The Gaian Mysteries Of Gnosis – The Bruce Codex

Today we have a little-known document that describes what many scholars in the field of religious studies regard as an initiatory rite attributed to Jesus. It describes something that is being spoken of widely today amongst many who have themselves experienced awakening, which is the Ascension of Gaia. In this remarkable excerpt of the “Hymn of Jesus” it shows that in early Christianity they were describing a nearly identical phenomenon in operation within human consciousness in our present day amongst many (although not all) who have experienced awakening. From Chapter three of the Hymn of Jesus:

“The living Jesus answered and said : “Blessed is the man who has known these things. He has brought heaven down, he has lifted the earth and has sent it to heaven…”

What I find so interesting is that virtually no one that I have spoken to about the Gaia Ascension mythos today (most commonly described as “ascension”) knows anything about this obscure, but incredibly important document. Nor are they aware that we have been here before, talking about the same phenomenological concept separated by close to two thousand years.

The document in question is the Bruce codex which contains Coptic, Arabic and Ethiopic manuscripts and was found in upper Egypt by a Scottish traveler, James Bruce in about 1769. The first translations of the text began in the mid-1800’s. The passages I include are based on the translation of Carl Schmidt, and republished with additional contributions by Violet MacDermot.

This edition of The Bruce Codex is long out of print, but may be found in research libraries. It is also included, with material related to the find and its translation and other particulars HERE.

What interests me so much about the Hymn of Jesus is how it is clearly a series of initiatory rites with words spoken much like how a mantra is used, which is used to alter consciousness in order that one may move into that state where one awakens or is open to the same level that the Master has achieved. Indeed, the codex is consistent in how it is structured in this way.

Without getting into deep theological debate and the history associated with early Christian belief, most scholars see works of this type as not having been written by the actual witnesses themselves and that they came later as a result of stories that were told about Jesus and his life. This is as true for the “Gnostics” to whom this codex is attributed as it is for the more literalist Orthodox wing that ultimately won the “war” of ideas and belief to become the one that was most widely accepted. It is worth pointing out that all of the synoptic gospels were written not by witnesses but were in their earliest form, anonymous. The church later attributed them to certain writers, and they all were written some time after Jesus was no longer on the scene. Also, there are synoptic gospels that do not agree with one another also on some very important points. Discrepancies, yes, and most are small, but others are bigger and they affect how scholars look at these books in terms of the belief that these were eyewitness accounts (which they were not despite how the Church has represented this point for centuries now). We know, for instance, how certain conversations could not have taken place in some gospels because of how Aramaic was structured and used, that some word usage was specific to Greek as a language, which is what was used to write the first gospels (instead of Aramaic, which was the native tongue of the people involved in the Jesus stories). We have no copies of these Gospels in Aramaic.

We know stories were added to the synoptics gospels (most likely by scribes) and we also know people were forging documents, like a number of letters by Paul for instance, all of which remain in the New Testament to this day. Everyone was taking the Jesus story and running with it and inserting their own ideas in order to push this movement in the direction THEY wanted, and this is true for ALL branches of Christianity. In fact, as writings get farther away from Jesus’s life tend to have the biggest and hardest to believe miracles in them (and are not included in the New Testament). They just kept getting bigger and bigger as we go along. All of this to say that what was once called “The Way” was subject to interpretation with all comers. What is interesting is the depth and the truth realized in writings like what is found in the Bruce Codex, as they are themselves depictions of real human experiences that do describe aspects of the enlightened state. Different perhaps from the New Testament that you grew up with, but at one time were treasured by early Christians (and bear close similarities to other traditions that had some of the most sophisticated understandings of enlightenment in the world despite the fact that these early Christians had no known contact with those other cultures from the East).

With that, and against that backdrop, the first chapters of the Hymn of Jeou (Jesus).

---

The First Book of JEOU

I have loved you. I have wanted life to be given you; the Living Jesus, who knows the truth.

Chapter 1

This is the book of the gnoses of the invisible God, by means of the hidden mysteries which show the way to the chosen race, leading in refreshment to the life of the Father – in the coming of the Saviour , of the deliverer of souls who receive themselves the Word of life which is higher than all life – in the knowledge of the living Jesus, who has come forth through the Father from the aeon of light at the completion of the Pleroma – in the teaching, apart from which there is no other, which the living Jesus has thaught to his apostles, saying:  “This is the teaching in which dwells the whole knowledge.” The living Jesus answered and said to his disciples: “Blessed is he who has crucified the world, and who has not the world to crucify him.” The apostles answered with one voice, saying :  “O Lord, teach us the way to crucify the world, that it may not crucify us, so that we are destroyed and loose our lives” The living Jesus answerd : “He who has crucified it is he who has found my word and has fulfilled it according to the will of him who has sent me.”

Chapter 2

The apostles answered, saying : ” Speak to us, O Lord, that we may hear thee. We have followed thee with our whole hearts. We have left behind father and mother, we have left behind vineyards and fields, we have left behind goods and the greatness of kings, and we have followed thee, so that thou shouldst teach us to know the life of thy father who has sent thee” The living Jesus answered and said : “The life of my Father is this : that you receive your soul from the race of understanding mind, and that it ceases to be earthly and becomes understanding through that which I say to you in the course of my discourse, so that you fulfil it and are saved from the archon of this aeon and his persecutions, to which there is no end. But you, my disciples, hasten to receive my word with certaintiy so that you know it, in order that the archon of this aeon may not fight with you – this one who did not find any commandment of his in me – so that you also, my apostles, fulfil my word in relation to me, and I myself make you free, and you become whole through a freedom in which there is no blemish. As the Spirit of the comforter (Parakleiton) is whole, so will you also be whole, through the freedom of the spirit of the Holy Comforter.”

Chapter 3

All the apostles, Matthew and John, Philip and Bartholomew and James, answered with one voice, saying:

“O Lord Jesus, thou who livest, whose goodness extends over those who have found thy wisdom and thy form in which thou gavest light ; O light-giving Light that enlightened our hearts until we received the light of life; O true Word, that through gnosis teaches us the hidden knowledge of the Lord Jesus, the living one.”

