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Archives for posts with tag: belief
This post began as a small rant on Facebook and then grew far too big to even consider keeping there. Instead, I have placed it here for those who find these kinds of ramblings to be of interest. -P.
Years ago I realized the problem I had with religion….ANY religion was the belief part. It wasn’t really some personal problem or an ego thing or….it was a lot simpler. I grew up willing to ask myself is belief even necessary? I mean, what if you just started from the premise that instead of believing, you simply inquired about the things that most folks have a a belief about? I realized that in doing so, I could solve any nagging issues about whether something was real or not. And mind you, some things simply do not lend themselves to this form of authentication or checking out.
But a lot of things do. And most people do not know how to go about authenticating their experience. When it comes to that, humans are mostly all thumbs. Or rather, they have been trained to be like that. And why? Because one serious problem or drawback when swimming in the waters of belief, I have found, has been the hand-in-glove tendency for beliefs to require you to cleave to an authority figure of SOME kind. Whether priest, priestess, mullah, or pastor, these two things tend to go hand in hand. And that is really a problem. Why? Because when it comes to authority, and spiritual things, being able to listen to the authority within is really important. And a LOT of religions tend to weed that one out. A LOT. Oh yes, people will say that they do listen within, but its all within
So what is forgotten in all of this is what I have come to observe is that the gateway of all experience, all of it, is within each of us. It then makes sense that this gateway must be clear…..but all-thumbs human does not know what this means or entails. Like a glass darkly, we distort so much within ourselves because its just now….prepared well. And look at our brothers and sisters walking the earth. God bless them, but we are all a mess inside. A mess. So much so that the only way through a life inwardly is by following what we “believe” is an accurate and unimpeachable authority to follow hoping it will not lead us into a ditch.
But even the grasping for a teacher is itself a belief, if not deeper down and less noticeable. We all have our flavors. And yes, this will upset people, but when you bite into the deeper unpresupposed, naked, and radiant truth that stands before us. The teachers who got it will be known for how deeply they partook of it and were able to convey some important aspects of it back to us, the great unwashed, the unseeing, the ignorant, the untouched by the great and brilliant white light of this space where some of us have been known to reach. Our belief also turn our most important teachers into gods or very nearly so. They did it with Jesus. It is now without a question that he was God. Mary was argued over in the early church and those who said she was a woman who gave birth to a man (yes, this happened) were pushed out into the wilderness (literally) and the flaming tires of the term “heretic” were tossed around their necks. This left these people at odd-ends to say the least….so powerful was this desire and drive and belief. The belief. The belief. Oh the belief!
But what we do not talk about much is that our books on this man are all cherry picked for us by people who lived thousands of years ago. We say the teachings are perennial and thus do not change….and this is funny to me because I know that as humans, we have a lot yet to get right. We are ourselves unfinished and thus our own wisdom and passion and intellect and how we use our minds and our souls to grasp reality and the divine cosmos are all in the process of becoming. We made a lot of assumptions two thousands years ago about what we thought was right and not right about what that man taught. And you know what? Buried in these heretical books I have found, for my own use, incredible gems of what I call the “Apex” teachings of Jesus. They were dumped I suspect because the people could not understand them. And so we got the KJV (King James Version) with all of its subsequent sub-versions that further push the interpretation further and further afield.
So this begs the question…..if the path is through yourself, then why not polish those parts and find the place within where the teachings can become manifest. Or known. Or felt. Or experienced. Directly. Why not? Just because you don’t believe it is possible is by no means any kind of test for the validity of my statement. It is itself what the rest of what religion has become, which has been a hijacking of our ability to think not just in a reasoning way, but in a deeper more spiritual way….which is much more free than the rather cramped quarters my brothers and sisters in various and sundry religions have. I will say that my freedom has allowed me direct access to some things that I read about from yogis and saints. Its true. And isn’t this what we all seek? Or am I wrong? Why do we seek it, then, through belief? What I have access to is not through a form of belief, but through direct experience.
