was there all along to know it natively. There is also the possibility of swallowing whole a teaching that the guru doesn’t fully understand his or herself. I have seen errors perpetuated this way, some now thousands of years old and now nearly universally agreed upon as correct. Just the mere fact that the teaching has been handed down for so long must mean it is true.

In the movie Anonymous about the life of Shakespeare, a character is telling another character how a royal must surely be correct in a given assertion when in fact they were woefully incorrect. When faced with incredulity from one of the characters, the character in the movie explains that they had important titles given to them, as if to say there was no way they could be wrong. The only thing a title does in some cases is to highlight how the system can incorrectly identify a person as someone who knows.

Not long ago, a group of archeologists who pushed a theory on when humans appeared on the North American continent (called Clovis Man) found it suddenly overturned after a dig was performed in South America that showed clear signs of human presence much further back than what the Clovis Man theory had put forth. The Clovis Man theory had been in all of the text books and was considered by everyone to be the truth. What came out after the theory was crushed was that the archeologists who had pushed the Clovis Man theory didn’t believe that humans in North America went back further than 10-13 thousand years, so they simply stopped digging! In this case human presence had been shown to exist well beyond 100,000 years in the South American dig. When archeologists dug deeper, they found older and older remains in North America.

This quality can be found throughout the world and in every corner of human inquiry. I am not suggesting that you blindly question everything, but I am pointing out that as human beings we all make mistakes. We missidentify phenomenon sometimes or missatribute reasons for why things happen as they do. There are people who look at the horrible things that happen and shrug saying that it must be God’s will. That is how far the inquiry goes! That’s why your own awareness is important and learning to use it an a clear and open way is crucial because sweet little you might discover something the rest of us have missed! You might even find something amiss in my thinking, and that is a learning moment for me.

I can tell you that the capacity to feel is way more important than any intellectual prowess you think that you might have or using the rational mind. To learn something new you cannot drag the rational mind into any of this because that part of the mind is based on what you have learned in the past. The truly revolutionary realization is that through your creative imagination, alloyed with feeling, those will bring you an overabundance of insight and this is how all great yogi’s and yogini’s have uncovered new ground. It seems so impossible until you find yourself pulling out information you never thought to consider or even knew was possible to reach. But you can.

I believe it was Osho who spoke about the tantric temples of the past. He said in essence that most people assumed that these places were adorned and populated with stone carvings of women and men cavorting in all manner of poses, a real feast of sensuality. But the opposite was true. Instead, these buildings were plain and empty inside. Why? Because the action all came from within! Tantra stands against the howling silence and emptiness to show us our creative potential as bliss-filled beings in a confounding universe that normally has people who seem to always misdirect your attention to the physical senses.

One final thing I will also add, which is that all of this is like an onion with many layers. Keep at the work because once you have uncovered some great realization, you will find after that, there is more to the story. Keep going, and this path will reward you with wonderful truths and incredible realizations about who you are and your capacities as a human living on the earth.

The tantric path isn’t for everyone. It is intense, it can knock you over at first. You can misread its seeming signs sometimes, and you can get it wrong, but the path is one that is fast and one slip up one day is wisdom in the next. If you allow the bliss to dismantle your old armoring and your beliefs about yourself and the world, it can work more directly and if you are willing to lose something in the exchange in order to gain something bigger, then it can be an incredibly beneficial path. For myself, tantra has given me a bright and positive attitude and it shows in my life. It has created a field of bliss around me that lifts others up (sometimes when they are aware enough). Gone is the much of the self loathing and negativity of the past and this shows in my interactions with others. Yes, there are people who cannot be moved and want to remain where they are, and with tantra, that is completely fine.

Every path has its own steps. I can harness the immense creative energy to achieve new work in my business and new ideas. My experience in nonduality has shown me that we are all one, that we are all in this together regardless of our political or spiritual outlooks. I see truth spoken everywhere, different groups just have different parts. Everyone matters and learning by encouragement is so much better than through punishment and condemnation! There is so much positive about this experience and presence as a guide long before we even touch on s-e-x. Why? Because the real union happens within. It’s an inside job. It might surprise you to know that this is so, but it is the path into and through tantra and greater spiritual union be it with God or Source or with another person. Union within is THE thing, and as a result, you love not for the object but because this is what you are. When this happens, so many things can change within you. Lost is the desire to grasp another to fulfill a need or a desire. Instead, you ARE desire, you ARE love, you ARE passion and you ARE the bliss that pervades the universe.