The living Jesus answered and said : “Blessed is the man who has known these things. He has brought heaven down, he has lifted the earth and has sent it to heaven, and he has become the Midst for it is nothing.” The apostles answered, saying :   “Jesus , thou living one, Lord , interprete for us how we may bring heaven down, for we have followed thee in order that thou shouldst teach us the true light.” The living Jesus answered and said : “The Word which existed in heaven before the earth came into existence – this which is called the world – but you, when you know my Word, you will bring heaven down, and it will dwell in you. Heaven is the invisible Word of the Father; but when you know these things you will bring heaven down. As to sending the earth up to heaven, I will show you what it is , that you may know it : to send the earth to heaven is that he who hears the word of gnosis has ceasedto have the understanding mind of man of earth, but has become a man of heaven. His understanding mind has ceased to be earthly, but it has become heavenly. Because of this you will be saved from the archon of this aeon, and he will become the Midst, because it is nothing.”   The living Jesus said again :  “When you become heavenly you will become the Midst because it is nothing, for the .. . .. rulers and the wicked powers (exousiai) will you and they will envy you because you have known me, because I am not from the world, and I do not resemble the rulers and the powers (exousiai) and all the wicked ones. They do not come from me. And furthermore he who (is born) in the flesh of unrighteousness has no part in the Kingdom of my Father, and also he who me according to the flesh has no hope Kingdom of God the Father.”

Chapter 4

The Apostles answered with one voice, they said : “Jesus ,  O Lord, are we born of the flesh, and known thee according to the flesh? Tell us, O Lord, for we are troubled.” The living Jesus answered and said to his apostles : ” I do not speak of the flesh in which you dwell, but the flesh of and non-understanding which exists in ignorance, which leads astray many from the of my Father.” The apostles answered the words of the living Jesus, they said: “Tell us how non-understanding happens, that we may beware of it, lest we should go . . . . . . .” The living Jesus answered and said : ” one who bears my virginity and my . . . . . and my garment, without understanding and knowing me, and blasphemes my name, I have . . . . to destruction. And furthermore he has become an earthly son because he has not known my word with certainty – these which the Father spoke, so that I myself should teach those who will know me at the completion of the pleroma of him who sent me.” The Apostles answered and said : “O Lord Jesus, thou living one, teach us the completion, and it suffices us.” And he said : “The word which I give to you yourselves….”

---

Chapter three is, I think, incredibly relevant to the Ascension mystery as it is being spoken and written about today amongst those who write about the “ascension” phenomenon. Is it not true that this is being seen by many people today as a global phenomenon in which the earth, we sense, is being brought to a finer vibration, with the implication being that Gaia itself is being transformed as well as life upon it? Or is it just us? And how far removed is this idea with the ideas contained in chapter three which describe the process of bringing earth into heaven and heaven into the earth? What kind of change would this represent? Is this simply too big of a leap for us to even imagine what a world like that might look like so we speak about it in mythic terms, long on theory but perhaps short on facts? Perhaps new turnings are always like this; it cannot be known until it has been created because so many factors depend on what are selected which will determine what that recipe ultimately brings us. While some argue against freewill, perhaps this is our one possible proof of that freewill, which is that the outcome might not always be foreseeable until we have acted, something that is an act that is collective, a collective leap into the unknown.

Scholars will likely point out that this writing was created some time after the death of Jesus since the argument can (perhaps rightly) be made that it was possible that Jesus himself did not know while he lived that he would in fact be crucified. While modern Christians would argue that through the prophetic tradition he would have known all along that he would come to be a sacrifice on the cross, careful examination of the Old Testament documents suggests that the passage in Psalms which most point to as evidence of a crucifixion show evidence of having been altered (Psalm 22:16). The issue at hand with this passage is that the Jewish version of the book says “lion” where the Christian version says “pierced” which results in a completely different meaning. In the Jewish version David is surrounded by “dogs” and “lions” who are at his hands and feet, but the Christian version reads that dogs compass him, they pierce his hands and feet. Lion was changed to pierce and, as the argument goes, it completely changes the meaning of the passage from David being savaged by his enemies to his waxing prophetic. The result being, that someone forged this passage in early Christianity in order to support the appearance of prophecy from the old tradition to the new. There is a lot of disagreement on this one point, however, as one document in the Qumran discovery in the 1940’s (and which scholars think were just prior to Christ’s ministry) has “pierced” in one version of Psalms. But, as Rabbi Singer has pointed out, this passage is not mentioned in any of the synoptic gospels nor is it mentioned by Paul not even once, who was himself often quoting Jewish scripture, and if such a prophecy such as this existed, he would undoubtedly have been mentioning it as proof of Jesus being tied to Messianic tradition. This only comes along later, Singer argues, probably in the second or third centuries. At any rate, as a result, this may mean that this hymn as written probably was a later creation. It may or may not have been directly tied to Jesus. It is possible that there was an original document that then got “embroidered” with the crucifixion story added in. What it does show is that these ideas of how we can bring heaven and earth closer through an inner act of inner transformation or awakening were present at an early phase in the development of Christianity. While these particulars are not themselves clear, what is clear for me is that this concept of bringing heaven and earth together was in development and it shows a keen awareness of how an aspect of evolution may very well operate when dealing with human consciousness. I take this side track into the architecture of the Christ experience to point out that for the Gnostics, while Jesus was incredibly important as the way-shower, they took the ball and ran with it. For them, the apostolic age did not end as the Orthodoxy had decreed, after the first initial group had died out. A gift had been given in the form of awareness, a form of knowledge called gnosis such that what they were calling “Christ” could be conveyed to others who then would become Christs (this was the case made in the Valentinian School and the Gospel of Philip spells this out unambiguously). As a result, the gnostic production continued while the Orthodox became static in the sense that no new documents were produced (after Act, some letters, and John’s Revelation).

In my personal experience I was aware of acting as a channel for a fire from heaven which was conducted by the masculine while the feminine acted as the receptive agent which was involved in the other side of the creation of phenomenon which is the nurturing side, the “bringing forth” of the resulting mixture which comes about as a result of “the two” that actually create the divine third, or Christ. One could not operate without the other, and while the masculine could be seen as initiatory, the feminine also was initiatory as well in that without her, the process of synthesis to a higher awareness was not possible. The two existed as a single unit, a co-creative matrix where one is not above the other, but each were co-equal and necessary.

I will point out that the Gnostics spoke of the trinity as a family unit consisting of a masculine and feminine quality that met and came into union “in the bridal chamber” and it was out of their ecstatic union that a third quality, a child, was produced. This was the Christ. The upshot in all of this was that this was an inside job, not something that one seeks outwardly. Even Paul, who describes his encounter with the light on his journey to Damascus says “when it was the good pleasure of God … to reveal his son in me” he does not say “to” but “in me.” It was a quality that was already there. He also says that he was anointed (initiated) by the “Christ that liveth in me,” he does not mention Jesus (he didn’t meet Jesus in the flesh). This was not something that he was given, it was something that he was made aware of. This, by the way, is how most of the Eastern doctrines treat enlightenment, which is a state or potential that is in all people. The Buddha, which we often tend to think of as a person, is in fact a term referring to a quality that is in all people. “Buddha” is a field of awareness and everyone has a Buddha within, slumbering until awakened. In like manner, Paul associates this quality with Christ as something that is revealed as existing in him. “For neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians).