To get there means you have to take incredible leaps. They are not leaps of belief, though. They are leaps that have to do with knowing how to use your insides. It means undoing limiting beliefs. Perhaps there IS a belief that does need to be held to until the rewiring is complete, and that is that within each of us is the means to know the divine reality directly. Its interesting that its the Native American holy men and women who were on to what this was all about. They would pray that they would become like a “hollow bone.” This meant, obviously, that they ceased reflecting on what they thought they were experiencing and just let it flow through them. They did not distort or interpret the information. This, though, is incomprehensible as an experience for anyone who has significant distortive material in the way. The leap, then, is a very real one. It is one more of faith, than of belief. The difference? Belief will land you where you expect based on what the belief tells you or requires of you, but faith will land you in a place completely unexpected, unmade in your mind, and thus also quite possibly free from as many of the tethers of belief than would have happened otherwise. If you are lucky. And this, I say, is not based on something I believe as much as what I have to this point experienced. Now my interpretation could be faulty, yes, because even I do not escape all belief. Belief is itself so incredibly pernicious a thing that it lies like dark fry (small fish) in the rivers and creeks of our subconscious. The deeper you go, the more you find. The fish sometimes make us think that our purpose is to fish those streams when in fact our purpose is in knowing that we are to join the river with the ocean that is in our being. And what is there? Our teachers have recalled these places for us and some of us have reported back about it. One thing is for sure; belief is not required.
So through all of this even from a young age, I felt like there was a way through the dogma and from leaving my brain in the parking lot. It has led to opening the heart wider and using the mind differently. It has sparked immense creativity. It has also led to deep swings from bliss to depression. Its been difficult, not easy, and also easy as pie when I can get “it” right. I am plumbing my own depths as much as I am learning to let go of the things that limit me. Like belief. And to be fair, there are more beliefs to let go. But once you let go of the big ones, the smaller ones, the day-to-day ones are what are left, or were for me. This is where some of the most practical inner work has been done and it is also the hardest since it lies closest to the ego and our sense of self. Or my self.
And this self does not cotton to the thought of being obliterated…..even as it has offered itself up for obliteration on a daily basis and have only found that the grain gets ground ever finer….
Some believe the way to God is by destroying the ego. Some believe that we are fallen and have no chance of ever getting up on our own. There are beliefs that we are not good enough individually, and also that there is some enemy out there. I have sen these beliefs tear apart families. I have seen people brainwashed by belief, and some of them have been in my own close family. And the effect has been incredibly destructive. And painful. And, like Buddha, I suppose, I ask myself about the way out of this suffering Way. And for me? The way is partly through the abandonment of belief in favor of going to find that thing that I feel tempted to believe. Doing this requires humility, a kind of emotional plasticity, and a willingness to be completely, absolutely WRONG…..and then being willing to set about changing it, or at least being on duty while the change is being made (largely by the higher self). All of this is much too detailed a thing for me to hit on specifically and not turn this into a small book, so I keep to the edges and to the docks and away from the sailing spaces and oceans so deep and ineffable. 🙂
So this has meant that instead of believing in God, I have been impelled to just go find this thing. How do you do that? This gives rise to questions, naturally, very big ones, but we save the questions for later and address them one by one carefully. Yes, there is a way to know about God and death and all the questions that dog us and keep us up at night or terrify us as we grow up enough to know, holy shit, we are each going to DIE! In my mind as a youngster I asked the question. How would one go about finding out what lies beyond that transition? I mean, without any meaningful information, we are all just guessing, right? It is this kind of inquiry that has led me to some interesting places. When I was 9 years old I figured that the best way to deal with the fear that grips each of us here about our demise here physically, is to learn about what might lie on the other side of that place, if there is anything. The advantage seemed to be a win-win. If there was nothing, then at least we would know and we would also know that this is all there is. Or, we would find something more and we would know more about the conditions of that other place.
What I found was that bit by bit, I got my questions answered. In a myriad of ways. There is enough there to fill a book, so I will save you, but I will say that as you seek, you will tend to find. That old maxim holds true.
What’s interesting is that within some dogma, there is a limiting belief that essentially says that one should not go messing with the powers that involve finding this out. It is, itself, a kind of straw man argument, which essentially creates a false premise from the beginning just to knock it down, as though it was real in the first place. But it, like so much, is a belief. And belief has the power to toss all kinds of adrenaline into your body in order to create the illusion of fear and dread, which tells you that this is a path you ought not go. But its belief that does it. Most people just never bother to unravel the packaging as deeply as this to find out that this is the substance of these things. Ego and belief dive all the way down into the marrow of our most primal of places, places many do not ever bother to even plumb, yet exist and all of this stuff goes deep, one as deep as the other, and is part of the tyranny of belief that says be will be cast into everlasting hell-fire or that we need to destroy ego in order to know God. Both, just as ridiculous and impossible as the other.
