In The Shadow Of The Light

In my last entry I described a meditation I got caught up in that resulted in strong light activity, a phenomenon often tied to awakening experiences. After what was a very productive session, I decided it would be a good idea to revisit the meditation again to see if I could continue with the work. This time was decidedly different, but was oddly similar to the movie about the after death experience “What Dreams May Come” starring Robin Williams. In a similar way, it was also a bit like the movie “Inception” too. This was due to the lucidity present throughout the experience, I think.

When I say my meditation was like a movie, it’s not lost on me that there was an undercurrent of drama, hinting at a subsumed emotional energy, like a great big question lying in hidden veils at the center of some great edifice that kept coming up and up, over and over. But this meditation took me deep while awake, and then took me into dream, while I alternated between lucidity and full-on dream state and forgetfulness of earthbound ego awareness. This time, instead of brilliance, I delved deep into the shadow.

I have tended to see awakening taking on this kind of cycle; a moment of brilliance followed by a deep dredge of the muck as though one serves to bring up the other. It isn’t perhaps why many people misunderstand the power that awakening contains. It’s not all rainbows. It is more about clearing, cleansing, and it can be hard on you to do this kind of delving. I know it’s not fun for me….but it always comes with a reward that is forever reaped, an inheritance that remains perennial.

I slipped into the deep state. This part is the easy part. It’s being able to remain lucid enough inside such a deep lovely swirling eddy of energy and not lose consciousness, especially when it’s at the end of the day and you are ready for bed. I remained neutral, not seeking to do anything since the intention was already placed. I just had to wait for the subconscious and higher self to do their part. I was along as a witness to what would unfold. My cat lay next to me, again, purring softly, a few snorts as she drifted either deep or up out of her own deep sleep. This time, she would project right into my lucid dream, acting as a reminder to remember why I was there.

I wound up inside a dream. It was night and I was walking around an old house that I remembered having dreamed of years before in another shadow work dream at an earlier stage in my progress. Nowadays, dream imagery and its meaning tends to be much more direct or understandable than it ever was before awakening. For me, a house represents the construct of human consciousness. It is an image that Jesus often used, too, and it has been a consistent image each time I dream of it. In one dream I might be in a house, in another, a warehouse, or in one, I stood on the streets of a city as I observed the roots of some massive tree or plant that was growing in a large building, revealing its roots as it emerged through cracks in a deep stairwell….an image that spoke to me of the work that remained to be done in the root chakra, the foundation.

Last night, it was that same old haunted house. It had the weight of ghosts, of lives and people who had lived inside of it and now it lay abandoned. A moment of lucidity began to build and I felt myself dream while kicking into meditation all awareness simultaneously. The last time I was here, the dream ended with me discovering that I could lift up into the air; a clear indication of my letting go and allowing the organic force flow through me. I lifted up into the treetops. This time, though, I was solidly grounded. I pondered what else was there to clear out, to resolve in this tumble of an old home? It was in its own slanted way, a great life, but it wasn’t my life today, but one lived a long time ago. All of this was emblematic of the work I had left incomplete in that previous life, and here I was, having to set it right, to give it that moment of forgiveness it so needed in order to be free.

The house lay in a depression, between two sloping meadows. It must have been a lovely sight in its heyday, but it was lying in moonlight and was ramshackle. The large wrapping porch had sunk in, taking a wing of the roof with it. You could see into its interior and as I made my way around it, I realized how much it lay in shadow. “If there is to be light here, I am the one who must bring it…” I realized.

Just as I thought this, I felt myself lift and the dream fall away from me. I was warm in bed, and only had a moment to ponder as, like a swimmer, I went right back in, grabbing a quick breath as the waves of sleep lapped over my head and everything went muffled and I lost ordinary waking consciousness, trusting that I would find myself again on the other side.