Gnosis.org has an excellent collection of writings on the topic of Gnosticism. It represents the “lost” story of Christianity. While the orthodoxy will say otherwise, the information contained in these old texts supplies insight into the nature of enlightenment and forms the body of knowledge that always seemed to me growing up to have been missing from the church, which is how to achieve union with the divine. Hard to read, the writings were shrouded in language intended to obscure their meaning, these were texts intended for a select audience, for people who were being “perfected” or “prepared” or “the elect.” This is what both Jesus and Paul referred to as “maturity.”

When Jesus speaks to his disciples about not speaking to Gentiles and others outside their group, we may well have been seeing the secret doctrine at work. What I wonder is why is it so hard to consider that this indeed may have been the case? With so many awakenings today which often include the elements contained in those secret teachings, it’s hard to see that this wasn’t happening and that the new generation of Christs today have managed to achieve something that in the past took years to achieve, if ever.

Advertisement

The Way Of Things

---

This is from my drafts backlog. This was written in December of 2018. It needs work but I’m so busy these days…

---

I have been in this funny place…I just don’t know how to explain it very well without a little backstory.

I grew up very curious spiritually. I felt like there was so much more to know, and that we were so much more inside. I was maybe three years old and I was having what I later learned were out of body experiences. These experiences were very specific though, and were all the same; I would find myself at the interface between spirit and matter as I watched these filamented orbs of energy entering physical reality to take on the bodies of what I knew were babies that were soon to be born. I was watching souls entering the world of matter. Over the next twenty-five years, I would have a dozen memories from past lives, a kind of inner cosmic disclosure that I kept entirely to myself and with just a handful of friends. The point being that I came into this life with my work from many lifetimes bearing on me.

I say this not as a boast. It took me all this time to see what has been happening around me and to me to finally begin making sense of this. I never spoke about this in any open way. I say this in order to set the stage because often, as we find, old stories and experiences wind up bearing on events later.

I also experienced experienced seeing my parents before I was born, the moment when it was made clear to me that it would be they who would be my parents. This memory, though it took place before I was born, somehow was evident to me as an early life memory that stuck with me. It exists just as crisp today as it was 54 years ago.

I grew up with having prophetic dreams about local and international events, dreams so specific in detail that it made it impossible to have simply been coincidental. Later, when I grew into adulthood, I began a series of dreams in which I began helping those who had died to pass over safely to the next world, experiences oddly congruent with my early “travels” to the edge of our world.

What I know is that on the one hand, I have had lifetimes…scores of them where trying to find “that” truth had been a cherished activity and that it was honed in early Christianity, in Tibet, in North American as a native American (twice), in the jungle of Palenque as a leader of the Maya, and as a freed slave in the U.S. All were connected or threaded-through with several central spiritual themes that appear to be flowering right now in our world.

All that work and so was it any wonder my childhood was filled with what it was? But even so, I have learned that you can, by diving deep into your feeling self (not emotion!) to discover what the rational mind can never offer up. This is your amazing capacity to feel incredible depth in each moment, each thing…no, don’t confuse this with your emotions because your emotions most often is a mine field, a trap) you can realize your greater potential. Hint: you can lean forward to feel the brilliance and peace written inside of the core of Prana or Qi itself instead of falling backwards into your past where you fall into pain and the regrets unhealed there. You can’t heal an emotion with logic, you have to let go and allow the perfect light to take it for you. This has been the away of things, the great lesson in my life.

I grew up with this voice telling me to stay away from religion. It actually said that I was not to buy into any one belief system. This wasn’t something that was based in dislike of religion. If there was anyone who needed a spiritual community, it was me. It was a very odd request, but because it came from inside, from my heart center, I just knew that I had to trust it. It’s kind of weird thinking about it now, though. When I screwed up the nerve to ask this voice why I needed to do this, the voice answered simply, “You will understand when the time comes.”

I obeyed even though I very much wanted to belong to a spiritual community growing up. I even went to church with my family, but I did as told…even though I didn’t really understand why. I did know that I was promised some kind of reveal somewhere down the line, but I didn’t know when that would be or what form it would take. And yes, after three decades, I had reached a point where I began to think that all of this was one big hoax, or a delusion on my part. It just seemed like nothing was taking shape. This took decades.

It wasn’t until I reached age nine that my unusual experiences began to take shape in the form of seeking. I sought, yes, some, but I never joined. I was told not to. This was not a voice in my head, but an inner directive. I would heed that directive. Imagine, though, you go to church, attending classes designed for those who wanted to become a member, and you get through the two-month long process of becoming a member of the church and you are standing before the congregation and you look the pastor in the eye and say “no” to whether you were going to go on to full membership. A part of me was mortified, another part did as I was told. I never understood why.

Over the following years I would hear that familiar thought in my mind….”Don’t join, don’t buy into that religion…”

I limited myself to very light reading. I stayed away from religions and philosophies. I did, however, keep a library of “lost books of the bible” books on near death experiences, a channeler whose work didn’t seem religious but was deeply thought provoking. I began to meditate, I considered that if we were beings who survived death that it stood to reason that we had a soul that existed beyond or idependantly from the body. It seemed simple enough of an idea and yet these kinds of things were considered as fringe or New Age. I wondered how something so fundamental to our being could be relegated to an “ism” so easily. I had experienced the out of body state. There wasn’t anything “new” about it.

I don’t think it was forbidden to study a religion, the point was not to buy into it. When I went to college I had to take two semesters of religious study at this small Christian college that I attended. I went to Sunday school, I sang hymns and I listened to many sermons. Don’t become blinded by belief it seemed to suggest. It was really a bit much…

Thirty years of this. I went to Quaker meetings in college because, I reasoned, there were no trappings, just silence and no preaching. The truth was I wanted to be close to God, to our fundamental nature, which I felt, provided a means to know God. I was devout but I was without a church. I felt like it was okay to attend those meetings because no one was telling me what to think.

By my twenties, I assumed that all of this would lead to something that was responsible for the feeling I had as a child about the church, which was that something had been hidden. I suspected this early childhood experience of mine had to do with hidden books. Something, I knew, had been hidden. I had no idea what that even meant, though. It was like reading from a fragmentary text or recalling a memory in the midst of amnesia. It did come from a place of utmost certainty though.

I tried to see if those lost books of the Bible rang any bells. They did not. It’s important to emphasize that I didn’t feel like I had a choice about how I felt. It was the oddest thing. I knew this like how we know gravity. And yet, I wasn’t given to being conspiratorial about subjects like this. It was only with the church. Not as if I was against it just not of it for some great unknown reason.

The truth of what had been hidden was hidden even unto me. Yeah, pretty crazy. I mean, you would have to be very patient to bear this one out to see what lay on the other side of this deep-in-my-bones feeling. I have spent the better part of my life with this odd notion in me, solid and certain as stone. And I did think it seemed crazy at times but inside the feeling was a certainty that I just couldn’t ever sell out or bargain away.

