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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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.

Why I Am Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Project

Life is full of surprises.

Copyright, all rights reserved

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for stopping by!

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.

The Sacred Erotica Of Alphachanneling

Many of you know how sex can be a vessel for the transcendental. Heiros Gamos, the divine masculine and feminine, kundalini as a union of the divine within the self. Finding artists who have an awareness of the sacredness of the feminine and the masculine without falling for the mundane is pretty rare. You’d think it would be easier done given how much energy we put into the act of begetting.

For some time now I have been availing myself and those I know who appreciate a deeper awareness of our sexuality than just a moment of pure pleasure, and that is the artist whose name is elusive but whose presence on the internet is not. Found, for now, on Instagram under @alphachanneling. I say this because if you haven’t noticed, social media has been enjoying its heavy hand in the censorship arena these days on just about anything that anyone might frown upon, be it an errant crumb on the tablecloth, an unapproved of political opinion, or scientific information inconvenient to whatever the current narrative is. Or sex. Even when your channel is defined as for adults only. Even then.

When I first saw the work I saw a range of works using different styles but clearly rooted in the sacred. There is, to my eye often a whisper of Art Deco stylization in some of the work. Many are fast, gestural, and I think it is what keeps the work from being less than what it is. That’s not to say that if it were more that it would be less either….(I have a right to be inconsistent if I wish).

I suppose that I should do a little digging to find out a little more about the artist sans actually interviewing him. So I found another who did, but not before contacting him to get permission to publish a few images of his work for you to see.

“Alphachanneling is a Swiss-born American artist based out of Oakland, California….Central to my process is … channeling, an ongoing cultivation through a deep relationship I have with several master-teachers….Spiritual in practice, the images I produce are simple thought-waves … I look towards Taoism and tantra, pornography and folk art, BDSM and the divine, the mystical and the occult, indigenous and outsider art alike … Alphachanneling lives in a boundless world called the Utopian Erotic, a world of magical pussy, radiant women, bedroom jungles and temples of light.” 

Is There Great Art On Instagram? Jerry Saltz, Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/2014/12/saltz-great-instagram-art.html

Since I find reviews of artwork usually tedious and more about the writer than the artist, let me get down to the work so you can see for yourself. Hang on for the ending because I will include a link you might want to save…

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This one was either the same one or one very much like it that I saw first when I came across his work a number of years ago. When I saw this image I stopped my scrolling and thought, “Hang on…someone has gotten onto the whole concept of energetic transfer.” Then sure enough, with a title like “energetic transfer” a little bell went off. Its nice to be on the same wavelength, it makes everything so easy.

Sadly, though, there is an image that this artist has been seeing too much of right along with his viewers, too, and one wonders whether the prudes at Facebook/Instagram will play the bully and selectively edit this chap’s feed:

With the announcement that the post runs afoul of their community standards….

I don’t know what the problem is quite honestly: there are images that some might want to call “scandalous” that stay up while, selectively, some are banned with this rather jolting image that belongs on the roadways and not on the Instagram feeds. It looks more like Sally Prude works on Tuesday the censor shift and she finds something she just can’t stand so she slaps on the above sticker, only to be followed by Ted, who we all know is a malcontented prude, who works on Thursdays the censor desk and goes to work hacking away at the artist’s lovely feed of spiritual erotica. It’s almost like there aren’t enough of them, taking down what they don’t like, but kind of hacking their way through the lovely jungle. Meanwhile, images of graphic violence and gratuitous sex remain on other channels. It’s enough to make a person want to start carrying around a pitchfork or something. We are lucky that this platform hasn’t gone demented and taken to censorship, at least not as I can yet tell.

So I will leave you with this one last image and a link to the artist’s site should you find yourself wanting to buy a piece or two. Maybe for your altar…It’s lovely to know that the feminine is treated as a sacred altar as evidenced in this artist’s work. Let me know what you think. Please, don’t be shy!

The artist’s website: https://alphachanneling.com/

Diving Into the Multidimensional

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shakti & The Lost Realm Of Time

©Parker Stafford

The mystique of enlightenment tantalizes us with promises of a new world, a new mind, a new way to be. I sought, never really knowing where it might all lead to. Perhaps what the mystics and yogis had said, had whispered about, was an inaccessible realm for only the chosen few. What I know now, though, is I had forgotten what had graced my spirit upon coming into the world.