I found many years after this journey that there was another person who had advocated what I was advocating decades before I even knew who he was, or that he held just such a position. It was U.G. Krishnamurti who spoke and taught a version of this idea that he called “The Pathless Path.” When I first read about it, it felt cold and sterile until I caught on to what he was trying to say. And of course U.G. liked to shock people. He was also a curmudgeon. But behind all of this was something very similar. Look within, inquire, and learn about the contents of who you are and dare to go deep. Most people are frightened to death to go deep for fear of what they will find. Doing this deep delving is the same as the shamanic shadow work and also the same thing that Carl Jung advocated, which was turning the unknown into knowledge, into awareness. Shadow work is a healing experience that relieves us all of the neurosis that besets us and our loved ones who seek to find purchase on the soil of our common shores together. When we do this, we make the dark into light, and the dream into wakefulness. We also move the subconscious into conscious awareness. We raise the submerged lands within the self out into full awareness. And what happens is that the self operates different. The “machinery” actually changes. What I have seen is that the light body can become like an incredibly brilliant transfer point for vast amounts of information. All of this is possible without drugs or even any exotic practices or methods. The path, which is for another post, is about how the chemistry in the body can actually potentiate awareness and energy so that what was once a weak signal can be boosted. It is the same thing that we do with probes in deep space. The process of doing this in the biological framework is one of self discovery. it does not require belief. But until you have reached deeply enough into it, it is best not to say what you think all of this is because until you do enough shadow work, you will be heavily laden with belief and this….dear friends….is the great distorter of reality.
This is the way I have gone in my life. I have sought to erase fear of death by learning what is on the “other side,” and I have sought to know this thing so many want to call “God” and I can tell you that its unimaginably big, so big that we have sought to create demi-gods instead of actually comprehend the full breadth of this being, if you want to call it that. It is much more accurate to call this being an idea more than a being. It is an idea that seems to have sprung self-made into being….and it has spawned endless creative enterprises. Just endless and incredibly various.
The world I have discovered in this place of non-belief has been quite incredible. It has shown me just how incredible we are, and that there is so much more than most people realize. It has not led me to some vacuous place, but to realizations that I may not have ever reached otherwise. And the difference? I am closer than I have ever been to the stuff of the universe. I am closer to my own inner depths. I am also able to look more clearly at my own junk and work with it. Do I have illusions? I do. This is a peeling away of the material, this is true. It does not leave me empty and naked. it just leaves me unafraid of being empty and naked. The nakedness is about my own shame and empty is itself a state that sometimes is useful for understanding so many things. To know the new, to really know the newness of some state or experience or idea, you have to really let yourself be empty in order to not presuppose anything, to prejudice the material with your own suppositions about what you think you are experiencing.
This began as a post on Facebook, and it grew to be much too big. I also have friends who are themselves quite dipped in the river of belief, too much so to make a post of this order possible in such a forum. So I put it here instead. Besides, Facebook is the realm of the sound-bite. Even here, on WordPress, posts are most often under a thousand characters. I find that by exceeding this amount, I get the seekers who are most serious about what it is they are doing. And it is this that I like….a perennial engagement amongst common minds and souls who are seeking something of themselves in what they find seemingly “out there” only to find whisp of the infinite staring back at them in the mirror and winking……a knowing that we could all take off our masks and we’d all be more interconnected than we had previously thought….born of something the same yet also individual and one. What a crazy way to start things off, right?
Once I caught on to what had happened to me had a name (kundalini/awakening), I came across some work by U.G. Krishnamurti. A friend lent a book to me of some central thinking from his life. I remember feeling how spare his view was about all of this. A pathless path. As humans, we like to fill our lives with the things that serve to decorate our lives. We are all about the mental jewelry, right? Inner and outer kinds. So it felt kind of bereft of a certain human feel to what he was saying. But the thing is, the wonderful thing about all of this, of awakening, is the less you believe in something, the more open you are to what is true….potentially at least. You now have a new channel into this world that is all around you. It is like a umbilicus that nourishes you, and it is the universe that is sustaining you. Instead of letting belief get there first to muddy the water with centuries of error and opinions and half-glances and incomplete comprehensions, you can get it directly. And perhaps, too, you might also have your own half glances about it, but it will be yours, and it will grow organically like a flower bud opening.
You look out from the eyes of your body here and feel the rush of the universe inside of you….and you know that as the soul of the world moves through you as light forms, you are feeling the goings-on that is all around you at incomprehensible distances. This is part of the overwhelm that many feel when they “rise”(the rise of kundalini…) or resurrect into this new life. It is an inward inner-net of life. It would not be stretching it to say that you have unlimited information at your fingertips. This is where the siddhis come from in the Hindu tradition as they describe one facet of awakening, which are abilities. Now on the one hand, they are just this, and should not be given too much weight, but only the same weight you might give them as you give eyesight, hearing, or anything else: they are there now to help bring more information into your life.