My awakening, when it came, was itself like a giant clearinghouse for so many questions in my mind. Awakening made things clear to me in many ways (it raised many questions that would layer be answered, some of them), and it all began with what the church had hidden. When this became clear to me, all of the doctrine of the church began to make sense in a way that was fuller, more expansive, and now had the capacity to reach into the cosmic or transcendent. In a word, the doctrine began to mirror the capacities I was seeing in myself over my lifetime and that what was in us was an important spiritual physiology in order to know divine union, what early Christians called “The Consumation.” But like I said, something was lost and it was like losing the lock while still holding the key. Further, we each have this within us, this innate capacity for divine union, of being one with the Beloved.

We grew up as most Christians were being told that you didn’t have a lock, you just needed the key. But that was just a story based in collective ignorance. So the saving words of Christ were lost almost as soon as they were given. I am convinced now that entire generations of Christians completely misunderstood key aspects of the innermost teachings so that the understanding was edited out and the books that began to describe the real depths to early Christianity were ordered destroyed. This took place as a steady drip by at least the first century A.D. as early works and letters show a move against the “heresies ” began. By the fourth century the church was allied with Rome and heresy hunting was moving powerfully with decrees handed down by the emperor.

I know how that will sound to ardent Christians. I have had people tell me that if there was something new to know about Jesus or Christianity, we would have found it out by now. The the crazy thing is that in close to two thousand years, this really has remained a mystery, a secret, and this secret has kept countless followers from the means by which one opens the lock and opens the gate to the garden where the white light dwells…the light which transforms each of us when we touch it here on earth. I was able to open that gate in order to glimpse this vrry real and tangible light that most must wait until physical death to experience. I know its effects, I know how just a glimpse can transform any of us here…forever.

The Secret I uncovered had to do with the Trinity and how it served both as an anatomy of God but also of our own inner spiritual anatomy too (as children of God). This secret has been kept out of the church so that no member or believer may know its truth and its effects on us.

I finally realized that in order to understand this, I couldn’t be in the church, no matter how much I wanted to be. I wanted to be! It has resulted many years later in my finding my “rest” in the understanding that this was all for something. I see and understand some of it. Now I understand the fervor, the passion and intensity of my journey. So much is clearer now even as I know that personally, I have more work to do to become more like Christ, to embody that fiery passion that raised souls from death into a new, second birth.

This discovery has changed the makeup if the Trinity, the force which “raised people up” from a dead state to a living one. It also puts a spotlight on the ressurection and many central tennets if the Nicean Creed. Goodness sakes, this discovery changed a lot and when I begin writing about it, it will upend many cherished notions all made as a result of incomplete understanding. To do that will take a book because there sre countless references that will need to be cited and I have to learn my New Testament now like someone who has been studying this his whole life. I dont expect to convert anyone but I do hope for deeper reflection to take place. I have been avoiding writing this book because while I discovered something critically important, it is so different from what one billion church members worldwide that I doubt it will be taken seriously by anyone in that membership. It is, though, critically important to understand just as important as it is to understand how such an error happened in the first place. Lastly, it will just happen to link Christ’s teachings with those from other times, schools of thought, and philosophies.

Recently, after having spent years alone, I have felt this stir of wanting to return to the Church. About three years ago that inner voice, that guiding presence, said to me that I could now read about other religions and philosophies if I wanted. I asked why now because whenever that voice comes, I feel like I can get a few good words out of it before it goes quiet again. I thought I’d try. It explained that I needed to be able to show how my experience mirrored the awakening described in the early church and I would have missed it if I had become a follower. “By being on the outside you were able to finally understand what the missing piece was because your experience included the missing piece which you will bring back to those who are brave enough to encounter the Light and be changed in a twinkling.”

This is why I was able to take Christ as the saving presence without being in the church. The problem is taking Christ as your savior meant taking on the Christ—which means becoming one. Philip’s gospel spelled it out about how this all worked. That the church was calling his teaching heresy was itself the heresy. I did this because of what has been lost. Yes, Paul was right when he said that we take on the Christ, but this was literal. We DO take on the Christ because what gives rise to the Christ has always been inside of us. Even Jesus hinted at this in pretty clear ways saying that the Kingdom was within. It isn’t attained from without but is instead the single most intimate experience one can have where once you encounter it, you do not feel it as anything that ever existed outside of us. It’s just that intimate an experience. There is no man who comes into you, this is the error that was sewn all those centuries ago.

It is the height of ignorance and arrogance to believe that there isn’t anything new we can learn. But there is, and for those who have laughed at me for saying I have found something new I will say this; the assumption of this truth has been extremely rare…so rare in fact that there have only been a precious few who were able to speak to its innermost truths. It wasn’t until about the 16th Century that anyone speaking out about Church doctrine was labelled a heretic. It wasn’t that long ago that heretics were burned, tortured, and mutilated (remanded to a civil court for sentencing and punishment). Only now have we been free enough to speak freely without fearing for our lives, or excommunication. I don’t have to fear any of this because God kept me free from all of it. I never joined, I had no dog in the fight.

This gets to how I have been feeling lately. I know that my devotion to the church has been strong all these years even if it was to point out a flaw or lie or deception within it. I know that the bees in the broken hive still think their hive is perfectly fine, but I stand outside and know better. I am here to fix that hive. It will be up to the bees to accept this and make the changes. Luckily, none of this diminishes the one thing I love most; my communing with the one true creator.

Finally though, I find myself hoping for the same devotion to a religion that honors the truth. I yearn to know another who has this same level of devotion so that we might both gaze into the infinite that is within each of us. I find myself wishing for someone as devoted as I have been. I know I was made to serve, but I find myself asking the Light, “What now?”

I know that because the truth dwells in each of us, we CAN know the truth without books or teachers. Afterall, I did! I know it’s possible and I know the way to that lock on the garden gate. I don’t want to be a teacher or guru. I just want to live my life in quiet devotion with this radiant life that dwells within me…and maybe get this book written about my experience and how it helped to unlock a secret thpusands of years in the making. And I suppose that is a bit of a boast, but there it is.

And alone has been fine, but now I seem to yearn for a mirror who shares the same love of God. Those awakened who lack devotion to the higher purpose present in this experience seem to me to be like rudderless boats. I think I see an ingredient missing and it is devotion. I’m being judgmental I know, but it’s based on experience with those rudderless people. I’m not here telling those people directly that they lack direction, no, and it may even serve an ultimate purpose for them, so who am I to say? It’s just not for me anymore. Sometimes you do need to be lost a bit before realizing you need something more. For me, the devotional path feels just right for the rest of the time I have here.