May you experience blessings in your life today and all days..

The Third Eye: A Simple Tip For Helping To Activate Awakening

I begin this as I begin all posts on ways of sparking awakening, which is to caution the reader to consider that if you are not properly prepared, awakening can not go according to plan. This is a full-time commitment and it will occupy your life for years especially in the beginning and more specifically in the first three to five years of awakening until you learn how to work with, and not against the forces that are brought to bear. One thing I can say is that if you are OCD, like things a certain way, or like your life well ordered and controlled, awakening is not for you. Awakening will involve opening up the metamind, which is a fuller spectrum of mind than you are used to. It also reveals your shadow and the way at working out these wrinkles in your past is not the way we go about our business normally. If you don’t know how to surrender and let go of expectations, it is better that you learn how to cultivate that part first.

That said, a simple method that has been used both by the Hindu’s as well as the Egyptians. It is also what I was guided to do one evening as I sat for my meditation. I will also say that this method may not work magic for you right away, but for others it may be very helpful. It is best preceded by the meditation method described in my last post, which is a good way to learn how to silence the left brain (which is the part we call the part that is always “talking”). This is a shift into the nonverbal centers as recent discoveries have revealed.

There is an apocryphal story about an exchange between Pythagoras and a member of a mystery school in Egypt where he asked them what he needed to do in order to gain entry (he was said to have petitioned them many times) and the response was to focus on certain centers in the body and to fast. He did what was prescribed and returned saying they were right and that by doing so, he was changed. He said the old Pythagoras no longer existed and a new man stood before them.While we don’t know what those center were, it is very likely that they were centers like the third eye since this same method has been mentioned in passing in ancient writings. Pythagoras went on to study there for many years and eventually became a teacher there.

Sitting quietly and in meditation (breath work as prescribed as described in the previous post is helpful to drop you into greater quiet) close your eyes and then focus your physical eyes on your brow region of your forehead. Imagine that you are looking just beyond your brow region some. This will mean that your eyes may feel like they are slightly crossed. Focus your eyes and your attention on the area that we think of as where the Ajna or third eye chakra is located. Now as you do this, you can be aware that you are focusing the energy of your awareness there. You can imagine that you are sending energy to that location, because you are. Do this for moderate amounts of time, but don’t do it until you feel uneasy and find yourself disliking it. It’s important to find this fun and enjoyable because the quality of your energy will help actually to create an emotional pattern associated with this activity. It is better to do five minutes while feeling fresh than it is to do forty minutes and feeling bored to tears. Just place your attention on that spot and consider how you are filling that center with the energy of your awareness, and that your energy is going into that center.

It’s helpful if you do this without any expectation of an outcome. It is best to keep your mind as free from these things as possible. Having a blank mind is very helpful because what you are doing in this practice is stimulating the latent powers of your being. The ajna chakra is one of the least emotional centers in the energy system. It sees but the degree of emotion in seeing can be one more aligned to a kind of detachment. Certainly the state required to open up the powers of the right brain and the larger cosmic mind requires learning to understand how that focus of mind is so broad as if to seem as if it is not a focus at all, and this can escape beginners. It is like you went from wearing glasses that allowed you to see up close for most of your life and one day, you took up a set of telescopic lenses that allowed you to see so far that you didn’t realize what it was you were doing. You might even be gazing and deep empty space without realizing that this was itself a meta view (through the metamind). Because the third eye can be so free from emotion, the initial awakening can be relatively calm at first, allowing you to be more stable in those first days of new experience. Only later might the energy, the high flow of prana, begin to open up and free stuck or knotted energy in your field, after which the experience can then become more intense to the degree that you allow it to be so. There is nothing inherently wrong with its being intense, but some of it is built on appearances and on an illusion created by the ego that these things are more important than they are. The only thing important is that the body and mind is cleared of them. Some might think they have to wrestle with these things, and when someone takes a stance like this, then it seems reasonable that wrestling must be done, but this is in no way necessary at all. You can learn to drop the drama within if you are more selfless in your approach. This is a much more peaceful way of going about doing “the work.”

