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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Serving the Light,

~Parker

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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:

My Best Longterm Education

I have had one main source for my spiritual education and it was found in a few books by the same author. Everything else was grazing articles and books and the greatest teacher: life.

That first book was Seth Speaks. It led to more Seth books over the years, as I eased into the very thick and cerebral material. I found the books useful because they were describing things I had already thought about or experienced so they felt familiar, and prescient, too. Unlike most writings that were said to have been channelled, the Seth books never dipped into dogma, instead they stressed that the divine was within and that the individual should rely on themselves when considering spiritual principles and work. Many beliefs, he explained, were limiting. Many were based on distorted principles handed down through the generations in some cases.

As the decades rolled on, the books haven’t just held up, new experiences have revealed other teachings to have been amazingly on point, sometimes decades later.

Seth is very cerebral, and it often takes multiple read-throughs to get the full range of comprehension. I’m not a fan of trance channels, because so much of it strikes me as contrived or soaked in dogma. It isn’t to say those psychics are wrong, but their teachings appear distorted with notions being put forward that often tow the line of a consensus reality which I had often found suspect as a result of my own experience. A lot was trying to muscle its way through my awareness even then, much of which I would find mirrored in the material that Jane, as Seth, brought forward. Okay, so to be fair, Seth talks about life after life and how we create our reality, ideas that strike some people as strange, too, so there is that.

The work is worth the reflection and the level of self reliance that is inspired by the books even before the content is even considered.

Jane Roberts and her husband Robert Butts were both involved in helping to bring the Seth material forward. It began in the mid 1960’s when Jane, who was an author, decided to write a nonfiction book entitled Improving Your ESP Powers. They tried exercises throughout to determine which ones worked and which ones didn’t. At one point in their process, they used a Ouija board and Jane found that she was anticipating the answers before they came. Jane didn’t know what to think. The personality that came through was named Seth and he would say things that were complex, nuanced, and struck the two of them as curious. Were they making it all up? Then, around the same time, while sitting writing, Jane felt as though she had suddenly tumbled down a dimensional rabbit hole. Her account which is in the first chapter of The Seth Material describes it in her own words:

It was a lovely Autumn evening. After supper, I sat down at my old table in the living room, as I always do to work on my poetry, Rob was painting in the back Studio, three rooms away. I took out my pen and paper and settled down with my 9th or 10th cup of coffee for the day and my cigarettes. Willie, our cat dosed on the blue rug.

What happened Next was like a “trip” without drugs. If someone had slipped me an LSD Cube on the sly, the experience couldn’t have been more bizarre. Between one normal minute and the next, a fantastic avalanche of radical, new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force, as if my skull were some sort of receiving station, turned up to unbearable volume. Not only ideas came through this channel, but sensations, intensified and pulsating. I was tuned in, turned on– whatever you want to call it– connected to some incredible source of energy. I didn’t even have time to call out to Rob.

It was as if the physical world were really tissue paper thin, hiding infinite dimensions of reality, and I was suddenly flung through the tissue paper with a huge ripping sound. My body sat at the table, my hands furiously, scribbling down the words and ideas that flashed through my head. Yet, I seemed to be somewhere else at the same time traveling through things. I went plummeting through a leaf to find a whole universe, open up, and then out again drawn into new perspectives.

I felt as if knowledge was being implanted in the very cells of my body so that I couldn’t forget it. I got knowing a biological spirituality. It was feeling and knowing, rather than intellectual knowledge. At the same time, I remembered having a dream the night before, which I had forgotten, in which this same sort of experience had occurred and I knew that the two were connected. When I came to, I found myself scrawling what was obviously meant as the title of that odd, batch of notes, The Physical Universe As Idea Construction.

Later, the Seth material would develop those ideas but I didn’t know that at the time, in one of the early sessions. Seth said that this had been his first attempt to contact me. I only know that if I begun speaking for Seth that night, I would have been terrified.

Here are a few excerpts from different books written from the mid 1960’s through to the mid 80’s.

Jane would go into trance and would dictate the books with few revisions. Robb would take dictation. Seth would cover topics that were wide ranging from the soul, the self, the psyche, the nature of reality, and topics (like probable realities) that were new at the time. Many ideas that you think of today were concepts that Seth put forward. Probable selves, timelines, and realities, were all presented first by Seth. Seth provided ways to explore the inner senses he often described, and he always accented the importance of the individual and how it must look for its own answers.

