It Was Always Worship, It Was Always Religion

image ©Parker Stafford, all rights reserved

It was what carried the soft cry of power,

the ability to create new life both in spirit and in body

that crept in unannounced unseen at first

but like a welcomed guest made itself known.

Years later it would be like a lightening strike

in which I was begotten again through the two.

My first love felt it first

looking up at me that Fall night

eyes wet with her excitement,

asking if I had felt it

and described how everything became space

and what moved between us built itself

until the cosmic moved within us and the cosmos

exploded within us.

In the blue t.v. light she described what she had felt

and I was left scratching my head because I hadn’t a clue.

With her

in the years that followed,

I learned the simple dynamics of sacred union.

I didn’t have a name for it

but I knew it was the most important thing ever.

We had both been involved in it before

her in her way and me in mine, often separated by centuries.

My education began with her before I was an adult

because it was just that important…She has long since gone her own way

having taught me an important clue she could only ever have taught me

on that quiet night in the country before the blue t.v. light…

It was so important to me

I often tried to make others

into something that they were not

and as I was crowned by it

I was just as easily crucified, too.

Forty years later the same scene would be described to me by another

and I would bite my lip and feign surprise

as this has been following me my whole life.

“Did you feel that?”

For me, it has been my religion to find the sacred in another

who will let me in so deeply as that.

It seems impossible

but the Holy of Holies for me lies not in a temple of stone

but in bodies of flesh

and are set aflame by something so simple

but purposeful..as the soft glisten in our eyes.

There is something more than this…

Not everyone can got that deep

it feels dangerous to do that

because you have to put so much on the line.

Some are visitors

comfortable for it to be for a brief moment in time.

It’s surprising to find how much we all hold people so close yet stand so far in moments like those.

It is from my own experience that I learned how to be close to the One

but also to be so close to the other

that all lines that seemed to divide us

erased us

and remade us…

I had to accept that some have had their expectations for how it would be

and that this would serve to separate us

as I learned that expectations are the route to failing

while keeping the mind of a child allows us to rise

and know its great mystery which is beyond all of our efforts to place expectations on it…

image ©Parker Stafford, all rights reserved

I have seen how I have remained the same in regards to this

where out of the deep blue of me He comes crashing through…

I have seen how some have tried to make me the problem in this sacred work

to cover for the truth which is

it just wasn’t their thing.

For some I wanted to go too deep

for others I stood in for their wounds

which kept them from entering more fully the sacred center

of their hearts and the temple that resides silently there.

Each time I learned something meant just for me it seems…

What I do know is everything I have wished for has come to pass

and I have wished for one who knows this work

of the sacred that has no temple nor candles nor priests or priestesses

nor tithes or narratives save the one about the passion

and parousia.

Beyond this I know I was elsewhere

where human shame didn’t exist

and I have been trying to bring it back with me ever since.

For each time

and each person

it seemed like it was a near-miss,

but in truth each one taught me something incredibly important

and tailored just for me:

for the one who could not embrace it without safety

I know that none of this is safe for me

or the one who could not grasp her own power

and had to fault my own

it showed me how important standing in your own truth must be.

The ages may not ever understand you,

that’s how it can sometimes be…

So much of the learned behaviors are undone here.

image ©Parker Stafford, all rights reserved

With a heart burning with a flame of the tantric,

there is nothing that exists that is itself bad or wrong

only poorly used or understood.

Making it religion has made me persistently engaged,

turning about its golden center like a planet gazing at its sun

and soaking up all of its life and turning it into something new…

She has always been religion to me

and the Two have always had something to teach me

about how the world is formed

from stars to quarks

from daises to Orcas

and where we as humans stand amidst it all.

Every center in Her was itself a beautiful flower

that opens before the bliss

Her true nature as Creatrix

unfolding in the presence of the warmth of a knowing

and strength

which seems to come from another time and place

but knits all of them together.

How passion breeds peace is what the monks have missed

something that cannot be known until you get on the other side of shame

where freedom exists

and the true nature of who we are is known.

It was always been worship to me,

nothing else ever stood a chance to teach me more about the clockwork of the universe

whose heart beats with a center of fire

and a need to become

to manifest in us just as strongly and clearly as can be.