Additionally, it is possible that other centers of energy might be stimulated that could stir the depths and bring on awakening, however, it is my sense that everyone needs to be careful when doing this since if you activate a center that has a lot of stuck emotional material, you could be seeing your experience through a lens that is now amplifying that emotional material, which is like being cast into the vat sea of awakening but in choppy seas right from the start. There is, though, real benefit in simply meditating and feeling your energy, sitting with it and keeping your mind open without preconceptions about what it is or what you might experience. By sitting in the present, by being present, you are beginning to utilize the right brain which has the goods in regards to cosmic mind. In my last post I spoke to this as being a quality that we have identified as being located in the right brain. This part of the brain is specialized in a certain range of perception and feeling, and it is very different from the more dominant left brain. Knowing that it is the right brain doing this doesn’t really tell us much, so all of this is a direct experience. Just knowing that you have this bicameral brain with two ranges of experience and perceptual ability is enough to put you on the scent so that you can remind yourself to emphasize one a little more than the other. Contractions of consciousness, which are often about fear and which can contain pain body, something that is both a noun and a verb, can be experienced and then the self can learn how to keep those contractions down to a minimum which results in keeping a broader more open-hearted state at play. This is why work of this kind seems best done in a gradual fashion since it allows you to slowly walk into the waters gradually and to get used to how to navigate it and not fall for fear or anxiety or to lapse into the pain body or contracted states, which are a hallmark of the left brain.

We are also at this unique place in our development as a species where awakening is happening in ways that have never happened before. It is a hopeful sign in some ways and I think that it also shows that this is very much needed if we are to progress as a species here on the planet. We need bigger thinkers, we need more compassionate thinkers, too. We need the soul of what the Buddhists call bodhichitta, which is a motivation that is based on wanting to expand our understanding of ourselves while at the same time, wanting to be of service to others. It is a more selfless way of being, and is not about grasping for approval or for being happy because we made someone else happy. It is like giving something precious away and not holding onto it. I leave a hundred dollar bill near a park bench and someone who i do not know picks it up and is thrilled because moments before they worried how they were going to pay a bill, or maybe it is just that the note left which says “blessings to you” was enough to clue them in that all of this was intentional but selfless.

The boddhichitta is also that part of you that has made you a seeker and has kept you on the path of wanting to know more, to reach whatever that elusive thing was that might have been eluding you for so long. There are some who say that seeking is itself an illusory act, but I am of the mind that we are first seekers before we find that which rewards us so greatly. The essence of the bodhi, or Buddha nature, is one where the heart opens and where there is less grasping. It is in such a state where all that we need naturally comes, like a blessing upon our heads like the rain that makes everything grow. The universe is not one of punishing or rewarding. The way of the bodhi is in part the removing of obstacles. This is why so many who awaken experience such coincidental or synchronistic events in their lives. Miracles, small ones, sometimes daily, remind us that we have stopped the struggle and are now open to the divine plan and cosmos, which is one of abundance if we can live in that feeling state. The reverse is certainly also possible where everything seems to be going wrong. Examine your thoughts and your beliefs.

If you feel a struggle or resistance within you, then whatever you are feeling will serve to attract things like it. If you feel that there is something wrong with helping others because you think that it is somehow selfish or self serving, then examine your feelings more. If you are living transactionally in your life, you might be missing an important element that is holding you back. If you give openly with a full heart, more of that openness will come to you in your life, bringing you greater joy and fulfillment. If you instead want happiness, you will tend to be more happy and by serving this light in you, you will shine it out onto others in a shower that they also cannot help but sense at some level. This is some of the more positive motivations that can serve to guide you in your inner work.

So by focusing your awareness on the third eye, you feed more energy into that one center. As you do this, it slowly fills with the light of your awareness and your attention. Perhaps think of it as some unknown reservoir that can contain energy and by turning the light of your mind inward, you are no longer expending it through the physical sensory world. At first this might be a challenge, but the mind can be trained, and you can make this part of a practice with the highest intentions at heart. Don’t worry about when that reservoir will fill up enough for something to happen, instead be patient since we are each unique and this may take some time, some more than others. This isn’t a race and achieving this is like finding a pearl that is hidden in the mud. Imagine yourself filling up with your attention and keeping turned inward. This practice is very similar to what is called the Golden Flower, which is in Taoism. The secret of this flower is known when we turn the “lantern of your attention inward” so that the inner world is filled with light and may respond in time.