In the early days of awakening, I used my desire to know to penetrate deep into this “inner” world. By allowing consciousness to accelerate, you can do what I have done. We all can. When I read the words of Edgar Cayce, who did thousands of readings for clients using a method of going into trance (code for an acceleration of consciousness!), he was able to access what he described as an unlimited library of information. I can’t say that I have seen it as a library, but the image is useful to point you to the place where you and the universe meet. I discovered remote viewing before I even knew what it was. Seeing objects from a distance, describing the interiors of people’s homes who I knew, or feeling into the marrow of the multiverse, I was most interested in knowing directly, personally, what the stuff of the universe was. I didn’t want an article of faith. I didn’t trust that people always got it right. I wanted to enter into a personal and intimate relationship with the soul of the world.
The universe is thus inside of you.
You do not need belief in order to experience the divine reality. This reality, in truth, is merely an expansion of your narrow focus. It has simply unfolded in important ways. In many ways, the right brain, in its capacity to glimpse the big picture, is adept at processing the information that is streaming into you in a moment by moment basis. Why one person picks up on it and another does not is not because of ability, or due to divine favor. It is simply due to less things being in the way of this stream of energy, life, and information. You can let it flow like a river and just watch the surface of this water sparkle or you can dip your awareness deep into it and “grasp” the stream and examine it. In doing this, I have found worlds in a drop of this energy, this water of life. A world explodes into view and is so powerful you have to let your imagination take center stage in order to help to construct what it is that it is trying to tell you. Imagination is incredibly important, central, in fact, if you want to let this world teach you, speaking to you to reveal its secrets.
You don’t have to believe in anything to inherit the universal truths. You do not even need to believe in a deity. You don’t. You just need this connection, this umbilicus that nourishes you and fills you. The trick is in waking up and shifting focus. The energy will itself accelerate your consciousness. Some call this an “altered state” but accelerated is much more accurate, so I use that. It is literally like being swept off your feet by a wind and finding yourself flying where before you had to walk. And really, you can know just about anything that you are clear enough to have come through. As long as you remain totally open without your blinders in the way, you have so much to learn. You can learn about grace, about how this energy has animated worlds, vast universes, and how it has seeded all of matter with sentience. It can show you the relationship between how this energy filters down into matter and turns itself inside out, transforming itself into countless things. When you see things like this you see just how free-wheeling creation is. Suddenly the world stopped being dead matter and became this thing that was alive with a vitality that was incredible. At the atomic level, this creation is taking place constantly and at time scales that are astounding.
If you take a second and then divide that second into 300,000 even increments and then slow that one increment into an hour, what you would be able to glimpse would simply amaze you. You might see just what I saw, which is that matter is not solid at all, but is being supported by way of a stream of quasi-particles that move from energy to matter at ridiculously fast speeds, Speeds so fast, I don’t know that we have yet detected them. And someday we might have a way to glimpse this so science can know it, too, but for right now, consciousness as it exists in your body is perfectly suited for being able to move into these time scales and see the world that explodes into view. With no mass, your consciousness can become small, large, slow in time, or fast. It can also move through time as it does this, too, which is helpful when you are examining the “insides” of all that is. It might seem impossible, or like some drug trip, but I assure you that it is not. This is the potential we have in our hands. We can use it to heal the planet, to change how people see their world from one of dead matter to more than sheer miracle, but zillions of miracles happening on each needle-point stretch of space that is wrapping itself around your flesh.
I know it sounds a little out there. I know. And yet, my experience along these lines was described perfectly in a thousands of years old document found within the Vedas where our ancestors used their newfound awareness in awakening to glimpse vast cities inside of their bodies, where cells exploded into view and revealed to the onlooker that the cells were themselves made up of still smaller particles.These folks were all over it. Old school. And they might not have the technical vocabulary like atoms or compounds to explain it all, but they did very well with what they had. And you have it. We all do. This is the good news.
So yes, I read from time to time of others’ experience….not to know some truth, but to gauge where I am, and to try to pick up new awareness. It usually comes when I am not even looking. I’m just thinking about it and then someone comes around the corner, smiles, and hands me a book saying, “I was wanting to give you this because it has something pretty cool that I thought you might like.” And there it is, a cosmic friend who has arrived in perfect timing to answer a feeling or question in a way that feels like a gift from that universe which winks back at me, urging me on to open even more so it can reveal more of itself. And of course, I am giving something to the universe that is highly personified. But there is an intelligence there that is beyond anything I could even grasp in ordinary consciousness.