That probably makes me sound like a religious geek, but truth be told, I always wanted to know God’s thoughts. Even as a kid. Now awakened and entering states that put me at the feet of this Presence, I have simply said, “I want to be more like you.” I realize that to do that, I must learn how to be all love. I know that the attention and love that I feel streaming from it to me tells me it wants a perennial engagement with me. It does not want me out of that stream of powerful love that undoes me, empties me so that I might be ever-more-full. I know that now I am the same; I yearn for a love that results in two unafraid to grow together as one. It’s a tall order I know.

Seems I have my work cut out for me.

God Wasn’t What I Was Raised To Believe

 

I think I have always wanted to know the thoughts of God.  I was never convinced that God was what we said “he” was.  It seemed that there was something much more to all of this.  I grew up feeling this way but having no way to back that feeling up with sound, solid proofs or contentions. I didn’t know for a long time why it was that I had a kind of amnesia about this knowing, at least not until recently. We all have this kind of amnesia, and it serves a purpose, I think.  We even have a name for it, we call it the “veil” and everyone talks about it so much.  It is everywhere you look. We have anthropomorphized it, essentially taking what is in us and projecting it out onto the world.   But this veil is within us….it is not outside of us or in the world, no matter how much it might seem to you at the time.  It does express itself in the beliefs of men and women, yes, but that only speaks to the ubiquity of this meme in people’s minds. The veil is discussed as part of attaining a clearer view of reality or how the world works, “Once I pull the veil completely back, I will then know what the real truth is” many think to themselves. Admit it, if you have read about the “Veil” you have thought about this at least once.

The secret to attainment is in unrolling these illusions and getting down to the deeper fundamentals of who and what we are, not doing what those who are not awake do, which is to see the surface of things and think they understand the forces that are at work.  This type of attainment means that some beliefs are going to die. This is in fact the very act of “pulling back the curtain.” This opens your awareness in such a way that you are now capable of being able to glimpse a new world, or at least what seems to you to be an upgraded version.  All along it was because the lenses and blinders were being  dropped within you (and me and the rest of us who are engaged in this process of awakening on the planet).

The problem is, as I see it, is that we don’t even know what God is.  We have created many many forms, but these are human creations. The biggest challenge I faced when I awakened was this thing we call God.  It just wasn’t at all what stories had tried to describe God as.  Obviously we had each created “him” and ourselves in each others’ image.  But what I found when my soul was cracked open like a walnut by awakening was that a force that was lacing itself through the entirety of creation and which lay nested within every single atom and lay there watching, quietly, observing.  In fact, my very first experiences when I encountered what I would later learn was samadhi, was the presence of this force that was ever-present all around me. I just came into an awareness that only seemed possible once the brain or mind had been altered by awakening….it just wasn’t something that I had any real direct experience with.  If you know me, I am a big one for direct experience and not just quoting the experience of others (but both are good). It was less that I stood before a great man being and more like living in the bloodstream of a light being that is so huge you can’t even glimpse what it is.  Something that huge is just hard to even wrap your head around.  I found it flabbergasting to be honest.

Another aspect of my experience with this grand living presence that was everywhere was the silence of this presence.  In fact, it could be said that silence was its hallmark.  I wondered about this for years.  Why was it so silent?  I mean, I am now aware of it and it must know I am now aware of it….aren’t there going to be some kind of recognition of that?  To date, there has been none. Instead, it seems that this is still very much an inside job, and I have been getting hints that this Presence does want to commune with me, but it wants to do so in silent knowing.  It already lives inside of me, albeit silently.  But this observation about its silence is nearly universal amongst mystics and people who describe such encounters.  Mother Theresa has mentioned this silence as have Buddhists of every persuasion.  Saint John the Cross wrote, “The Father spoke one word from all eternity and he spoke it in silence, and it is in silence that we hear it.” This perfectly matches the kind of silence that I experience…I feel the presence seeming to be pulling me into it.  It seeks union with creation, and it is not just content to be inside of everything looking out.  But when I say this, I have to stress that this Presence does not force anything.  In fact, everything that it has done thus far shows very clearly that free will on our side is absolutely crucial, which means, I supposed, that it remains inactive in a way, but vibrant in its longing to engage with the Creation which has sprung up around itself and which it, “God” (if you want to call it that), has cleverly hidden itself within.

Without realizing it, I had my own personal “God is dead” moment. The final tossing of that old dry construct of God as a man in a beard or something roughly mimicking human was replaced instantly with something wildly different, but also extremely interesting.  God had indeed died, but it died in the way that an idea dies; it wasn’t ever really real per se. It was like watching this old play set fall down around the actors.  It wasn’t even tragic, it was more like it needed to happen.  I guess on that day was when I really met God, or the thing that we all would agree or are yearning to know.I know how hard it is for those who very much want to believe in Christian doctrine to hear these kinds of things.  I don’t say them out of anger or upset or some deep seeded need to tear down the church.  Its just that…..we kind of have been getting wrong for a long time and I think it is time for us to wake up to something that appears to be much much more amazing.

I found that now I felt things that I had not felt before.  I related to the “spark” in me that is said to be divine.  What I mean is that I became aware of just how it is that our divine spark IS this “God” or Presence or divine intelligence in the universe.  I imagined feeling a thread that moved through all parts of me down to my deepest core.  Somewhere, in what seemed like the mystery of nothingness, I could feel that thread dive deep, somehow tying me to All That Is. Just beyond that inky dark, I sensed a world that was unimaginably vast.  I imagined or considered that this void was in fact God’s own veil in order to help us maintain our sense of self here in our reality.  When I would feel into this void, as I experienced it, I really did see that in the great void, there was simply nothing.  It was like the nothing state you encounter when you fall asleep….just…no consciousness.  But this isn’t a scary thing, not for most of us.  And I think that we really all known the Void as it is discussed in my mystic circles because we encounter it every single time we fall asleep.  We cross over in those moments.  Its a kind of non-event.

When I would feel a little overwhelmed by all of this, I would take my third eye and go into an atom and scale that up until it was like I was standing on a football field with the atom’s parts all around me (I suggest you try this sometime-it can lead to amazing discoveries about matter).  Here, I would feel the energy animating the atom.  I would feel the presence of those beings that orchestrate the creation and sustenance of the atom, these wildly creative and gleeful beings I encountered my first year of awakening, but I would also feel something else that was this amazingly constant presence that was…everywhere and everywhen.  I experienced it initially as a flash of brilliant white light, after which everything in my experience changed from that day forwards.  Shade of Paul on his way to Damascus.  In the case of Paul, I sense quite strongly that Jesus was sharing with him the light of his own attainment because they were, oddly, kind of like brothers of a weird sort, displaced by about 20 or 30 years in their births, but with a connection to this same light.  Paul was less converted from a distance by Jesus as he was touched and healed by the light that Jesus and all other initiates are connected to, regardless of religion.