Every tradition has its prescriptions, some say to practice for forty days, others don’t put a time limit on it, and this I think is the wisest way to approach this. What I can say is that imagination is the gateway through which we can know a hitherto unknown thing. At first when you get results, you will think you are just making it all up, but deeper still is a part of you that naturally knows what or how to imagine in order to get there. By being quiet and calm and learning how to calm yourself with breath work, you can begin to bump up against these forgotten realms of the mind. Remaining inquisitive and like a child is best. I have found that I was able to learn much by not leaning on a teacher, for it is in us to know these things if we resist the desire to ask someone who surely must know more than we do. If a teacher is needed, that teacher will come like the blessed rain that I described as coming to the bodhi earlier. If you resist trying to figure it all out in a mental way or trying to force things, the universe will provide you with exactly what you need for that moment. Its pretty amazing that I was able to have people who had exactly what I needed who lived within walking distance of my home in these mountains. One was a Qi Gung master of sorts, someone who had studied in China to learn White Crane Qi Gung, which is the same energy practice that the Shaolin monks learned, a man who gave classes just around the corner from me, about three blocks away from my home. Then there was a healer from New Zealand who was almost the same distance from my home, who was there just in time to help me with some later work in my process. Only months after seeing her, she moved to another part of the States, so all of this had the feeling of happening in what we often call “divine timing.” In each case, I didn’t ask for these things, but I was open to the possibilities. All of this comes when there is this shift or acceleration in our energetic awareness where we seem to be interfacing very differently with the world. These are all signs that we are moving into a different perceptual and field of consciousness. Remaining humble and serving the light within seems to keep us on the right keel and in a state of grace, which I observe is an important thing for us. Don’t expect to be perfect at every moment, but instead learn as you go, for surely this is how we improve. Awakening is a great gift, but it is just the beginning, a kind of entry into the garden. You might wind up slipping on some of your own shit from time to time, so go easy on yourself. This is not a race, and there is no one out there who is going to bonk you on your head for messing up (you will probably do enough of that in the beginning all on your own).

Using this method along with the meditation that was outlined in my last post can be a very useful way of stirring the depths. Consider the meditation method first and then after a period of some weeks as you get used to the method, bring in the third eye meditation later.

Serving the Light,

~Parker

Why I Am Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A 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. . .

A New Project

Life is full of surprises.

Copyright, all rights reserved

I have been working methodically on a manuscript about early Christianity. It’s a slog in order to have all of the right sources. My project presents the thesis that in earliest Christianity there was a very different understanding concerning some foundational concepts that would inform the religion for centuries. It’s a story of one group that pitted itself against another and sought to wipe away its influence for all time. But like the sun, moon, and the truth, what was hidden was later revealed when documents began to surface from early on in the movement that told a very different story. It is one of the greatest stories never told about a religion that exerted tremendous influence for centuries.

It’s here that someone from the distant past emerged, a seeker herself, and artist like me, who was keen to collaborate with me. What has emerged has been a new project on a facet of awakening most commonly known as twin souls or twin flames. This is an aspect of awakenings today that link people who have karma in common.

I have been critical of the concept, though, and it was a surprise finding myself considering a project like this. The result has been a flood of information that provides a new perspective on the phenomenon that I have been bringing through. Because of my familiarity with the subject already and the history of awakening, I found I have been able to bring what I think may be a new perspective on the phenomenon.

The agreement was that the project had to be small. I didn’t have the time to devote to a 200 page manuscript. As a result, a book of 120 pages emerged very quickly. The collaboration begins with me writing and my coauthor providing illustrations and proofreading the manuscript.

The illustrations in some cases reveals the artist’s own discoveries of her brush with a new energy in consciousness, which shows up in her work, which I think helps to bring added meaning and comprehension to the project. Being able to have the work illustrated is a plus, something that makes the project unique, I think. There will be some intersections with the book I am working on related to early Christianity, which is awakening and how kundalini was actually being taught. Other cultures and traditions that have teachings or writings on awakening also tends to include the phenomenon of union both on the individual level as well as between two people, which is a second wrinkle in the awakening phenomenon. The book shows that the history on twins as they are called today is scant in the way some would like them represented, but a more abundant field of understanding awaits when you can shift your focus. To this end, I show instances through time when high vibrational relationships emerge. The phenomenon has been hiding in plain sight, but is not obvious to anyone unfamiliar with the subject. It helps if you know how and where to look. A little sleuthing can make for interesting reading.