I was walking in yet another building, another old house, and this time I was inside it. There was no light, and windows down the hall and into a large outer room were painted over a kind of greenish color. Drapes hung in tatters, and there was a drip of water that made a smacking sound as each drop filled a puddle on the wooden floor, now a wash of sepia in the dark of the night. I remembered this house, too. This was one I didn’t like at all. It looked like it hadn’t been lived in in forty years. Nothing was bright about this place, it had a dank and decaying feeling to it. I kept walking though, wondering if I would find something that would mean I had broken through to something. I noticed kitty was with me. She has a name, but she knows kitty best. Sometimes she is monkey, sometimes Georgette. There she was, her tail flicking upwards. I could hear her thoughts, wondering why we were here, then immediately realizing that she was in my dream. She settled in after that and began following alongside me with less trepidation. She predicted that we wouldn’t be here long,and she was right. I surfaced yet another time out of sleep and felt my deep breathing. It was like being awake, but feeling the spell of dreaming still all around me.

The answers didn’t come in the usual fashion. So much of these places represented aspects of myself from the past, mostly distant, unresolved, lying unseen, needing badly to be seen. They had a surrealistic quality to them. I felt that edge of…fear, dread, and yuck about it. But that was exactly why I had to go back into these old haunts. I wasn’t there seeking to do what a guide once admonished me never to do, which was to try and drag it back into my life again. No, this was different. The idea that I had to carry the light into these darker corners was what this was all about.

Awakening is ruthless. You can’t bullshit yourself. Only when it’s completely clean, clear, forgiven, can things be forgotten. Until our inner compass is satisfied, we wind up going back to those places to sweep that little remaining bit of shadow away. I felt like I was ingesting it, taking it in so that I could metabolize it into light. Kitty stirred and looked at me through blinking eyes, sleepily, her head up, then back down, nonchalantly falling back in for another round of sleep. This felt like it was turning into a tag team wrestling match, dipping into lucid dreaming using meditation as the launching pad.

I kept at this all night in a marathon of visitations, never knowing where I would end up next, but in each case it was some long forgotten building, some old remnant that I have inherited in this go-round and am tasked with emptying of what is less than it’s best. Like  a big cleaning. You know how it is. You pull out the big stuff and haul it away, and with each time you go back, the particles get finer and finer until you go from sweeping up the last bits to wiping up the dust. This is all old business, an old self, a past life, and it’s now being brought forward.

I thought about that first house I dreamed of in the months before awakening came. It was all so much brighter, more optimistic. A road led up a hill with a creek running beside it. The creek grew stronger the closer I got to its headwaters, which revealed how this wasn’t an ordinary body of water. It was prana itself, filled with symbols and brilliant. How could water be so bright? Climbing the hill, on the right, was a beautiful arts and crafts meets Zen monastery. Built from large beams, the building interlocked, revealing its construction. Stone rose up through its middle, and when you walked inside you could clearly see two fountains inside, split down the middle, representing the Ida and Pengali currents with the Shushuma in the middle. That was my house, my temple, a place that was more than just home, but was who I was. It still is. But since that time, I have had to venture out into the past in order to heal it and cleanse it. Actually, I can’t even say it is I who does this; clearly my earthbound self isn’t up to this, but something deeply rooted in me is. It is this part of me that teaches, reveals, redeems, and ressurects. I wish dream could be brighter sometimes, but there are plenty of regular dreams that are, and besides, digging into shadow always resolves some deeper sense of feeling ill at ease in me.

It would be great if I could offer some grand finale, but an ending is itself a beginning, a new thread is discovered and it’s then followed through until something big is exposed from the rubble. Another chapter is begun even as additional chapters emerge. Over time, what I have found, is the gradient becomes finer and finer. It actually gets harder to keep the shoulder to the grind stone sometimes. It’s easier…the energy is less turbulent and it doesn’t stir me in the same way. But what I also find is that in some ways it’s a little easier simply because so many blocks have been removed. The blocks have gotten harder, but the level of confidence has been forged in the flame of awakening. As if that makes any kind of sense, right? The easy stuff came away first, and when I put myself into energy work like Chi Gong, material cascaded away, and this continued for years. Thousands of blocks, I figure, big and small, always burrowing down deeper and deeper.