This that I am explaining is itself the means by which you can know instead of using belief to prop up for what is a shortcoming now in awareness for you. You do not need belief though, since all of the things that were expressed in the past and written down will come into view to be seen for what they are. And just like I am doing, using words to describe the ineffable, we achieve varying degrees of lucidity of this “formless” presence that gives form to all things. Emptying your mind of what you think you know, you can be open to what is. Like a data stream of bliss, it will move through you. Its grandness is enough to reveal just how wonderful the universe is. It can fill you with grace, awe and wonder, softening you and shifting your awareness.
When we talk about our advancements in technology, this consciousness is light years ahead of using THOUGHT and the force behind all things (its love people!) in its ability to animate, create, play, and discover. We could learn a lot from something like this. “It” is ever present, yet what “it” is will escape you because, I think, it is just so vast. And yet, if you allow yourself to be true inside, you can glimpse the whole in every single of its parts. Like a cell inside a vast body, this is akin to glimpsing the dna or some universal holographic form that has all of itself in everything else. Yep, it will boggle the mind and of course, discussing this in mixed company would get you some funny looks, but the world needs it.
No belief is required. I know that the hymns and the rituals all help make us feel warm and safe, but there is a greater safety inside every moment that will also strip you down of all your faults, errors, and blindness. Seems you have to just let it work as it burrows down into your core. And it can be hard letting go of something you reflexively have held onto but don’t even know what it is. This feeling inside, a broken feeling that you have taken as being who you are when in truth it was simply a story inside of you that you grafted onto your personality. Its brokenness just feels……familiar…..and when this force digs deep it is like a death….but when you open to this cosmic invader, the light illuminates the roots of this and will show you what is true and what is error. And really, this is what sin is about, which is doing that which damages us. Doing this work often means slipping past the subconscious self in order to dig out the roots that you thought were you. It was the devil that you knew. And its simple. Jesus said you needed to be like a child. True. And trusting of “it” in the same way that a child might trust a parent. You put yourself in the hands of this thing….and it can be hard for the most ardent believer…..especially for the believer….because they already have their own ideas preformed about what they think this will be like. And it is different from what most people have thought, so it unsettles them. It is so deep a place of communion, of union with the universal force of all life….and of course many of us shrink back because we feel like we have a reason to feel shame for our sin, for all the roots we let grow inside of us. But this light….it does not care….it does not CARE what you have done. It knows that in this moment, you could unwind centuries of wrong as it dips down into you and pulls out those roots wrapped aroud your energy body that form your negative karma. This is the error of all of us. The reward is simply so grand, why would you want to live another day in prison? Well, that is the illness of humans. We just don’t know how bad we have got it. If you open to this light, it will show you. But to do this means that you get really honest and really open to it. You do not need a priest or priestess. You do not need to believe in a matrix or a 5d world or commandments or any of that. The light will naturally guide you.
Will you fall? Oh, probably. At least a couple thousand times. Get used to it. Just accept this as the price of admission to the next level of existence. If you think that you awaken and suddenly are completely enlightened, you miss the human part, and this is the part missing when we think of those who are “enlightened” because I can tell you from experience that there is no great completely free person full of enlightenment sitting on a louts. It does not exist. And why should it? It just isn’t what is real. Our humanness is. We do not leave our humanness. We renovate and perfect it by clearing it of the junk we put there so we can honor the Presence who made all of this for us here. It is then that you can glimpse how amazing this world is by how your own vessel, your soul made flesh is. But fall, yes. Learn from it….not just how what you did made you fall….but about how compassion can make you better. Awakening give you this rocket boost way ahead of anything you might have known, and yet, you still are little you. It takes a while to catch up. It may be true that it takes lifetimes before you can refine what you capture in awakening. But we have all the time in the world. We do. Existing as soul independent of time, you can glimpse how time is not some kind of race. The grace and compassion built into the creative force that is prana is that we have all of it and more than we need.
This work is like putting a big puzzle together….the puzzle is you…your self cleared of all the pieces that did not fit. Errors, assumptions, beliefs that all sounded good at the time, but wound up not being quite right. And each of these are like blocks for the true light. So piece by piece, you feel this light shine into those cramped places inside of you…..and as each piece goes and is replaced by its more perfect piece, you can begin to feel all the other places where other puzzle pieces don’t fit. Like tight shoes. You wear them for a while and you one day realize, “You know, these shoes aren’t that comfortable!” This is the beginning of the change. Just awareness. So simple. Your own personal awareness has flowing through it the light of the All, and this force has the power to melt and erase and save you from all of these pieces that were installed incorrectly, or were less than joy. You don’t even need to know HOW it works. You just let it in. It is the single most intimate act you will ever do, letting that thing in. No mantras are needed. No prayers, no postures, no methods or techniques. It is what U.G. described as the pathless path. But that path, I will tell you, is simply amazing.