A lot has been done in a short time, and with our moving into the Fall, I am facing the busiest time of the year for my studio business in glassmaking, so work on the book will go into a less intense phase now which will be a refinement period where I will have friends help review the work for editing. It managed to get slipped in just in the nick of time!

In the meantime, I will be publishing excerpts from the book as the editing work proceeds. This has moved along so quickly we don’t even have a title yet! I am including preliminary illustrations from the artist, which will help give you a sense of the character of the artwork and the flavor of one important aspect of our story telling.

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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!

A Message From Spirit

Yesterday Facebook memories reminded me that wild cherries that I used to pick were ripe. I took the picture on the day I picked those cherries and then posted it that day, so I had an assurance that the same trees were bearing. The cherries grow on a tree in a dear friend’s yard who deceased in November of last year. He was one of my very best friends. We were like wheels that had come off the wagon of the world, misfits, iconoclasts whose journey song no longer matched a loud and increasingly jarring world that seemed like it was losing itself. So we took shelter in our friendship. We had talks about all kinds of things, and he helped me with my electrical equipment since he was an electrical engineer. Rational, but highly creative, the kind of people I often gravitate towards.

With his property still in limbo I went to his place and checked to see if the cherries were ripe. They were. I took a small step ladder to help me reach them because I was going to pick as many as I could get. These cherries are wild, so they are small. They are both bitter and sweet all at once, and being wild, I like that about them.

Normally, I tend to have some communication with someone like my friend after they pass, but I have only gotten glimmers, and it has made me wonder what was up. I was thinking about this as I walked across the yard to get an even larger step ladder to get up higher into the boughs.

Being there, though, in nature, did something to me. It wasn’t a surprise, it is something that happens to me a lot. If I am going to feel a burst of prana, it is going to happen when I am alone in nature. The quieter I am in my mind, the better it is. And I had gotten very quiet. Still. Hands reaching for the cherries still ripe and not overly ripe. I was busy with very little…

As I stood there, I felt my heart open up, and I enjoyed that moment of communion with the tree and all of the life around me…birds, the insects, other trees. I sank into it, and as I did, it was like I found someone there looking out through it all. It was my friend, but it was an aspect of him that, while I recognized it as him, he was just very different. I “got” that it was him, but it was as if he opened up in a way he had never done (perhaps because we weren’t communicating telepathically with each other while he was alive). What happened next is nearly impossible to explain or describe, but I am here to try, so here goes.

Have you ever watched a movie that is in a language you don’t understand, and instead of reading the subtitles, you fix your eyes on the people talking? You are aware that you are not getting the full drift or meaning of the conversation, but you are getting the feel of it, and probably a lot more than you even realized. I could feel my friend coming through, communing with me there, but also speaking to me but not in words….not completely. He was telling me something, but it was more like listening to a symphony of feeling more than anything else. The explaining in word was only a small subset of all of what happened. Part of me craned my neck to try and hear his words…but this seemed like it wasn’t entirely the point. Still. What I was getting was something that was partly just feeling with a kind of narrative wound around it….but he wanted me to get the depth of feeling, and was there I think, because he knew I might be able to catch it in that moment. He approached me, I think, in the way that he did because he knew he could. While I really liked his earthly presence, what I was feeling into was really quite grand, like an inner self without any fear or sense of vulnerability that we often experience here with people.

What he was doing was he was feeling something and telling me about it. I didn’t need the words if I could just stretch out into what he was feeling. I did that. I let myself get closer and closer and to open up more and more without engaging my rational side.