For me, the hardest blocks lay deep down. For me, the root was where the hardest wounds lay. And despite all of this, I was able to manifest truly remarkable opportunities in my life, and when I was ready, events have simply fallen into place. When I was ready to fund the next phase of my life after a collapse of the markets, I waited, keeping my wealth in assets I could relate to, which was real estate. Even though I saw half the value of my property evaporate, it also came back during a confluence of events when I was ready to make my next step. Wanting in truth to sell directly to a buyer instead of a realtor, my soon-to-be realtor cancels when she gets too busy with a market which suddenly was going crazy. Deciding to sign papers for representation in another three days, I’m contacted by a family who heard through the grapevine that I was going to list my house soon. They asked if they could buy it directly from me, an outcome which I had wished for in my heart. While taking a nap hours before I would speak to them on the phone, I see them in a meditative state, not knowing that they would be talking to me later that day. Before I was set to sign papers with my realtor for representation, they brought a contract. I was able to sell to a family who had loved my house for years and were having trouble even seeing homes because of how hot the market had heated up within months.

Now it might be a big question what this has to do with my work. What I have found is that as each block is removed, so too are the blocks to manifesting the events in my life that support what needs to come next. This isn’t for me about chasing wealth, but finding my own inner abundance, which is less about money as it is about opportunity and helping to make others lives better. There is so much feeling of loss and lack, and for years I too fell for this feeling. But often, the things I chased after weren’t the things that would have been good for me. That was why they were hard. What is easy comes like magic. These things emerge in perfect timing. Life is increasingly different as the years roll, and as the air clears. Life is more a series of serendipitous events that have purpose and flow, pushing some old block to the surface, or leading to the next step. Something bigger is in control. That might sound superstitious, but it’s not. As division falls away, there is a marriage of the small self with something larger within. This is about bridging the gap and clearing the way for this to happen, and it’s not done halfway or half-assed. How’s that for mystical musing?

Whatever it will be for you, getting out from underneath the tangles holding you back, is what brings the change. For now, the work continues, and who knows what is around the corner.

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Dreaming Awake

Is it possible for us to dream while awake?  Yes, we all know about lucid dreaming, but what I am asking about is something a little different.

I experience something that I call  Dreaming Awake.  This involves, as I experience it, a blending of two different brain states.  It blends waking and sleeping states.  I think its like how dolphins can allow one hemisphere to shut down while keeping the other “on” in order to get some much needed rest.  I discovered that I could do this just before I had my awakening experience, and it was later refined during awakening into what I know today.  The trick for using this method is pretty simple.  I have to be tired, but it has to be during the day in order for it to work.  My own physical rhythm is such that if it is much later than, say, 4:00 p.m., I will just fall asleep.  For me, I find that I get sleepy right about three in the afternoon.  For me, this is the best time to use this technique.  The reason for this is that my mind is vigilant and this means I wont simply drift into sleep.  This detail is  important.  When I was working 70 and 80 hour weeks blowing glass, this method allowed me to turn off for a short period of time without having to take a nap.  The result was that I felt afterwards as though I had just taken a two-hour nap.  Refreshed, I could then go back to work and continue working until midnight or later.  I learned that being tired has everything to do with the brain state.  Yes, we simply DO get fatigued, but so much of my sleepiness is directly tied to my BRAIN.

SO this is what I do.  I wait until I feel like I could just fall asleep.  For me, this happens at about three in the afternoon.  I have to seize the moment, though, because if I don’t, I can phase out of this fatigue so that I can’t be tired enough for this trick to work.  I take a moment to sit comfortably in a chair upright and close my eyes.  Since I am self employed, this has been easy for me to do, and I am most often working alone, so there are no distractions.  Being free to just nod off is important.  Except you don’t really nod off.  You stay awake.  But your brain THINKS you are asleep and so something very interesting happens.