I know the One loves me for that propensity

even when there are others who are loved for their more staid ways,

mine I’d like to think helps bring balance to it all.

I am open enough I think

to feel the One flood through me in its innocent desire to know what it’s like

and in that moment the heiros gamos manifests itself

and ancient and new are knitted together

as awe begets awe

and souls begets new life.

This is my religion

and this is my worship

it came from beyond the stars

just as it rose up from all around me

and made the flowers bloom

and the lovers gasp:

“Did you feel that??”

Why yes, it was the soft cry from home,

the cry of power…

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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).

Heiros Gamos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A 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..

Death & Bliss

I had allowed the shadow of death to knock me from my perch. It happened as a gradual accretion, a belief based on coincidental symptoms that had emerged over the last two years that I might be sick and that I might die from what the symptoms were suggesting that I had. I have spent weeks trying to feel out if it even feels right to write about this. There was, I realize some unrecognized silliness involved, too. This is not something that I have mentioned to but a few people in my life.

It’s true. I began having symptoms for what I thought was for a type of intestinal cancer. Normally very healthy, I didn’t carry health insurance. It was tricky to sign up for: you can only sign up November through December. Those are the two busiest months in my studio business, and for as lame as it sounds, I missed the signup dates two years running. I knew the clock was ticking and yet I was also being pulled into a feeling of inevitability.

I knew that the only way I was ever going to see a doctor was with the right insurance. The importance of this was driven home by something I learned about first-hand about cancer diagnosis and treatment. A family had come to me this past year to ask that I put the ashes of their loved one into molten glass, something I do with something called Journey Glass. I saw during a visit to the studio how they had tried to keep their loved one alive with chemo treatments. When she finally passed, her husband was 1.2 million dollars in debt. It was startlingly easy to do with the cost of a single dose of IV administered chemo at nineteen thousand dollars. They went into receivership just trying to keep her alive. I knew the only way I would see a doctor was with insurance. I also knew every case was unique, and I knew the clock was ticking. The back story on this was that I could feel a block in a region of my body corresponding to the LV 12 meridian point and I had had several therapists work in and around that energy line as early as 2013 onward. I could FEEL the energetic block for a while before it manifested into a physical malady. Being me, I assumed the worst instead of staying open and receptive.

The symptoms were all consistent with cancer, though. When I would research the symptoms, this was all that ever came up with. How could it be anything but that? After two years of this dogging me, I finally was able to see a doctor who ordered a battery of tests. The abdominal pain had gotten so bad that I was having difficulty using bliss states to ameliorate the pain. This tossed a few more pints of gas on the fire of my fears. It turned out, though, that it was just that; an unfounded concern based on symptoms that sounded nearly identical to the “big C.”

One big reason why I fell for this was that in years past, as I worked through blocked energy with kundalini assisting, I could feel the presence of the blocked energy in what I identified was the LV 12 region of the meridian system. I had been to an acupuncturist, which did result in some releases, and then later I was guided to a Kahuna healer whose therapy room was within walking distance of my home. Of all the people out there, I had a therapist who knew and understood energy work using a modality that focused on the balance between yin and yang energies, which was exactly what I had been hoping to find. She had lived in New Zealand where she first learned her craft. Here she was, within walking distance of my home. She too helped me when a group of Reiki healers could only go so far. I wrote a few years ago about how one of these healers admonished me to not “go trying to find problems where problems didn’t exist” because she could not feel the presence of the block herself. I thanked her and the rest of the crew. A month later I found Violet, my Kahuna healer, who felt the block and went straight to work letting a portion of it go. There was still something there that I could feel vividly, that remained. About a year later, another energy healer worked on this area of my body, revealing still more material stored there. That, too, was a welcome relief. I said that I was concerned about moving this block because I was afraid it could wind up turning into disease and kill me. Because of some cancer in my family, my mind went to that as the potential invisible culprit. It was there that things stayed and after a few more years, I had the uneasy sense that the energy was turning into a physical symptom of illness. I was ready for the worst, which has been one of the Achilles heels in my life. Why had I fallen for the negative instead of remaining open to the possibilities?