It remains a mystery to me why it took as long as it did. Was it just that I had some very real-world lessons to learn first? Did the mundane trump the transcendent? While there have been answers, questions crowd them out in greater number than ever before. It’s as if in seeing the “iridjuel,” a transcendental object existing at the end of time only serves to deepen the mystery. That may just be the point and the way of things. For myself, I am surprisingly more content now with the motley crowding-in of questions over answers. It is a bit like how poetry is. It never seems to give you a solid answer, it teases you along with still-greater possibilities, a greater inescapable reality. Like poetry, maybe the whole point is to be inspired and not answered. Perhaps it is better to have an experience over answers. And yet, along the way, answers do come, but they come about through a very different process than before. These answers, though, lead to a more informed kind of mind and heart filled with greater humanity and kindness, perhaps a sensitivity that appeals to the Shakti in each of us. Fiery, alive, but gentle and sensitive to the needs of the All.

What is so interesting is how we all come to these in our own way. I’m not suggesting that it is the same, though. Many paths, many arrivals. The moment that I think that there is a hard and fast answer, a path that is clear, I see so many other paths that weave in and out of my own and down into parts of the forest that I had never considered before. What is clear though is I can see how there was a single substantive move from the laser-focus of the logical rational mind to that of another which was its opposite which led me to this shore and the end of time which is like Terence McKenna’s “iridjuel,” the transcendental object at the end of time.

Was it just as simple as activating the power of the more feminine side of our brain, that right hemisphere? So much of what I saw happening in meditation when the lights came on was about this shift. If it weren’t for how the meditation technique was designed, I might have missed it. It appeared first like a giant empty room. I had been there countless times before. I might have dismissed it that time, passed it by and gone on to more active pursuits. But I stayed. I gave it time. Instead of a focus, it was the opposite of what I knew was that laser-like focus which we all had grown accustomed to and comfortable with. It was a focus, but without the usual sense of focusing. It is, in short, precisely what the non-dual crowd calls “not doing.” It was the opposite of “the doer.” It was observing but it was not aware in the same way. It was as if my mind had been switched off and a giant seemingly endless expanse opened up. This I think is what so many call the “void” and many back away from it both in fear and unknowing. It was in that darkness that the brightest of pure white light flashed before me, subsumed me for just a moment before receding, after which everything began to change. You could say it was my “journey to Damascus” moment.

I stuck with this new form of observation without a single-point because I found it novel, a new challenge to my mind. Curiosity had the best of me. And maybe I had tried so many different ways before this that I kind of shrugged and thought, what’s the harm? It wasn’t that this void was really empty. In it phenomena would rise and fall based on how well I didn’t drag into it my old focus, that old comfortable and certain laser focus. It invited me to open, open, and open still more. The more I did, the more it would show me. I considered the possibility that the void was perhaps just a gulf between two selves, one of which was incomprehensible to the other. If the other side to this new form of “focus” was apprehending, then this was a very different acquisition altogether. I didn’t catch a bird, I observed it through its very essence, whatever the object of my interest was. A window opened in my forehead and I saw images from a great distance. A hallway, an apartment, the windows, the arrangement of the furniture, the bedrooms and other things. I was lucky, I knew the person to whom these scenes belonged….I just didn’t know it at the time. Coincidence or synchronicity saw to it that its import was made known to me and I was placed on that person’s path. I was able to see that for as fantastical all of this was, for as seemingly self-created it could appear, what that window revealed was in fact images from a world away. I corresponded with the person to whom these images belonged, who was able to tell me how correct or true those images were. It was as if I had caught onto something that had been hidden in a seeming void, images shelved behind darkness that might never have been found had I remained incurious and remaining in my old ways. It all seemed impossible, and yet there it was. Over and over I tested this seeming novel capacity, always with a high degree of accurate results. If this was mere imagination, there should have been results that reflected that reality and I would have seen more misses than bullseyes. Somehow, it was as if my mind could imagine what wasn’t there before and could show me what did exist through some unknown capacity opening up within me. And surely this is what happens when we open our minds in this way. Psychics often describe how they seem to lack the filter that keeps such access to this phenomenon at bay. While it isn’t that important to have these experiences, it nonetheless is a symptom, a sign, of the change that is taking place. It turns out that this is a universal symptom regardless of your religious belief or school of thought. The Christians have it as “gifts of the spirit” and the Hindu have it as “siddhi.” They all come from the same precise phenomenon but go by different names.