I sit quietly and allow myself to just be very very still and I drift into sleep.  The fact, though, is, I can’t fall asleep.  It is daytime, I am sitting upright, and this keeps some part of my brain vigilant.  I can’t really fall asleep.  But I do.  I have come to the conclusion that the brain will THINK the body is asleep if you are still long enough and are tired enough to fall asleep.  What I experience is a sudden buzzing feeling that overtakes me.  It is literally as though some part of my brain is just tuning itself out.  I sense or feel as though “static” is falling down all around me and I can hear a crackling kind of noise a lot like tuning a radio.  This comes through me like a wave.  Once the wave moves all over me, I am left feeling calm, refreshed, and ready to continue with my day.  It is really quite amazing.  But there is another part that is interesting, and this is the dreaming part.  I do this while I am awake.

I know that this may sound strange to some people, or hard to even relate to, but here is the thing; Tibetan Monks have a practice that is identical to the one I discovered while doing this little meditation.  It is a way to have lucid dreams while being awake.  Its not hard to do. It is a mix of sleep and meditation.  As long as you aren’t a Type A personality, I think just about anyone can do this.

If I allow myself to drift a little further from the state I was in that led to the vibrations, I can induce a waking dream.  It is quite interesting.  It is like I am exploring unusual worlds and realities, which is basically what I like to do.  Since a kid, an adventurer.  Instead of jungles, its states of mind and dimensional awareness.

I was reminded today of this while I was doing school work.  I took a break and felt that heaviness overtake me.  I just slipped into it, happy to fall asleep, if that happened, or to do something else.  I began to dream.  But the dream was itself more…..how to explain this….it was more brilliant.  I felt very awake, very aware of all the qualities of awareness that were bringing this dream to me.  So I slipped into the dream a little more.  I became aquainted with a whole world of people from this world near ours.  In it, I was being shown how someone had developed a way to transfer data through people’s feet.  It turned out that this scientist was able to transfer information in a subliminal way through energetic impulses.  This person was developing a shoe that would help to amplify these signals for people who needed a signal boost.  When I realized that this information was going to be used to feed information to people without their knowledge, I essentially woke up out of the dream.  The idea of the concept was itself an amazing discovery for this person, but he had chosen to use it for either government, corporate, or military use.  He was in the beginning stages of this.  The idea horrified me.  So many really cool ideas have been militarized in one way or another.  What if we were to allow people to learn amazing cool things that THEY wanted to learn in this way instead of finding a way to “dope” (fill) sidewalks with a material that would itself be conductive for these signals to flow through?  It was Big Brother on a scale that was….well….creepy.  But on waking up I realized that we are struggling with similar things in our world here that I find just about as creepy.  Certainly our forays into Mind Control during the 40’s through the 80’s was certainly creepy.  More than that, we are spied on in so many ways it boggles the imagination.  With intelligence networks capable of scooping up ANYTHING via phone and internet, it effectively means that all video that business or government has can be captured and observed.  With laws that were changed via the Patriot Act, we are now all possible terror suspects.  I know.  Big Brother.  this need to control is everywhere.  I suspect that “we” are dealing with all different aspects of this in many places in order to learn the lesson of what control is all about.

Okay, so maybe TMI.  But the idea here is that you can land in some interesting places sometimes, like a visitor who experiences dreaming in a whole new way.  I have been able to go and do things that were pretty interesting.  I have been able to do this without having to fall asleep.  I did, though, have to induce a deep state that is akin to covering myself with the DRAPE of sleep while taking it gently off once it happens.  To do this there has had to be certain conditions to make this phenomenon more favorable.  I know its possible because I have done this a number of times and I think it points to our potential as human beings.  Imagine solving problems with this method.  I think the potential is there.  To do cool things.  Cool stuff.  I think that me transferring data through your feet is cool.  Governments using it?  Not so much!

The first step is to learn how you can allow this “buzz” move all over you and NOT fall asleep.  If you can reach that state and then go a little deeper, you can begin to have lucid dreams in this state.  Your brain at this point has effectively shifted into the place necessary for dreams to take place.  I find that I have to let my brain do what it does best to conjure the dream, but once it initiates the process, I can direct it more.  I find that this process of dreaming awake is a kind of partnership between different parts of myself.  Not all of it is necessarily clear at all times, but if you can trust yourself, you might just find that you can master this and be like a modern Tibetan Monk, dreaming awake.

Until then……sweet dreams.