When I read about the Chinese concept of the Tao, I see how their experience mirrors my own. Yes, I have felt this marvelous quiet and stillness that is the Tao. I have, however, also experienced another aspect of the Tao, which is that each time I go back to it, it has changed.  I don’t mean that it has changed its essentially nature, no, but something energetically has changed.  To explain what I mean, it is like how a lightning strike could be absorbed by a vast lake.  This lightening bolt is streaming in all of the time, and this lightening bolt is actually information coming from the Creation.  There is energy that is streaming out from the Tao also, but it is not seen as a lightening bolt because the creator is IN everything, actually sustaining everything that exists.  As a result, you just don’t see a big production happening. But this Creator is registering all of the change in all realities which is quite a feat.  I became aware of the Creator presence as this thing that looked almost like an atom, this thing that mirrored itself all throughout creation in the atom, the cell, in so many forms. Even as I say this, I know that this was not the truth, it was simply a way that I saw it.  It was inside of all things, like how you have DNA inside of your body at the base of your entirety of being. Having said this, I also must admit that it could be that the change that I see as taking place in the Creator as a result of being a part of its creation, may in fact be my own inner change.  I am always keeping my mind open because what I think I know is often changed by what actually is.  What I do know though is that as a kind of mile marker in my jounrey that what I have experienced privately is very much in line with what people describe during moments of enlightenment or while experiencing samadhi.

In fact, what I experienced while encountering this prime creator was that it was not masculine or feminine. It could not be said to be a God or Goddess at all.  It was radically different from anything we have ever as humans been taught.  I found that when I was feeling this prime creator, I did it best when I was deep in samadhi.  The deeper I could go, the more of it I could glimpse. I wanted to expand my consciousness more and more in order to take in a larger view. This Presence was so perfect, so wonderful to me, I wanted to know what made it tick and how I might be more like it.  Over time, though, I have found that my ability to feel it moment by moment has improved along with my own inner work in awakening.  That said, my ability to comprehend its mystery appears to be tied to what level of attainment I have matured to at the time.  The spark in me knows that in order to really change our world, we need to teach how to bring this spark into the world and nurture it into a flame.  We need it because it represents a balancing of our innermost natures and of a path to activating the latent abilities in the left and right hemispheres in the brain (which are activated when awakening is itself activated).

I am not alone in this sense about the creator as a vast presence.  Nearly every person who has had a near death experience (or NDE)  reports much the same as those who have had brushes with enlightenment.  Those who have had NDE’s as well as those who have awakened both often say that after the experience “God” was more a quaint idea for people to carry with them until they were ready for what I call the Big Kahuna of Realization.  It seems that awakening and NDE’s both share similar traits, in that both involve an encounter with a brilliant white light that always results in a significant change within the person taking place.  I have read extensdively on NDE’s over my life and this trait is nearly universal. People talk about the veil being pulled back in awakening, but really all that ever is pulled back are the beliefs that you had in place that kept you from being able to see things as they are.  Both an NDE and awakening promises this kind of glimpse and the changes that take place in their wake.

This is why, I think, people describe Awakening as a destructive process.  It is destructive because by rewiring yourself for awakening, you enable your mind and begin to glimpse the truth of things, sometimes only for mere seconds in the beginning, but a glimpse is all that it takes.  In time, you have more glimpses, and hopefully it melts the beliefs that have been wrong all along and which have also kept you from facing the prime creator and understanding your relationship to it (as a divine spark seeking to grow into a flame of creative energy).  But once you get past that sense of having lost so much, a new world begins to unfold.

I found myself watching a youtube last night of a man who I have known peripherally.  I have friends who know him and have studied with him.  His name is Joseph McMoneagle.  Joe was a military Chief Warrant Officer and a gifted Remote Viewer for 19 years in the military and intelligence agencies.  He has gone on to form a business where he remote views for companies and he speaks about his experience as well as having written books on the subject.

Joe had two NDE’s and when he talks about them, he describes how his old notions about
God were put to rest. What he believed about God as a result of growing up and what he actually experienced during his NDE’s were so vastly different from each other that he was left grasping at straws.  He saw that there was this vast presence and it was in this white light.  His whole inner spiritual paradigm got shifted through those experiences.  This, though, is part of the “growing up” that we each do in order to be able to face the much bigger truth that waits for all of us.

Knowing this is such a big thing. By this, I mean that the Presence that we wind up experiencing is just so incredibly vast.  Faced with this presence of the Light, and the lack of all of the things that we thought was God (ala Moses and the Ten Commandments), we can be left with a paradigm shifting experience that leaves a giant hole open, which is a vast mystery and really hard to wrap your head around.  It really takes a level of spiritual maturity I think to be able to deal with this. While we each face this when we leave this body, we also face a curtain of forgetting, too, which means that most people do not remember what it was like in between their lives.  I know that for as many lifetimes as I have wound up remembering this go-round, I have precious little in the way of what it is like to be in this place called heaven.  I suspect that this is something that we can’t cheat on, it is something that we have to be able to obtain for ourselves, this presence of the white light. But what I do know is that when I encountered the white light and what it brought to me, I had this singular experience of remembering, not as clear as you might think, that yes, I had experienced this white light before, I just could not place it (it existed, it turned out, outside of time, something that makes placing something so tricky).  Until we do this, we are simply caught on the cycle of reincarnation, trying to grow up and mature enough so that we can handle to news that things were different from what we had thought.  And to be honest, its not a devastating truth, its just….different.  No more Santa Claus, yes, but something else more subtle and bigger.

I tend to feel that by knowing this great mystery, as the Native Americans called it, that we are kind of setting things right again and getting more right with the way of the world and the way of the entirety of Creation. It seems based on my observations that the prime creator does not speak through burning bushes but by simply being present inside of every subatomic particle, inside all of us, looking out, and waiting for the moment when we get quiet enough and clear enough within to be able to see how we are connected to the Creator and how what this Creator has is freely given.  Many of our leaders in the past encountered their own spark turning into a flame and had visions that they believed were of God speaking to them.  That’s great, I guess, but given our new understanding of how things are, it is more likely that it was Moses’s own inner spark speaking to him and not the Presence in the white light.  I say this because when it comes to people who talk about God speaking through them, just knowing how silent the White Light is, causes me to doubt the very nature of these communications.  I have no doubt someone like Moses had an experience with an inner presence, I’m just not convinced that it cam directly from “God.” I think anyone having experiences with awakening or NDE’s will likely have similar feelings.  We, it seems, are here learning how to receive these gifts as the sparks of the divine that we are, and we are bounds to get the truth only partially correct sometimes. Additionally, learning how to use the energy that comes from that divine spark in us for beneficial purposes also seems to be an important aspect to growing up and seeing that this White Light is this powerful force that is love.