Now, decades later, I find that my experience is similar to the ones Jane has described. I found that her initial experience quoted by Jane earlier, is similar to how I experience extra sensory material: it isn’t rational or mental but is instead is felt at the atomic or cellular level. What others might feel, I can experience directly as if it was a reality to me, but often accompanied by bewilderment as to its source since the reaction lacks the cause that we are normally familiar with. Some of my experiences can be as vivid as a drug trip (I assume, never having taken LSD before). So much sounds so familiar both back then and now that it makes me certain that the material comes from a source that is more than an imaginal figment or other.

Seth is worth the purchase. The best first book is Seth Speaks. After that introduction, the rest of the material will make more sense. You can find the collection sold online.

I salute the light that is within you!

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!

The Initiate

Many years ago I considered signing up for the Rose Cross or Rosicrucian literature and school of thought. What kept me from following through was this inner voice that had admonished me for years not to “join any religion or school of thought.” Once I awakened, I understood the purpose for me in my life for why this needed to be so, afterwhich the inner voice explained once I got a decade in that this would no longer be necessary. I wasn’t going to throw myself into the dogma or belief of any system at that point. As a result, I was able to begin researching other traditions for clues about illumination and /or enlightenment.

As an outgrowth of this, this video was sent to me and I think you might find it interesting. It is only a primer, but it helps to show how there is a universal phenomenon that has been seen in all the religions and schools of thought which boils down to a non-religious knowledge about body and soul (and all both contains) that I think could be understood in a more plain and objective way while realizing that it leads to themost vivid and deep levels of feeling. So here is the video. Let me know what you think.

A Message From Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naturally Telepathic?

Photo by the author

It was the early 1990’s and I was working as a traveling portrait photographer for one of the largest photo companies in the U.S. My work took me on a circuit of seven regions, over and over. Once October came, we were officially in the holiday season and things got busy. We shot portraits mostly of babies because once you reach school age, schools take pictures of children. Babies were our bread and butter. The thing about being busy is that mothers would stand in line for hours to get pictures taken and after such long waits, their babies would be in really bad shape. It was my job to do what I could to calm the babies just long enough to eke out a few fabulous photos of babies.

Most often, a crying baby would calm down for a few minutes when it heard a stranger’s voice. These would be very small infants. If that didn’t work, sometimes unusual sounds would work. Sometimes, nothing worked. But if you know me, I am also out there wondering, “Can I communicate with the little ones telepathically?” I had plenty of subjects to try this one.

I tried this first in the town of Cumberland Maryland. I remember this week because I was being borrowed by another district, so I was in a different area completely from what I was used to. One evening, we had this beautiful little baby come in, no wait to get pictures, but cranky. I suspected that this was the only time the parents could come in to get pictures and the baby was ready for bed. It was no more than 4 months old (closer to two to three months). Mom was concerned that the baby was crying and as I got the studio set up for the sitting, I explained to her quietly that I was going to try a few things that often worked with babies when they are cranky like hers was. It’s enough to get Mom to just go along with me enough so we can quickly get into the sitting, and when all goes to plan, we all wind up looking like geniuses.

In this case, though, nothing was working. I finally decided to speak directly to the child through its mind. I was standing ten feet away, not speaking, just getting the camera set up and the baby is crying. I speak to the child in my mind and the child stops and begins looking in my approximate direction as if she was hearing a voice. The eyes of babies in these cases will look upwards slightly, searching for the figure of the person, often a knit in their brow like their eyes are trying to focus. It is a look that is pretty common with small infants when they hear a strange voice. At the time, no one else was speaking, not me, and not the Mother. It was a quiet evening just before closing and there weren’t a lot of people in the store. The baby got fussy again, so I spoke to it again and just like before the baby quieted down immediately, began searching with its eyes in front of it, for where (perhaps) the inner signal had come from. The sitting lasted about fifteen minutes once we got going, and while I didn’t get smiles, I was able to get a look of calm on her baby’s face (which many Moms will take when their child is being fussy). After this, I began trying this out on other infants. The good thing was that I would have hundreds of sittings with mostly babies each week so I got a lot of practice. In all I was able to try this on many hundreds of infants. I found out a few things that I’d like to share.