If the old way of being was achieved by way of a linear progression and its laser focus, then this was a compliment to it. It emerged seemingly as if it was a divine compliment, for surely it was just that. It looked and smelled and felt like the simplest of tricks, a simple key in the lock that turned the tumblers of time and everything else with it. Yet, holding a key or grasping a lock alone would lead to nothing. The world remained as it was; as appearances only. Both were impotent apart, but both were suddenly potent when brought together. Together they opened up secrets, the unknowable, the impossible, and yes it all seemed like a fantasy at first until I found that no, these were very real things that I was seeing. I didn’t see them from the outside, but rather I felt them from the inside out. Everything was in reverse. I considered that I was sick, perhaps suffering from some brain malfunction for about two weeks, that is, until I realized that no, there was a basis for what appeared completely implausable. This is perhaps why the concept of union over-arches this experience in all of its forms. Left brain and right brain, always out of sync, always putting out different frequencies, now line up and are on the same page. They then create a third mind, a meta mind, which then opens its window into the world beyond the senses. Like a ladder adding to itself, it leads us into a new way and a new world within ourselves. It is apt calling one side the masculine and the other the feminine, for that is surely how they seem. The one caveat is that regardless of whether you are male of female, we all have the same two present in us. Like the rails of a ladder, when we bring them together with the rungs, we are able to climb up into the transcendent, into what science says isn’t possible. It was in the practices of shifting into the other lost rail of the ladder of our mind that I found the way upward. But just as it showed me the way upward it also showed me that it also goes downward and into the realm of shadow where if we release those old ghosts of our fear, we can continue higher with fearlessness and wonder.

It has helped to show how all people matter, how it is that different turns of mind are important as we reach the end of time and its realm of appearances. It always seemed as simple as hitting a whole new gear. We just didn’t know that this gear even existed. So simple, so broad in its implications.

I began to see how, through time, just as we had subsumed the inner Shakti within ourselves, so too did we subsume the Shakti’s in the world. As above, so below. Was it ordained that it be this way? Or was it just inevitable given how we had limited ourselves? More, every once in a great while there would come some person who was a teacher who would pass on something that would yield a brief period, a kind of renaissance of spirit, whose words would fill a scroll or book and we would be left scratching our heads wondering what or how they got to where they were. Like a tide, knowing would come flowing in and then after a time, it would flow out, seemingly lost to human comprehension and the limits it had placed on itself. Always a teacher to light that fire, fanning the flames as best as he or she could. Over and over, we would fall back into forgetting. Not all of them would, but the most worldly of them had an amazingly short half life.

That is why this time seems a completely different iteration of past events. Waking up as we have, without a teacher or any knowledge of the secret practices of yogis or mystics, perhaps millions may have already reached this further shore. Will it make this iteration different? Will it last? Is it a new wrinkle whose very presence will change the pattern for all time, or will it be just another tidal phenomenon, subject to the larger forces present in our cosmos and thus our own bodies?

While the left brain says “Aha!” It is the right brain that brings the myths which tell truths that facts cannot. So Shakti dances in a wreath of fire and beckons us to her mystery. Perhaps this time we can see the two impulses as not mutually exclusive, but capable, when brought together, or forming a window into a larger understanding of what those two sides represent when brought into union. It is why I think that both, set apart, will only offer up what they think they know instead of a larger view of what is. It seems nature has a proclivity toward having us learn how to cooperate between our disparate inner nature if we are to reach the prize. And what is this prize? Is it a definite object that we can know in a concrete way, or is it instead both mystery and known quantity that mystifies as much as it informs? Is it the gift that reveals how important it is to see both sides of things, which pulls us along in our curious journey to discover what has not previously occurred to us? Is the answer as much how the meta mind is created as the object at the end of time is composed? And as such, will that object always defy our attempts at grasping it, but remain like a ball of wool, indistinct, random, but from which, with the pinch of our mind, can grasp a small part of its incomprehensible nature and spin it into a coherent thread? And will those threads always be just one small aspect of a still larger whole? I tend to think as much, but I also observe that anything that you might ever want to know can be found and teased out in just the way that I have described. This represents the exact opposite of how we are taught learning can take place….and yet the transcendental object at the end of time remains, enigmatic as ever, urging us forward into some new understanding of ourselves and the cosmos itself.