Namaste

Made Sacred

​She’s made sacred by desire

Her great yawning passion

Whose throes 

are the forge

of creation

The multiversity rests

perched,

ready,

unknown

even to her

until the brilliant light enters

whose warmth stirs

and awakens

a celestial womb

draped in night

and buried deep

but moved by by his presence

so that

blooming

she opens deeper still

as everything in the illumine

is undone

revealed

taken and given

all at once.

These are ours

moments snatched 

from the infinite

a Sunday morning late in Spring

with tea and rain

drawing us into this warmth 

of presence

where divine

laden

springs.

Restoration

She was taken out of the equation

a divine light

which darkened our spiritual skies

we called her presence pagan

or worse; consort of the devil.

Why did we do this?

What were we thinking?

We we mad?

Amnesiac?

Those dry canals

could not stand

to feel

the full force of their being

their intellect

along with their emotion

their physicality

love

their sex

because they were ashamed

and fearful

because when the goddess entered the house

it was lit aflame

and gave birth to worlds

We fear this in ourselves

until we do not.

How much longer will you hold back the force of truth

in your own body

your awareness?

The merging into the two

is an act so intimate

but is done without anyone there….

a great silence

an emptiness

full of fire and flow….

a mystery

I am here to initiate you into

a mystery I seek to show.

We will go mad without HER in our lives

look at the march of Christianity and Islam

they forgot their sacred feminine force

and have gone mad.

Its been one conquest after another

without her presence adding balance and compassion

We have invaded, taken, stolen, destroyed

all in the name of divine providence.

This has been done in the name of the angry

frustrated

lonely

man-god

and his clannish club….

I am bringing back her breath in me

I am bringing her breath back to the world.

I am turning back the great spring of our awareness

to bring back the old wisdom that kept us safe

sane

and sound.

Time to open the halls of heaven

time to bring the Goddess to her God

in the Bridal Chamber of the soul.

Sacred Duality

Within cell walls

infinite

lies curled

the Two

turning

in blue

and golden hues

an endless meditation

birthing the spirit of all religion.

 

His gaze

undoes her

she brings to him

his returning

unwinding,

bearing vulnerabilities

as the sweet syllables

of those secret mysteries.

 

Here they turn

forevers upon their lips

their sweetly swaying hips

Round and round

for infinities

a perfectly pitched moment

measured in whispers

mysteries

secrets

born through soulfulness

and awe.

 

Everything else falls away

all memory is locked into a moment

bursting

worlds form from this

flowers and sea foam

gallactic twisting

rivers runnin

stones tumbling

muted

but feeling

prayers lasting centuries

ushered from their lips

a lineage of everything

where the god and  goddess

mingle

tangle

become

turning round and round

central core

within a cell trebled into life

bursting with potentiality.

This is the divine masculine and feminine….

yin and yang

the servants to the Tao

handmaidens to the All

and that dwells in each leaf

and cell

and doubt

that it even exists…

The Bridal Chamber

 

Upon waking, my soul and heart of my heart whispers, “Make it right….make the Bridal Chamber within you  your mirror of the world.”  With this single knowing command, a truth is given….and lying at its heart, a wonderful mystery.

When I awoke, I entered this chamber within…I tasted divine union from its very beginning. I entered its mystery and knew its wonders.  This is a mirrored chamber…which was one of the greatest of its teachers….the one silent gift and mysteries provided by the Gnostic writings….the mirrored chamber.  I soon learned what this all meant for me.  Stubbornly, in bits and pieces.  I could not deny what this image had to teach me.  And each time I return, everything is different, everything is new, and the reflection I see is always changing.

To get the mirror reflection right is my souls purpose and my greatest work.  I am bequeathed this gift from the start, just as we each are.  I learn how to make my reflection a clear image of the divine….so that on the day when I can no longer see who is the earthly self and the heavenly one, I will have won the message within the lesson of the mirrors of the Bridal Chamber…the place where the union rises from shadow into the light. Within  this gift, I need no other path or Way or method, just continuing refinement as I make my image pleasing in the eye of the divine…which dwells within and shows me the way. I wait for the day when the eye of the divine is the same as mine.  Until it is continuously known, I have more undressing, more stripping away, more shame to remove from this  walk through the world.

It confers upon me many blessings, many gifts, which I take gladly and joyfully.

Everything  for me becomes religion.  A gaze, a smile, a walk down the street is all a-riot of this religion…trees swaying in a cool  breeze as the whole world opens up and speaks to me.  Every particle bears this.  I feel so blessed.  How can I ignore it? It is my salvation, my ransom…if I will but listen and know all of life is calling me  into its mystery.  It has been easy for me to focus only on the shadow in hopes of healing it, the residual  which remains, and get down on myself, but I know in the love of this Presence within me that I am truly blessed.  Am I whole, complete?  I don’t know.  I don’t pretend to know.  I am being guided by a hand far superior to my own and like the bride, I return to the bridal chamber to learn more, to grow ever closer to my beloved.  Here is where I seek to reverse the fortunes of the world I have known.  It is here I seek to redeem, ransom, and save the past by healing it all.

All of this is ours.  All of this is what we will each inherit.  If not here and now, then in an infinity of nows.  There is time enough and love enough for each of us to know it…..when we each are ready.

 

The Source

How do I say

without eyerolls

that I enter into a place

where I turn into something

that touches the All?

There are no altars

no candles

no scepters

nor crucifixes

or ankhs

but a vibrant presence

that changes each time I go

the going is itself a deep surrender

and my vibratory rate changes

deepens

and peels away into bliss

like love distilled

and burned as light.

This being is there

intelligent and aware

it is watching everything

because it is IN everything.

It is here that I sense a love

that it feels for every single thing

that it is itself

through this marvelous creation

that seems to have emerged from it

in a time outside of time

with no real inception

but an expanding sense of the conception

born of all aspects of its own being

which we here see as yin and yang

Goddess and God

the current cycling that is expressed in electricty

solar rays

and our very consciousness.

It is energy turning itself into everything else

and is thus connected

continuguous

boundless

and bounded all at once.

This being

it pours over your life

but remains silent

because that is just how sacred freewill is

and freewill emerges from individuality

and so

monks and gurus and yogis and all the rest

who wish to say “Kill the ego!”

are to me entirely deluded in their task

for this is by definition a sacred cow that this being seems to always respect

and hold dear.

Our individuality is no less an illusion than this being’s individuality.

Killing it only reveals the folly in such things

for the cosmic mind touches our own mundane world and mind

and you just can’t escape it.

So why try?

Here, come this way….

It is here in letting go so deep

that you can feel this being

which is the All.

Comprehension expands each time it seems

and what I see one day changes the next because I change and it changes each time  the embrace ensues….

It is like a vast switchboard where all channels are open from the smallest to the largest.

Here the words “split the stone and I am there” is understood.