To awaken, you will do so when you are able to remove that which divides you. The more of this you remove, the more this flow will move into you. It is this simple. Some might call this removing blocks from the body, others will caution that you MUST breathe a certain way or else the kundalini will flow the wrong way….and I am here to tell you that this is all the result of the past error in perception because we really don’t have a lot of time left to get this right. The Collective is pushing forward the energy of awakening now in what can only be described as a watershed moment in history. People who have not spent decades in a practice are waking up spontaneously. This ought to tell you something. This is not for the elite, the chosen. It is WHAT everything is, and when you awaken it is just this very thing that you find stringing all of this together into something at once vast and also incredibly simple (like how a galaxy can be resolved into a speck in the night sky).
Sometimes a simple meditation is enough to bring you to enough unity within that “it” revs up and turns into full blown awakening. Maybe being around someone who is awake will remind you of what it is “this” is. I stirred awakening in myself, I know, by resolving a long-standing sense of guilt that I had with the universe about not doing enough in my inner life. When I made peace with that (quite unexpectedly), the waters flowed from then on. My days as the old self were numbered….even as my essence has remained. Two days later I turned and felt this thing…..like a far off song playing on the breeze….and I wondered….how could something be so beautiful? “It” told me that I was part of a family of consciousness, that I belonged, that the story of this family would be what “it” would be revealing to me for the rest of my days here on the planet. Its funny, because this “family” is actually everything that is. That is the family. Every leaf, every atom, every star and galaxy. Every baby, every smile, every action, event, thought, all of it. Nothing is excluded. And if that don’t shake your world, I don’t know what will.
You don’t NEED belief. When you move from imagining what the Kingdom might be like to feeling it surging in your veins and traversing at light speed via prana in your energy system like so many invisible fiber optics, there will no longer BE a need for belief. You now have EXPERIENCE. As this experience accumulates, belief naturally can go by the wayside. And this? This is what Yogi Bajan (I am told—I don’t read his writings) is what makes you the most dangerous person in the world. I am sure he used this for dramatic effect, but its good because in a way it is true. It makes you this person who cannot be lied to. If you see the world of the 10,000 things as the Taoists describe it, but also feel the soul of the world, then you see the outer and feel the inner. You don’t need belief to prop any of that up. You walk by someone and you feel their world of life moving all through them. Loss, gain, love, hate, joy, frustration, and that incessant chattering thought. We have all been this. We are this. But we are potentially more. So beyond belief, yes.
Lets get honest. Even in the most illuminated and seemingly spiritually advanced traditions, there is still a great deal of male chauvinism. I hear people say how lovely it is that Shakti is conceived as the force of kundalini itself and must slowly rise up the body, refining herself as she goes in order to ready herself for her union with her consort, Shiva, resting in resplendent perfection in the crown chakra. Or how, in images of Yab-Yum the male figure is the deity and the feminine aspect is his consort. If you go to Wikipedia you will see this expressed. In one fail swoop, the cosmos is rendered an all-male deity club where women must refine themselves to be worthy and where the women are merely consorts. It is a fact that both forces of masculine and feminine rose within me AS THE FORCE that IS kundalini when awakening took place beginning in 2006. The intense energy living in me was the locus of the union of these two forces now vibrantly alive in my body. I was one with the father and mother. They were one within me. It was I who had to refine myself, to catch up. Both sides of the energy cycle had much to teach me, both the north and south poles of the vibrant nimbus of energy now licking like sensual flames all over me. But we speak of the feminine having to refine herself and no one so much as bats an eyelash. Does anyone bother to stop and look at these stories and realize that all the god stories and goddess stories are merely stories about us written large against the spiritual skies of our inner world? Who realizes that when we began looking to see a deity in the clouds or sky that we had defacto set that deity apart from ourselves, placing a VERY frustrated and angry and probably sexually frustrated bearded male god in a untennable situation. Well of course he would smite and destroy. Who wouldn’t? And where on earth is the softening aspects of the feminine in all of this? Without her we have had ten thousand years of stiffened hardened madness. And look at how this has played out in humanity. So the feminine inside each of us, EACH of us, is vital but so is our awareness of them…..
As long as we continue to do this, we continue to turn a blind eye to our own divinity because what works here on the small level also works on the larger spiritual levels as well. The curious thing about belief (and its brother named bias) is that you wont experience a thing that you have barriers erected for. This is how for centuries people have seen women as lesser to men, essentially like cattle to be traded and sold in marriage. Little more than slaves.