Somewhere along the line I allowed this niggling fear to eat away at my bliss, the same kind of bliss that I felt when an angelic presence entered my room one early morning at four a.m. and did to me the same thing that I would later read had happened to St Theresa of Avilla. An arrow had been thrust into her heart, which set her ablaze with bliss and a love for God. Her insides felt as though they were being drawn out of her. I had the same experience, except that my angelic presence pulled something that felt like my insides out of me, leaving me emptied of something I knew was old past material. It was this experience with that angelic being that I was able to taste a bliss that was beyond all bliss. It was that one experience that forever changed me from that moment forward, leaving me to reach for some semblance of that bliss felt on the morning of Good Friday in 2008, about a year after kundalini first rose in me. It showed me that I didn’t need to be a believer, much like Paul wasn’t a believer either, but was nonetheless struck by a blinding light which changed his life forever. I am not suggesting that I am a Paul, no, but rather to underscore that belief is not a prerequisite (like it was with Paul). It is something that is in all of us, a potential which is revealed in each of us just as Paul described it as the Christ that was revealed in him in that moment. We don’t get it by looking outside of ourselves, but by always looking within to find the “architecture,” the structure in our own consciousness that makes such a state possible. The reward is this brilliant bliss that heals and transforms. It humbles, too, while opened the mind to our greater potential. It’s as though we often suffer at the hands of our limitations, of feeling cut off somehow from a quality that we in truth have but do not realize that we have. I had allowed myself to drift from that perch that I had found. I am reminded that this is a daily challenge to always attune myself to this quality and to do so in silence and in thanksgiving.

So finally, I was able to go to a doctor. Tests were ordered up, a whole battery of them. One by one, the results came in: negative for cancer. I was happy to have been wrong! I had reached a place in life where the world just seemed like it was going off the rails. It was like the world was going mad to me, and it was disheartening to witness it all. I saw how terrible people were being to one another in the midst of a pandemic, I saw how those who questioned the mainstream narrative were being treated much like any group in our past has been treated: they were the enemy. Why? Why was one narrative being pushed so hard? Why was early treatment being treated as though it was the worst possible thing a person could do to themselves or to others? Doctors lost their ability to practice medicine. People were deplatformed from social media sites for speaking up about alternatives. I read meta studies that showed the efficacy of other methods. And why not? How had so many seemed to have lost their minds? Fear. That’s what happened. In fact, I had also fallen for the power of fear myself with the concern that I had cancer, so I wasn’t immune from this. My condition all seemed to fit a given illness trajectory, except fear kept me from considering other alternatives that could have led me to different conclusions or the possibility of them. It took tests to show that my fear was unfounded. All of this left me feeling like maybe leaving this life might not be such a bad thing.

I know how that sounds, but if you know me, you know that working with kundalini left me largely free from the fear of death. I knew what waited for me on the other side of all of this. And yet, I was not completely immune from fear about something else. So? It was for me a big lesson, an important one, and it had more to do with not giving up so fast, to stay with the challenge that this life offered me. The lesson was one of having a better attitude. The rest, I have come to learn involves availing myself of how to help my body heal from a couple of issues that created the symptoms that I thought might be cancer related.

Despite this, I had already begun to have big shifts in my life, with an ex who finally came to apologize to me for her treatment, something I never thought could or would happen. This had happened in part as a result of what power truth has in our lives. We can run from the truth, but it gets harder and harder to hide. Eventually it eats away at your peace, which was predicated on something that was false. I am not suggesting that karma is something that is some righteousness coming to take anyone down, but rather that when we hide from the truth, the truth stalks us since that truth is so important for our happiness and wellbeing. My ex’s life had been whittled away because of living an untruth and seeking to promulgate untruths about me. I wrote about this recently, just as it caused me to consider the effect the same acts others have perpetrated in my life which involved being dishonest. Would it stalk them too? Of course, but that wasn’t my story and they were out of my orbit, thankfully. I too wasn’t being honest about my truer nature and had allowed the worst of my fears to grip me. Luckily, I was able to dispel those fears once and for all. I mention this recent event with my ex because in that moment I felt this great weight lift, and when that happens, many more other things often tend to have a way of happening, too. But as for my condition, this swirl of concern over my health and mortality? It showed me that there is something beyond the pinched view I had in regards to what my ex had done and I read this event as my soul finally being heard before I might kick the bucket. But there was another possibility beyond my thinking that this was a presage to some kind of transition. Silly me.