He was capturing a state of mind, one, which, he was explaining, he had spent his life on Earth finding and keeping. He was saying how it would elude him…he would get it and then it would wane and slip between his fingers. What was that? He was showing me and it felt like for a moment that we were somehow suspended outside of time just a bit while I was standing on that ladder picking cherries. I didn’t skip a beat, didn’t get “way far out” I was just very present….right here in the Now. Tears streamed from my face as I leaned into this feeling he was “telling” me about. His big regret was that he couldn’t stay in that state all the time. He said something to the effect that he always knew that this kind of state could change the world. I chuckled at that, and he said something that approached “Okay, it changed my world…”

I stayed with it and I could feel this transmission keep going, and the less I tried to hear it the more I felt it, the stronger it got. It felt a bit like a saxophone playing this really long note, and the longer that note was played, the sweeter and riper it would get, the more intense it was. It required a surrendered state where I could become inspired, and this was what was fueling the experience. It would be very easy to think that I was making this all up in my head, except by now after many instances or experiences like this where I have encountered people who I have not even met before saying and doing things in the ether, I have come to suspect that when it comes fully “hatched” as this experience did, the likelihood of it being something from someone else and not self-created, is very high. I have done this in my work where I have been able to describe the behavior of people who I have not met before and who have been deceased. This feeling that was so nuanced, so full, and that had this undeniable stamp of his nature on it, was sweeping all through me. I was reminded how the rational mind, when allowed to come stumbling into encounters like this can make a mess of things. I checked the rational a few times in the process of this in order to allow the part of my mind, which had the capacity to expand and roam free, the greatest room. It was like being told that being so inspired, so full of wonder and awe is what the world needs more of. My friend has this brand of it that is part of who he is, and he chased it the whole time he was in his life. Later in life, however, he grew jaded and tired of how the world seemed to be falling apart around him, and wondered what the whole point was. This encounter was him setting the needle back into the groove again.

It was very much as Jesus said, that we must be like children in order to get there. There was something orchestral about it. Funny, too, because he was a great musician. We used to make music decades ago in another life when I was in my 20’s. We lived a few miles apart back in the 90’s, and then I went to graduate school and wound up settling in the opposite end of the state four years later. In 2006 I had the opportunity to invest in real estate in the area, and considered my old stomping grounds in the mountains. The only problem was there was only one building on the market that fit the bill. There just wasn’t anything around to buy…and the one building that worked for what I do was almost directly across the street from my friend. We had a good chuckle about that when I bought the property (just as awakening was taking hold). I eventually moved to the area where I bought the property and here I am today. We had both lived in many different places (him the son of a Joint Chief of the Pentagon, he moved around a lot) but this area we both loved more than anywhere else. Now we were just across the street from each other. How funny. This was not an area that I was looking for property nor did I particularly care to go there…but it was the only building like it on the market in the region. Kismet.

What was fascinating about our interaction was it was an exercise in reaching a certain vibration, which was really only the result of surrender and letting myself “fall” into it deeper and deeper. It’s funny how we talk about changing our vibration in cases like this, but honestly, when I experience things like this, it feels more like opening up my mind and heart, removing the blinders, the barriers to the experience. Why it is I sometimes have resistance, why we as humans have resistance, I don’t know. Maybe it is this fear of being “out of it” and fearing a saber toothed tiger might eat us or something. But that was then and this is now, and so we are learning a new way to be…an old new way, I think you could say. But for me, my friend didn’t just present his earthly persona, he dug deep and inspired me to do the same, apparently. Maybe he didn’t need to dig deep in the state he was in without a body. It was one of the most remarkable experiences…and a lot has been happening on the telepathy front as of late. It reminded me that these states are what the earth needs, people who can reach deep and feel…and then pass it along to the others. I think that when we do this, we begin to realize our potential as beings here. It is like stealing back a bit of heaven to plant it here. I find so much of what I try to do is to help bring that “higher vibration” here to the earth (which is I think simply surrendering to our deeper truer nature). But what we think of as a high vibration is I think being honest with who we are, what we are, and learning to first shed the bullshit programming that we have taken on foolishly in our time here. Even if a million wise guys said it wasn’t good to do this or that….and if the strongest and most powerful parts of ourselves have been shamed in the process I say question what those wise guys say. There is so much activity around wanting to control our creativity, our energy, our inner power.

I am finding that this is getting easier as time goes by, and I think that this is so is because it is actually a natural capability. If I can do this anyone can. You have to reach within, something that many people doesn’t want to do for fear that it comes from a place where it is fabricated or made up. Getting past that and beginning to be open to the possibilities is one of the first steps. The feeling state, the energy body, is the means of receiving and sending these messages. The universe is energetic and so are we.

I wish you were here to share these with me. That will, though, have to wait for another time, maybe another life.

Entity Fundamentals

Someone asks about implants or entity attachments. Beyond this, you’ll need to read my book when it’s out.