This is changing in a big way. While change has been gradual and perhaps too slow for some, it has nonetheless created a change that does not show signs of changing back or reverting anytime soon. Yes, we still have the throwbacks, but on balance, things are better than they have ever been. And they can continue to keep getting better.
Here is my contribution….
Below is an image from the Hindu tradition of Shiva playing his flute to his consort, Parvati, a manifestation of Shakti. Shiva has the nimbus around his head in green, but Shakti does not. Perhaps she is having to refine herself, her energy, before she has the same radiance as her consort Shiva. As someone who reads auras, I can tell you that the energy surrounding women is every bit as brilliant as that around men. In some cases, it is stronger in women than in men. This makes sense since women will bear life and will have to carry this new life with its own energy sheath in a protective manner. Having a strong bio-energetic field could have its benefits. I show you the image just as I came across it and then the image that I changed to include a nimbus for Shakti. Hers is violet, which suggest intuition. It is a nice warm color yet very spiritual, a nice counterpoint to Shiva’s halo. I hope that you use this image to help raise awareness in a simple way that BOTH of the sexes are equivalent. Please feel free to do so with attribution. A nice remix of sorts. It is a small thing, but is another drop of change that we all need if you ask me.
The way to living an authentic life begins very simply. It has to. there is a lot of BS you have to sort through. But start, you must.
Authenticity is not about fear. fear, even the smallest niggling fear of how the neighbors might interpret your intense love of plaid as being WEIRD, so you hesitate buying plaid wall paper because you think other people think you are crazy to want or like that. This is not authentic. A big part of being authentic is not being fearful or letting your reflecting on what other people think get in the way of what you do, how you feel, who you are, and what you ultimately become.
But it’s also not about rebelling and taking a giant machete to your surroundings. You don’t hack off arms and the limbs of those hanging out in your plaid-less jungle. No. You change. If those who were there before the change do not like it, they will move on. It could be a very peaceful transition. Most often, it isn’t. People want to hurt you or say things to hurt you because they are simply so dysfunctionaly cast into their memes that they can’t honor that it’s not plaid-ville (or whatever it is that you need to do to change your life for the better, for the more authentic).
Second, don’t expect the authentic life to be some granite edifice to your unwavering greatness. Your authentic life will change. Perhaps
Image © Stafford Artglass, Parker Stafford
day-to-day. Week to week. Maybe it changes once and NEVER changes (okay, you are an unusual dinosaur bird and welcome to the 21st century, we want to study you….from a distance!) Give yourself the flexibility to do whatever changes you need to do. Allow yourself to be wrong. Allow yourself to be right. Don’t pretend to know everything that is in this enchilada because that, too, will change. All of it. Tomorrow we might be eating kabob or something. Lamb. Quail. Cactus fruit. Tangerine and coconut.
Authenticity lies in you. I can tell you all sorts of things but unless you find it, you haven’t found it. You are always seeking it if you are indeed seeking it. Otherwise, maybe not so much. What I am saying is that this is a constant state of becoming, so be ready for that. Be ready for what that means. It means not taking yourself so seriously. Besides, it makes you look stiff and that kind of brittleness does not look good on you (holds up a different colored suit and dress to compare and ushers you into the dressing room quietly to try on the new pair of clothes).
Be ready for people not liking you and not seeing what you are doing as anything worthy. However, those that matter will see that what you are and who you are as being authentic is a good thing not because you are somehow different but simply because you are being you. For you. And the people who are attracted to that kind of person for that kind of reason are a rare breed of animal, different from the vast masses of followers and pretenders. Lost children. Angry. Frustrated. The people who like you for you….who do not feel any need to change you but to see you be all the more you are more of the same. Authentic. Not everyone is ready for the awesomeness of this. Don’t let it trouble you. I have people who wont speak to me because of this. Too bad, but really, if I spent my time pacing the halls and weeping, where would that get me? Nowhere.
Life is not a popularity contest. Any great artist who was ahead of his or her time will tell you this, each of them from the grave. Its not about being recognized for your greatness, its just being YOU as the greatness that you are. So maybe that means plaid wallpaper and maybe it doesn’t. I am hoping maybe it doesn’t, but then, that shouldn’t matter to you, right? Your greatness will not be because of any other reason than you are THAT. Don’t go looking for recognition because you have already recognized it in the only way that really matters. the world, what does it know? When does the world know cool when it sees it, or awesome, or marvelous, or beautiful or handsome? As soon as the world has caught on, its like disco was in the 70’s. It was so yesterday. If we worry about a trend or catching on, we wont every really authentically live in the moment. Most recognition, then, comes at the very tail end of an era just as those who were there in plaid (or whatever else they were being authentic about) was getting ready to change. That’s why you really can’t go chasing things. No chase. BE. Butterfly come to you, not you chase butterfly. Wax on, wax off.