I had so much to do, I thought, so much left to do that my soul came here in physical form to work through. I had several writing projects hanging over my head and I really needed to finish those so I could tick them off my soul contract. I had not spoken to anyone about these concerns except for just a few people, and none of them in my family. I didn’t want anyone to worry, least of all my daughter who was getting ready to finish up her last semester at college. I figured if it was bad like I feared, then I would have to look at chemo and surgery perhaps, and that would be a bridge I would have to cross once I got there. No use in setting off alarms and distracting people. On the other hand, I still considered this could be something else, so I stayed quiet. I am glad that I did. I am also glad I was able to get the question cleared up.

This experience has helped to also underline the importance of taking care of my gut health because my gut has felt like it has been zapped with electricity since the rise of kundalini 15 years ago. Those who practice Chi Gung claim that chi resides in the gut, and it may be that it exists as a kind of biological battery of sorts. I had developed symptoms of nausea after awakening (kundalini flue they call it), as well as a five month period where my body stopped feeling hunger, a period of time that led to the shedding of loads of blocked energy and also helping my system adjust to this new normal. The zapping of my gut though was always an issue, one that came and went, and now as I write this I find that the many notes that I wrote in my journal about way of supporting good gut health are now coming in handy. While I am not a doctor, I can feel how food effects my system and how I need to change my diet a little more. Some of this involves getting rid of wheat as a possible culprit for one aspect of my symptoms, another involves supporting healthy gut bacteria. There is more work to do, and my hope is that I can heal a very cranky system that has led me to a great deal of discomfort at times.

I remain concerned about the state of the world, one that feels like it is somehow running off the rails emotionally. I see groups seeking to seize control of the narrative in order to direct policy in a global way that I frankly find beyond worrisome. When I see leaders embracing a green ideology while at the same time banning the use of fossil fuels while they themselves are opening up new markets for their own liquified natural gas in Europe, I see hypocricy. When I see passports for tracking our carbon footprint and whether someone has had a vaccine, I see another form of control and the loss of freedom in the process. Freedom is messy, but the ability to speak freely even though it means listening to voices we do not agree with is the cornerstone of our form of government here in the U.S. and in other democratic societies. Without dialog we lose the means of thrashing through our challenges in a broader way, imperfect though it may be, and even if it inconveniences our own personal values. We have so much promise as a species and yet, if we are not free to work through our challenges in an open way, we lose the very thing that will help us to find new solutions to old problems. We have so much potential and I hate to think that we as a species might squander it. Only through freedom do I sense that we will open up the lanes of possibility which could lead us to a brighter tomorrow.

My big lesson in all of this is not to shrink from controversy, nor to allow my own inner fear get the best of me. Only by being neutral and open will I be able to see with clearer eyes. I am glad that I was wrong, at least on this one thing. There is a bliss that exists at the center of our being. So many have been cut off from this fundamental nature, and so often fear is the killer of this bliss. But even death does not stop it, as this too is part of the natural order of our existence. For myself, I am getting back to the pass of bliss again as the way through, but not around my own challenges. It is in the bliss state that I find my own mind is expanded and curiously, my own intuitive powers strengthened. It is as it has always been, this new mind birthed from the union of opposites in our consciousness. This bliss represents the fullest expression of the synthesis that takes hold of those who “wake up” and find their consciousness changed in a twinkling. I think this is the way through for many of us, and hopefully it will be the way for many more to follow.

Message From The Mountains – Part 2

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

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

Because of my own makeup as this generally affable person who was this thoughtful artist and mystic, I sometimes have attracted those who lack what I possess. They say opposites attract. In addition, for me, these personality types have been involved in abusive behavior, an issue going back to my childhood, so I suppose I grew accustomed to them and unconsciously attract or am attracted to them. I was a year out of an abusive marriage when this person energetically forced her way into my life. When I say “forced” I mean that she forced a merging of our energies, something I never thought could have been possible. It’s interesting, too, because I never really held her to account for what she had done. Was I somehow inured to this type of abusive behavior? This person was a carbon copy of my ex behaviorally. Part of me knew it and had taken a protective stance. My hope was to resolve the karmic thread between us. This time I was along to see if I could change all of this. Could karma be changed? Was I mad? I really wanted to help make change, but people need to be ready to see and help make the change. Had I really wanted to help or change someone as a run-around changing myself? Not so much. But maybe a little. Maybe just enough for it to be a problem, a karmic hook. Karma creates chemistry.