I might never have thought that this was possible had it not happened over and over to me. Had I been less prone to digging in and seeing how the fantastic seemingly self-imagined objects I saw behind closed eyes were, I might not have seen that they were supported through fact and independent experience. And it isn’t even that doing such a thing is that important, it is I think, a signpost along the way that we are now in new territory. It says: The Transcendental Object At the End of Time Up Ahead.

A hundred years hence what I have considered may itself be seen through the tunnel of time as only one small wrinkle in a still larger unfolding. And yet, still, I cannot help but grasp that bit of air with my mind and pinch with my intention to spin out threads of coherent thought and discovery from the object that seems surely to exist at the “end” of time.

Sacred Sexuality Podcast

This just in from a friend.

There is a lot here about the interplay between the sexual polarity of man and woman. This struck a chord with me, underlining how much we often allow our own misalignment and deeper issues to get in the way of a more honest and realistic approach to who we are not just physically but psychicaly (emotional/psychologically).

Worth a listen…

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/deeper-with-sophie-josephina/id1518161721?i=1000485819892

Enjoy~

Parker

Twin Soul Pain

I was searching kundalini awakening on Youtube today, a first for me in quite some time. I didn’t know what I would find or even what I was looking for. Then I found her there in India….she has this hard unyielding way, but she is also able to express what I might need to thrash about in a poetic trance to spit out. Any insight is always appreciated. More about her in a moment.

The questioner asks her how to deal with the issue of having the feeling of the other within…even though it has been a lot of time since they parted ways. I am reminded of how these “twin” or soul connections work and how people I know even years later are still affected by their other. I know how I have been affected.

So I came across the work of Maharishikaa on kundalini. She helped a man who was really having a hard time in one video. Then quite by surprise there was this touching video about a woman who was trying to move on when her soul connection abruptly moved on without her. She came trying to find a way through this. The response I found to be unique, novel, and beautiful. Watch what she says. I think maybe the way through is not to go away but to go through. Step into the fire, do not run around it, ask what remains and be ready for what might come. For me, the answer was so simple, really. So much fuss over such a little hitch in my heart and ego.

Some put so much on these connections. More than they deserve, in my experience. At the same time, though, they help to show us what love can be, how we are the love instead of that moment of dissatisfaction that then fuels a connection later, in another life.

I find the arrangement to be paradoxical once you see what happened (in another life). It is like bread dough left to rise too long; it winds up much bigger than it ever was in that last life. Perhaps it is the effect of letting karma go for a single life – it grows bigger than it was when first minted.

Except no one seems to know this. That, or all my searching has somehow led me astray. Aren’t we passionate about getting it right? Could that be enough to open such a vibrant portal to the soul and it’s love?

We only see the large loaf and surmise it is more than it is. The paradox is…..that it is more than it should seem. Perhaps that is what these connections do; they open us to the love shining in the soul. For the soul, it seems that this is an everyday thing, completely common. But here on Earth, it seems singularly unique (which of course it is). It remains enigmatic to me. I wish I could go back to those simpler days of believing that it was a twin. It is, tbough, more mysterious than that. Perhaps it is enough that it moves us as it does. For what else makes us examine so much over something we might not have ever known that much about?

I know it may not make sense, but I think there is something here for those who need it. We let go of our need for it to be a certain way. When we do that, there is a greater peace and this cosmic presence expands and it’s one less thing that creates pain. We think it is about them when it’s just about our reaction to something that we think fell short of expectations. This is, I think, the genesis of these soul connections.