If you follow this and not worry about outcomes, you are going to find yourself and really that is all that matters. When you can find yourself, you will find others who have also found themselves. You do not find the found amongst the lost. Are you lost? You aren’t going to find those who have found themselves in the sea of lost swimmers. Their time will come when it occurs to them to give up whatever it is they are doing that is keeping them from authentically swimming or living in this vast sea of everything. I know; it is simple: just be yourself. Be ready to watch as vast skeins of yarn comes unraveling off of you. It has to. It no longer fits….and now must be rewound or chucked completely. So much stuff that you thought was you….sitting like the old objects in your attic that you could never bring yourself to get rid of. And yet, in chucking them, they are never missed. Really, why were you carrying all that baggage anyway?
Oh, and I almost forgot; this authenticity thing, it is also a path toward self-love. Not selfish love, not narcissism, but rather honoring the self you are in the very best way it deserves. Okay, you can now take off the plaid and try on this new suit to see if it suits you….
Who knows the basic principles involved in bringing your life into full focus for effective manifesting of what will bring you fulfillment? Who knows when these principles are put into place and when do they work? Who knows the “cycle” of manifestation that actually tracks and moves an event from “inception” to full manifestation? And who knows about the one key to bringing all of this to bear into your life in a way that is meaningful and effective?
I will give you a hint, but it wont be the kind of hint you would have ever expected. It lies within both your psychology AND physiology. Within the very atoms in your body, you have the ability to do things that some consider impossible. The principles are simple, straightforward, and require a fundamental shift in your thinking, feeling, and being. Can you achieve this? It is up to you and you alone. All of it is carried within your own cosmic vehicle. The only thing that keeps you from tapping it in the way that you would like lies in your psyche.
This is one big reason for doing the “work” required to get yourself to a place where you can experience the fundamental shifts that can occur day to day and moment to moment. The other clue or hint in all of this is that all of what lies ahead as challenges are all entirely self made. Want to be a self made woman or man? Well, here is your chance.
I am of course baiting you. Normally, I do not use such catchy words and phrases, but in this case, each catch word or phrase is entirely on the mark, honest, and supported by direct experience in an environment that has shown over and over how you can unlock your potential and find greater fulfillment. But to achieve this requires you to be different. To feel different, to think different and to allow yourself the means to get out of your own way.
There are many ways to this goal. There is not any one magical trick or technique because the truth is, like all techniques, they only work if you put belief behind them. Do you remember the people who were healed by Jesus who exclaimed in amazement over the change that took place within themselves in a moment? And do you remember what this man was said to have said? he explained that it was their own faith, their belief, that healed them. If you believe enough in it and if this method or belief system does not put up more roadblocks than it takes down, then you have a very good chance of it working. This is just how broad a thing this force is. It literally underpins the movement of atoms and moves up through a little understood chain of effects or forces until it meets you squarely in the moment and place that YOU are in right now. As a result, this force may not always bring you lottery numbers, but will bring you the things that you most need for the NEXT STEP. Without achieving those next steps, you wont ever get to the lottery or to the life your rational mind tells you is the one that you want. And curiously, too, the moment you reach this place, it may also have the effect of erasing any concern for the old hopes that you had and MIGHT send you in a different yet much more fulfilling direction. This is not to say that you WONT achieve your greatest dreams, only that in the process of making the changes to align you to your highest that some priorities may in fact change. So be ready for that. And be ready to be led. By a higher power. Your own inner power. And this power links itself up in web-like fashion to the rest of the cosmos. Truly. And THAT dear readers, is a fine place to be!
THIS is what I am working on in my book, what one student said was the most critical to him when it comes to books about awakening: keep the mumbo jumbo out and explain how all of this adheres to physical principles at work within the universe. The miraculous itself will in some way adhere to physical laws in ways we may not entirely expect, see, or know. This is my task for my book Waking The Infinite. It is my sincere hope to spell this out in ways that stray far from dogma, bias, and our need to sometimes mythologize a phenomenon that we truly don’t always understand completely. And yet, from time to time, we do have those individual who can bring the information forward in an ever-increasingly clear way so that it can be understood not through dogma or belief only, but through other channels of being. These other channels will often be the lost or forgotten parts of you that is the missing link in bringing you a life that is full of fulfillment…..whatever that looks like to you.
Waking The Infinite 