Finally, after years of emotional chaos after emotional chaos and her temporal meltdowns, she finally found someone else to latch onto who lived far away and she moved away. I had underestimated our capacity for change, to rise to the occasion. This is an inside job.

She had told me the first few weeks I knew her that she had spent her whole life moving from one place to the next, spending not more than five years in any one location. It was because of the abuse she had experienced, she said. When she moved away five years later, I realized that the genesis of all the problems were about her. She wanted to run, because my presence pushed her buttons. She would panic in my presence and she didn’t know why. It had nothing to do with anything I had said or done. I spent years trying to be calm and cool as she went through meltdown after meltdown. It was years into this and she was still admitting that something about me, something ill-defined in her mind that would just set her off. I realized that this wasn’t going to work. She would push responsibility for her feelings onto others. If I didn’t pay just the right amount of attention to her in public, she would berate me. Everything became my fault and I slowly grew tired of the treatment. To make matters more strange, she would say how terrible I was and then a week or two later go on about how important I was in her life. I remember reading about these kinds of people in an article that described these personality types as saying “Your terrible, I hate you, don’t leave me!” I was fooled for years with the act and only in our last year together was I able to begin to see the behaviors for what they were. I had willingly gotten back with her numerous times in the hope that something might change, but her limit was about two weeks before she would meltdown. I had to realize that this person had been doing this her whole life and it was time to let go, bless her, and hope she could find peace.

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

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

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

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

Who can say what is right for anyone? In the end it wasn’t some great love down through time, no. It was this meeting where I helped her as an African Pharaoh. But underlying it was this wrinkle in us both that led us to screwing something up royally. So when I hear people talk about twin flames or twin souls as this split in a person’s soul, I have to chuckle. No, it isn’t that, I don’t think. It feels great because it is a crack in the cosmic egg, and in rushes our soul energy which is amazing! The gift is we feel the energy from the divine leaking through into us at first, then flooding more and more later. This flood of truth can also freak peole out. We are able to realize a little of what we are beyond all of this. And yes, it is amazing and glorious, but it can also send people to dark places too as their unresolved issues can get amplified. I learned that whenever I released some block it was always because of my own efforts. What was being said about these unions just didn’t hold much water. Or was I simply not rising to a higher challenge? Is it maybe that this is about realizing that we are all one and because of karma, we get connected to people for better or worse, but we still need to attend to our own stuff? If you look at what people say about how unhappy they are about their lives, you often see a good deal of finger pointing when in truth, people are unhappy because of themselves. Well, there is a remedy for that, there really is.

The reason why we aren’t able to see into this realm of soul so well is because of how we have evolved as a species who has had this partition between our two brains (I am convinced). It would help us dealing with spiritual experiences if the curtain was pulled back a little more for everyone. This curtain or veil so many speak of is merely how we have learned to tune all of this amazing stuff OUT. What we feel when we feel the draw of the twin is the draw of karma with the incredible boundless love of the soul. Soul love is the great untold story in all of this. So whether you become aware of it within yourself as pure bliss or if you are caught in a soul connection, the effect is the same. Meanwhile, I think the best thing to do is to make the best of it. Yes, truly remarkable experiences can be had with another, but they mean little when they cannot be anchored as a feature in one’s life. It is so easy I think to feel someone from across the many miles and just sink into the foreverness of the experience. or leap from connection to connection etherically without ever having to have those people in our lives in a real world way (which is the true test of each of us if you ask me). Etheric connections are like getting a degree online whereas having the person face to face is like attending a university. You might even find that how you are being graded does not reflect what you have learned or that your teacher is kind of dialing it all in. And yet, the grade matters most when it is pushed through the sieve of the physical. Somehow, It think we all agreed to come here for this, to test our ideas and our hopes and dreams in order to make them real. If your outer reality does not fit your inner conception of how you think your life should be, you probably also tend to blame others for why things are so bad. I know I did. I did that shit for years and awakening turned me around more and more each day.