It is in everything

but to see it

you must see yourself so clearly that all of this comes into view.

the good that you are is seeking you as much as you are seeking it….

like star-crossed lovers

this is

and this being

like it or not

wishes to seduce you in any way that you are willing

when you set aside your righteousness and sinful thoughts.

It is beyond sin

and thus is itself the sexiest lover of all

for it has no shame

when it gets so close that it can feel your breath

and caresses your soul

in that embrace that changes you forever.

 

II.

This is where it begins.

Looking inside, it is like I turn inside out

with bliss.

This is a lesson  “seek the bliss and you find me”

It says.

But it is true that to find it

you must cast aside your shame

and be like a child

innocent

but sexy.

Our sex is one channel

one of many

all equivalent

and capable to bearing experience

of the divine here in us

the divine everywhere “out” of us.

We are all made one by this

because when we go to God and Goddess

we all go to the same place

like stones upon a great medicine wheel,

looking into the center

turning in the dim light of night

seeing the same brilliant star

all from different angles.

But when we reach it

it takes us completely.

It has been pulling at us for ages untold.

And here we are.

 

I have seen this great burst of Presence,yes,

but it contained no trappings of anything you might relate to.

Pure feeling

it felt purely

everything.

We say God is uncaring for it has remained outside our lives

and yet what I know is its is silent

only because it honors our individuality

our freewill

and that freewill has been in getting lost

from the very source

that is our lives

that is our redemption

and is the great wellspring of our love.

Why can’t we love like that?

“You soon will”

it says,

“….the closer you get to me”

it adds.

 

Like a blind woman reading braille,

this is how the God and Goddess read our lives….

it is not enough to see

it is everything to feel

as their invisible fingers trace every lost part of our days

the invisible core of our days

which we tread over the surface

never realizing that It resides within our self-made journey.

It loves us and wants us so much

that it just can’t stay out of our business.

It is there

like an egg waiting to hatch,

a world within our own.

A path lying within the core of all paths

a smile within our own

the love amidst the loneliness.

Quiet, yes, but yearning us

and when lit by its fire, we yearn right back.

We yearn perhaps imperfectly

but it still smiles

because any drop of our yearning it would take

because we then are on to a great mystery

which is its own to reveal in us.

It is the mystery within the mystery

the love within love

the soul of yearning within the body of yearning.

Its thoughts lie curled up in our own

just as we are curled up within its great mind

which goes on forever

in infinities enough to make you run red-cheeked from view.

“This is my love….

it has never been any other….

silent and unyielding as a great center point of everything….

waiting for you to come join in the feast.”

Here, you learn this God has been silent only in appearances

until its utter ubiquity has shown itself in everything that is.

It waits for you

and while it does,

its great love continues to unfold for you

as its great incomprehensibility

is its strong suit

so that every moment with it is like a sparkling gem with facets beyond count

the best of everything.

 

None of us are alone.

We might wax sad in those moments when our illusions grip us

but we know the truth

because we are more than the surface paths of our lives.

We make like stupid mongrels

when we are the royalty awaiting our kingdoms,

an inheritance

beyond all measure.

 

Here, within you is where you may find what you are looking for.

No cars or money or love of things will quite do it

for its simpler than that

but finer than All.

Its love is like that

and I could go on

like this

singing sacred mantras to the Light…

True Seeing

If you think that you know where other people are in their process life will deal you a wake up blow, because even when you are awakened, knowing where someone is is one of the most difficult things to really know.

Awakening opens you up, no doubt.  However, kundalini does not completely disrobe you of the distorting dross that lies before you which you are looking through.  It brings the potential of incredible insight into how things are, no doubt, and the world begins to clarify as these scales fall from the eyes of the self, but it does so incrementally.  With each reveal, we assume we become all knowing. We become more knowing.  Ego leaps us forward telling us we are where we are not. We wax foolish.  This is the most dangerous place to be without humility and grace by our side.  We assume much and know less and less.  Projections rule the day.  This is when turning the search light into our own process is so critical.  We fail with others but we succeed so much better when we deal with our own.  Everything we see around us is measured against our own inner distortions. Of these, we have lots.  Humility.  Grace.

Beware anyone who proclaims they know where you are and offers you advice.  I might know what it is like for someone to go through “ego-death” as someone recently wrote to me about.  I know just where he is….but I cannot know exactly what his experience is.  I can only know my own. And in looking through the windows of his own soul, I am gazing through the windows of my own soul first. And then into his. And who am I to proclaim to know where he is?  Look, the world is full of the walking wounded, and everyone deserves compassion, if only to bear our own souls to that place within ourselves where we learn how this is done for our own good if not not for the other.

The gift of individuality is a big one, cosmically it lays the responsibility for your own spiritual sovereignty at your feet and no one, not even the Creator will ever mess with that.  THAT is just how sacred freewill and individuality is.  As such, you cannot pick up anothers’ experience.  You will always view it through your own. I have said many times that the saying of Anais Nin goes, we don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.  This individuality also means that you alone come to the divine.  No one hauls you up to it. We each reach it on our own.  How many times have I known someone with such incredible insight fall so terribly far from knowing where I am?  When someone starts telling me or others how it is that I feel, that is when I run for cover because this is where the greatest illusions get spun.  Karma projects its distortions writ large and nothing good every comes from it.

Does it mean we cannot empathize with others or feel their presence? No, we most certainly can, but don’t ever be fooled that what you feel is directly them. Years may pass before you wake up to realize that what you were seeing was your own version of that own secret world of another. It is a lens through a lens.    I know of nothing thus far that suggests that this will ever change. As humans, we like to think we WILL KNOW. Bearing that, through our egos, we proclaim to know some great immutable truth.  But fortunately for the world, we just know our own.  We can relate, yes, but we always come home to our own hearth, to our own assembly of self for council and nurture.

We are not entirely alone, for we also live in that vast sea together, but this individuality serves us for a purpose we have found so important that we have taken this on in each life.

Humility is the greatest balm for the ego, for false masters and would-be authorities of this world.  It is also the hardest one to take and the strongest medicine for all of us.  Its reward is a spreading grace all through our being.

I bow deep before your greatness……

You Are This

©Parker Stafford

How beautiful it is to watch a flower, first a closed bud, swell and open to the sun and sky.  It does so leaving itself completely open and vulnerable, and yet it shows no sign at all of trying to hide or close itself up from life. Looking at nature, I take hints from it on how to be.  The flower blooms because it must in order to live, to be, to become.  I am like this! I know it is so.  I grow sad, despondent, dark and scared if I do not continually open to the greater reality that is before me and that is present in all things.  This is not some intangible anymore. It has been much like a tuning in of a new channel.  It is a choice.  I can see my hurt or I can choose to see my happiness and count my blessings. Take a cue from nature and from flowers, for you ARE this.