The Coming of Quetzalcoatl

It was 1985 and I was at this time interested in the phenomenon of astral projection.  I was 19 or 20 at the time and I sensed that if one could experience this state that it could serve to help erase our fear over death.  I had read some material on it from a few sources as they popped up here and there.  I bought a book by Robert Monroe who was able to project so predictably that he was a research subject at the University of Virginia’s Psychology department. Led by other academics such as Charles Tart and some of the work by Stanislov Groff and others who had gone to India, had dropped acid or eaten magic mushrooms, this 60’s era expansion of consciousness brought with it an awareness of still more experience, of larger dimensions to human experience. This was what came about as a result of some of the earliest East meets West experiences, a legacy that I think has helped to push an awareness of alternate forms of consciousness.  I grew up with some of these materials like East West Journal and Be Here Now, which was like a kids book for grownups.  Like my mother who seemed interested in this aspect of the counterculture, we both were into what the hippie scene conferred long after it had come and gone.

I had listened to an interview with a woman named Lynn Andrews on NPR who had written some books on the shamanic tradition as it related to women (Medicine Woman, Jaguar Woman, etc.) and she gave an example of how one could use dreaming as a jumping off point for doing spiritual work.  She described a method for doing this work that amounted to suggesting prior to sleep that when you fall asleep your  ego  would step aside while you did this work in dream.  The ego would move into the background as you used the dream state for more intentional work. Essentially what this meant was that you would “wake up” inside the dream using the dream state as a springboard.  This is called lucid dreaming.

I decided that I would do just this as a way to use dreaming as a jumping off point for a projection of consciousness.  Before going to bed, I simply said that I would wake up within the dream and would use this state as a way of projecting consciousness.

That night I dutifully awoke within dreaming.  I found that I felt a sense as though there were wheels of energy moving at ever greater speeds within me.  I felt as though there was an energy that was building speed inside of me, like a car whose engine was put in neutral while its engine revved to ever higher speeds. I had the distinct impression that some process was underway that would catapult me out of my body.

Just then, I saw in the distance of my vision the image of a coiled snake moving towards me. This snake floated through the air.  It had no wings.  It had a very Mayan looking face where the head of the snake should have been. As I looked at this form I felt something say to me that what I was supposed to do was to project my awareness into the form in front of me which was this serpent form with the human face on it.  As I looked at this dream form, old notions about the snake in the Garden of Eden cropped up.  I chided myself for falling for this fear.  I decided to ignore the fear and do as this inner voice was saying.  The wheels then dutifully sped up, the force increased to an incredible velocity, as I made this decision to just go with it.  This was building into something stronger than anything I had ever experienced before.  It felt as though the whole of the universe was moving through me as an incredible force gained speed. As the energy grew beyond anything I thought possible, I found myself feeling hesitant.  I decided that if I was falling for this fear, I needed to resolve the fear before going on such a journey as this.  The phenomenon began to subside and the snake disappeared into the distance as I slipped back into sleep.

In the wake of this experience, I kicked myself for falling for the fear.  Several years later, while in college, I took a course on PreColumbian art where I would see the same image in a traditional form of the Mayan and Aztec God Quetzalcoatl.  I did more reading on this God and found that the priests of Quetzalcoatl would encounter this form in their visions and dreams and that Quetzalcoatl would come in this way to take them  on soul journeys to other worlds.  Of all the Gods of the Aztec and Maya, Quetzalcoatl was the most peaceful. Quetzalcoatl did not ask nor seek blood sacrifice. Flowers and butterflies were instead offered to him.  As I read through this, I thought how perfect.  I wished I had not begged off from such an experience that I had had a few years previously.