So much said about these. My observation over years (40) of active energetic sensory perception is that we become vulnerable to energetic entities of every stripe, based on the emotional issues we carry. Read that again and let it sink in. Some can be akin to simple life forms all the way up to bipedal types (but still not all that intelligent). There is alot out there that isn’t physical that is entirely energy beings. Also, some beings are fragments of consciousness. It just takes enough energy focused in a particular way to create them. Homes often have them from their occupants. We call them ghosts, but I don’t think people understand what ghosts are in all truth (not completely…and that’s a post for another time).

Every single case I have seen, the entities attached due to a “trauma” or emotional wrinkle in the psyche of the person. This is always dependent on the person. What hits you wrong might not impact me…at all. This is to say that this is all because of you. Your choice in feeling led to this outcome. As hard as that may be to hear, its true. The good news is by doing your inner work, you can naturally clear these entities by clearing your backlog of emotional material. The other side to all of this is that there is no real protection in a universe as fluid as this. Vibration is everything. If you carry an off vibration somewhere in your field, it can be fair game.

Some have said drug use can cause it, but that isn’t correct. Most drug use stems from a condition of deficiency, a perception of deficiency, even if subconsciously. Something the drug supplies, that the emotion felt, robs the body of. The drug type doesn’t always track the emotion, but rather the personality type determines the drug used. I could experience the same trauma as another person but medicate with a different drug because I have a different constitution or turn of mind.

I have seen one entity daisy-chain with people. It does this because of the law of attraction. One person will attract certain people, and in that circle, many will be interesting to an entity because of the similarities between them. People do flock together.

If you use drugs of any kind, ask yourself what are you medicating? The true answer leads you right to the problem that needs your attention. Feel it, acknowledge it, and let it go, like a spirit leaving a bottle. By doing this, you engage in soul retrieval. Remember not to fall back into the habit of what the drug use represented. If you think that this is too hard, you might have become hypnotized into thinking this work is hard, and you might not be used to using the wisdom or intuitive part of yourself. That part knows where all your shit lies. It’s so easy, you will think, “That can’t be it…that was too easy…” That’s the brain washing. I can go deeper into how this is done, but this would be a chapter in a book.

There are ways to get at this material. Body work (deep tissue massage), energy work, chi gung, cranial sacral, acupressure/puncture, and TRE (trauma release exercise), holotropic breathwork, Rolfing (deep tissue again) are all ways that this material can be released. Kundalini and awakenings in general can often release this material also. You have to be very clear about whether you are ready to let it go.

People hold onto their stuff while swearing they are ready to let it go. Be humble. Be honest with yourself. Some things that feel great are in fact the illusion that a constriction in your field will make something energetic feel more intense and fool you into thinking it is “the bomb” or the thing, the person, the experience. You have to watch closely, honestly, and be able to see how inner feeling relates to how you respond to the things in your environment that are matching that unresolved issue. When it goes, the tight intensity goes and an expansiveness replaces it. It’s good to let it teach you how to be in this part of the new you.

I knew a person who had an entity attached to her. I described the being and she recognized it, saying, “He is my guide!” The being was a text book demon. Red skin. Horns. I was careful to confirm her description of the being. I offered that what I saw was a being just like Hellboy. She agreed that it did look just like him. In another case, I saw the entity which looked like a kind of dragon/dinosaur with terracotta colored skin, male. The person replied that this was her guide also. I had seen this being attached to a well-known psychic and it was attached to many of his female clients. When I offered to the woman that this was what I saw, she threatened me saying that this kind of talk was slander, and saying this could destroy the man’s ability to provide for himself. Stockholm Syndrome, anyone? I suspect both people still have their lower level entities still in place.

I chose not to remove them because I had done this once before and it made life difficult for me. I don’t regret it, I just know there are better ways (hint: it is an inside job). It is much better if the person can be made aware of what might be atrached to them so they can let them go.

I hope this primer helps. There is a lot of nuance I have missed, but posts can get long when I really dig in and I lose people. If you have questions, ask, and if you have experiences, do share! We swim in the ether. The nature of life is that we are made up of aggregates of consciousness. Our bodies are cells that have their own consciousness. Not all of this is bad or negative. The path to your higher evolution is in knowing what hinders you and what helps you.

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.