So when my ex showed up recently, it was bizarre. Surreal. I didn’t have the sense that she would EVER be able to acknowledge that she had done ANYTHING wrong or bad. But there she was trying to use her new dog as the way to introduce herself and why she was there in the first place. Just stopping by….and by the way, she wanted to say how sorry she was for twelve years of harsh punishment and terrible behavior (by most anyone’s measure – and yes I own that I chose her initially!)

But hang on. Did this person really know why she was sorry? What she did was behavior that was psychopathic. That term sounds really severe, doesn’t it? But a psychopath isn’t some axe-wielding slobber-jawed maniac seeking to kill anyone they see. No. Psychopathy is actually the lack of conscience in a certain area emotionally. It is a blind spot, a lack in the emotional feeling space of the individual. It leads a person to do horrible things but never see or understand why any of their terrible behavior is a problem. You can’t know what you don’t know, the experts explain. And it could be a blind spot in one area and one area only in their inner landscape. By being that way, a problem could lie unacknowledged for years. People like me, spouses, could see hints of it, but I am a glass half full person so I just told myself it wasn’t as bad as it was, which served to enable the behavior to some extent. Everything else about her was so functional, so smart, so aware, so caring. This is how these people can be seen by most everyone as so “together” and “great.” My grandfather upon meeting her once said for me not to let her slip away. They were all impressed. It took me years to finally understand what had been going wrong for so long once I got a decade into the marriage.

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

By this time I had ceased trying to help her anymore. I saw that she would go into one temporal meltdown after another. My guide’s words echoed in my mind: “You wouldn’t be doing what you are doing now if you knew what lay on the other side of this.” I had learned that I could see freedom as a threat or freedom as an unknown to be feared prior to awakening. I learned slowly after awakening that there was NOTHING to fear except the fear. I never put this onto another person, though. So given all of this, I stood there watching as my ex said that she was sorry.

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

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

So I did something that was uncharacteristic of me before awakening happened, which was I began to rattle off a few of the worst offenders in her behavior. I did so carefully, without sounding like I was blaming, but casually bringing up some of the issues I saw as blindingly obvious. To her credit, she listened and didn’t turn defensive. Before her stopping by on this day, I couldn’t bring up ANY mention of her bad behavior without it being turned back on me, effectively gaslighting me. Twelve years of an information and honesty embargo. It was always my fault back in the day. All of it, and most of it I tried to ignore as I cared for my child knowing she had been seeing this behavior too in her Mother, as we both soldiered on and tried to carve out a little slice of goodness so neither of us went crazy. But now she was squinting at me sideways and not putting up a defense. The tables had turned (because she had allowed them to turn). Still, I wasn’t going to do what she did to me, nor did I want to. I kept on going down the list and she didn’t run away.

I learned that she had been through a lot of therapy about all of this, and my guess was my innermost fantasy had come true, which was a therapist at some point explained to her just how abusive her behavior was and maybe she needed to set things right if she was ever going to feel any better. The clue was probably how obsessive she was about how she felt she had been treated unfairly (in my defense I behaved in a way I knew was fair so when I looked back on the whole affair I could rest easy knowing I took the high road at the very least).

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

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

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

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

I do wonder what happens to the people who were part of those old patterns when the patterns get erased, healed, or transmuted. I consider how a pattern I held with an ex-wife which gets resolved to a great degree bears on someone who I may have attracted (and been attracted to) now has a loose end, no more tension at least on my end. Do those people go and seek someone else to hold that rope tightly in another instance, or can they see this as an opportunity to change? I suppose they are like the sacred actors in our lives who often bear terrible things that then provide the potential for us to choose differently and to feel differently as well. We are here for such a short while, and we are all coming and going. It seems worth it to make the most of all of this and face a many of our demons as we can. In spirit all things are known. On earth, things are veiled. What happens when we bear heaven to earth and cause the veiled to be seen again. Do we do our little part in redeeming earth or our little place in it?

Message From The Mountains – Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End part 1

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.

Thanks for stopping by!