I wondered where I would have gone, what would I have seen had I merged into the body of this snake form?  All through history and all across the world, the serpent was an ancient symbol for wisdom, and spiritual knowledge. The Hindus had the double form of the serpent fire of kundalini, the Egyptians had the serpent (some were even winged—I write about this in the post of the Kriyas and/Mudras and the Holy Ghost that shows up in a link at the bottom of this page for popular posts), the Chinese and Japanese had serpents in the form of dragons.   The Minoans, Cretans, and early pagan Europeans all had the serpent tied into spirituality and vital force. Within my own experience I had been visited by Quetzalcoatl having never known what this image even meant, but its purpose was perfectly expressed in my lucid dream from just a year or two previous.  Some part of us knows these larger forms as we connect into the Collective Consciousness of all traditions.  We dip into the pool of our larger knowing and wonder how on earth this could be.  By shifting awareness, by allowing ourselves to move into larger realms of awareness, we tap these seemingly archetypal forms resting within the collective awareness of humankind. Its “out there” to tap for the fact that the channel lies within.

The Coming of Quetzalcoatl is  symbolic of a deeper return of our own inner knowing, our own vital force and spiritual wisdom.  Its no surprise to me that so many have been connecting with the form of Quetzalcoatl in recent years. For people who are connecting to the Collective Consciousness, many today are left with few good ways for reaching into the divine in a way that makes sense.  Quetzalcoatl serves as a type of angel.  I know for a Christian this would be blasphemy, but this has never stopped me from pointing out the obvious.  Religious figures are propped up as though they have always been while we alone have been involved in creating them.  The Hindus refer to this as our being the “ancestor” to the gods.  This is expressed this way because, well, we DID create them.  Anyway, so we are basically short good spiritual agents that we will need in the time upcoming.  This is not hard to pin down, to know.  Its very much in the air and it leads to a lot of fascination with those same forms that wind up speaking to us about all kinds of qualities that we need that we may never have known existed.  Call it an ability to sense through the Collective Subconscious. I was not able to know that Quetzalcoatl did not have wings.  I in fact imagined him this way, yet when he did arrive, he arrived in a very traditional way, which was much more like the image of the mans face emerging out of the mouth of the snake than anything else.   And if I was merely guessing about Quetzalcoatl’s connection to astral projection and “spiritual journeys” I’d say my subconscious pretty well nailed that one on the head.  Quetzalcoatl fits the bill for some because of this uncommonly peaceful character who did not demand blood sacrifices and was the epitome of peacefulness.

Quetzalcoatl and serpents go far back into the record in Meso America. Quetzalcoatl has gone through some changes over time, but has been connected to death and resurrection,as well as taking on the elements of the sky, rain, and the winds (not unlike the Thunder Bird of Northern America).  He was in the pantheon of gods in Teotihuacan, and it is believed that it was from there that his presence spread to the Maya who adopted him as Kukulkan.  Quetzalcoatl and the snake image dates back to the Olmec Preclassic period, as far back as 1150 B.C.  He has also been associated with Venus.  There are a number of stories over the long period of time that he has been worshipped. Some rulers have taken his name, perhaps in a bid to raise themselves to the level of gods themselves.   In the 10th century a ruler closely associated with Quetzalcoatl ruled the Toltecs; his name was Topiltzin Ce Acatl Quetzalcoatl. This ruler was said to be the son of either the great Chichimeca warrior, Mixcoatl and the Culhuacano woman Chimalman.

Quetzalcoatl was also said to have made humankind out of his blood and earth.  What is interesting is that the Olmecs, Aztecs and Maya all attribute our current era as belonging to the “fifth sun” which is the result of four major catastrophes that have befallen earth and have meant the humankind had to rebound or be recreated each time, something that is very similar to the Hopi concept of the four worlds, with the fifth being the one we are soon to enter. On that note, perhaps we bear some connection in the collective of Quetzalcoatl having to do with our destiny at this higher order of our consciousness?

From the  Codex Telleriano-Remensis.

It has certainly been “in the air” in a sense that many have been looking for ways to fill the need for spiritual agency, or connection to the divine cosmos.

In literal and figurative ways, we are unearthing what these potent forms represent for us.  Quetzalcoatl is interesting in that its very likely that there was a man who lived who bore the same name.  It is said that he presided over a kind of golden era which are now ruins. What gets many Westerners so interested is that he cam from the East and returned there by making a boat to sail.  He was also said to have had a beard, a very unusual thing for the Aztec and Mayans.  So often, myths mixes with legend as legend often has rooting in actual fact with myth expressing the spiritual aspects that transcend both.