What I found was that a small percentage of babies responded. The percentage, I would estimate, was around 24-30 percent. The problem, as I saw it, was that often a baby would be so upset that I couldn’t get through to it, but there were those instances where if you were there and I could point it out to you, you would be left wondering if your really saw what you had just seen. I know that something in the range of 20-30 percent may not sound significant, but when it worked, it worked really well. Calmer babies showed more signs of appearing to be aware that they were looking or searching for the presence or voice that they may have heard. Calmer babies appeared to be easier to get through to. Now I know that all of this sounds a little incredible, and what I can say is that I paid a lot of attention to the behavior of the babies while I was doing this experiment. I also know that the skeptics will waive off my findings as mere coincidence (and I would not blame them). The body language was almost always the same: the infant would look slightly upward and in my general direction (I was always positioned directly in front of them in the photo studio). I found that when an infant responded, I could keep them responding to my nonverbal prompts and requests, but if they were tired, upset or cranky, it was much harder to get them to show signs that they were possibly responding to my telepathic prompts (which were encouraging words for them to calm down, to look in my direction, etc.).

Was it all just coincidental? If I thought that, I wouldn’t be bothering to share this. Was it repeated by another researcher, was it run blind and with controls? No. But what I think it may point to is that small children may be telepathic to some extent. It is also something that you might want to try out for yourself if you work around children, especially infants. I found that by a certain age, this facility goes away for the most part.

At the other end of the spectrum, and some years later, my Grandfather was willing himself to die. He was in his 90’s and had been whittled down by many small strokes and was bedridden, and had been so for at least a year. He was fit to be tied and was tired of lingering and said so to the family that one Summer when we gathered to see him. He said his goodbyes and thus began what was his death process. Sounds incredible, but the people at hospice explained how the process would likely unfold (and it did). My grandfather was a force of nature, a hard guy to be around because he liked everything his way. If you deviated from any direction in the least, he pretty much lost it in the sense that he felt like the younger generation was somehow straying from the ways that would make them fit for the world. He also helped in giving me a work ethic, so it wasn’t all bad, not really. But that was the man. He left the way he lived; on his own terms.

About four or five days into this decision, my Grandfather moved into a phase of the death process that was marked with his becoming unresponsive. His breathing became shallow and he would lie in bed with his eyes open looking out the window but completely unresponsive to anything going on around him. His breathing was this shallow and fast near-hyperventilation type. One night as everyone had gone to bed I sat up with him. I began speaking to him in my mind and I noticed whenever I did that, his breathing would change noticeably. I stopped, and his breathing went back to what it was before. I spoke to him in my mind, and his breathing changed, slowing, again, noticeably. Was this just a coincidence? I kept testing this, and each time, sure as shooting, his breathing would change. I tried this scores of times, trying to begin and stop at odd random times. While I cannot say that my Grandfather heard my thoughts, his response showed me that he was responding to the moment when I would speak to him telepathically.

Are we naturally telepathic? Is what keeps us from being telepathic more an issue of filters installed later in life more than anything else? Do those, or will those, filters come off during certain circumstances? Is it perhaps a lot easier to achieve than we think? Could it be that the same exercises provided in yoga and meditation practices hold the key to discovering our natural telepathy? In science they say correlation is not causality. I am, though, very interested in these correlations. Maybe they need more study.

Addendum: In the field of awakening telepathy is found to be common. Many people have reported, including myself, the capacity to feel what another person, to whom they share an inner connection, feels. I know that I looked at this carefully during the time that I was in contact with the person who I thought was my “twin” from 2007 after a full kundalini awakening that took place early that year. There is a fair amount of writing on this subject that I have put down (as others have also) on this blog for those interested in learning more.

Awakening Isn’t A Mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has This Happened To you?

Ever have dreams of people who you do things with? When I was younger, I had dreams of helping people who were dying or who had just died, to cross over and to get settled in their new environment. I also was paired with a woman my age who I had never met for some of these jobs.

I think this points to how we really are multidimensional: our existances aren’t these linear progressions that we thought. We are the angels and devils both.

It’s Worth It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maui

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All My Love,

~ Parker