In the historical account, Quetzalcoatl had a sister whose name was Quetzalpetlatl.  If we consider how these two forms of myth and legend might flow and merge, it is certainly possible that Quetzalcoatl and Quetzalpetlatl express the masculine and feminine aspects of a still larger realm of spiritual experience.  We then have a masculine serpent and a feminine one as well.  Just as in the Hindu story of kundalini as two serpents, we have a full form that expresses the totality of creative potential in physical and spiritual form.  In this way, we all have access to those forms that align more closely to our own inner masculine or feminine selves. The coming of Quetzalcoatl can also herald the coming of his feminine aspect, Quetzalpetlatl.  The wisdom of what this myth represents is open to all.

If you can consider that we know more than we consciously realize, that there is a much broader realm of experience available to us in what Jung called the Collective Subconscious, then all of these things can make more sense in how we might encounter these archetypal beings without any present knowledge.  The resonance from a past life, or merely tapping a broader range of inner knowing can bring us into contact with those elements which can serve us in our own inner alchemy.  If you can approach all of this in the form of a very creative activity without a lot of structure, your higher self can suggest new possibilities that simply were not possible previously.  This material can be given a new life and old forms rewound through our own present experience. Its as though we take clippings from another time and make new art forms from the images and ideas contained in them.  As long as we don’t get hung up on what is supposed to be, experience is less limited.  Your being is innately creative, and you will be amazed at the insight that these forms can provide you if you allow things to flow more and be less controlled by any rules about their structure or older traditional material.

it was this process that has led me to a greater understanding of my own process as I come into contact with these archetypes.  Even removing the need to know WHY they show up will allow you focus in the moment to create anew.  I suspect that this is what all of this work with archetypes is all about; a creative enterprise where the old is made new again.  Don’t be afraid to go at this like an artist.  This is how new worlds are formed, ideas birthed, new resources uncovered.  There is a lot more to know and to become.  Even the Plains Indians had a process where the old forms were brought out, shown, then new ones put in their place.  These became the great sacred bundle that helped to direct spiritual understanding.  Like a snake shedding its skin, none of this was static, but ever-changing. Don’t be afraid to move with change and see what great promise it may yield to you!

NOTE:  Now just a few weeks after having first posted this entry, I notice that this post has an unusual number of views.  I first asked myself what was it that was drawing so much attention to this? The answer is simple I think. People have been finding the post often through searches FOR Quetzalcoatl. People are already looking for information on this mythical being.  People are focused, drawn by him. Is it because of all the Mayan 2012 stuff?  Perhaps. But I also tend to feel this goes even deeper.  I suspect that we sense that Quetzalcoatl serves as a medium for self transformation, a “Way Shower” of sorts.  We FEEL like h is somehow helping to usher something in.  I suspect that he is, in a way, but I also think that “he” also leads to the “she” as well, which is one of the great things about this age, the return of the divine feminine (there is a lot about this on this blog–use search tags to find them).  He holds a vibration which is a truth that we can sense from a vast distance.  How was it that I experienced Quetzalcoatl in such a way that was so close to his role in a culture that wasn’t even my own?  Somewhere in the space beyond our thinking lies a knowing about things. We see a distant light and feel a yearning to be there, to go nearer it, never knowing that it leads to some larger world that is within.  How do salmon know to swim upstream? Why do Monarchs find South America after thousands of miles?  We say it is instinct.  Perhaps instinct ties us into a more vast field of knowing…..even when we think we are not aware.  We hunger for a new path, I think.  A brilliant light to show us the way…..Even as I completed this addendum to the post, I noticed that on my popular blog entries section at the bottom of the page that this entry is now showing up there.  This is just how rapidly this post has gained popularity. We are looking for a light that we know exists….

Update:  8/20/2012

In a recent discovery of some old documents, I am pouring through a rather interesting tie-in with the Seraphim of the bible and how these beings were also called winged serpents.  These winged serpents took the shape of heavenly beings that brought illumination to humankind.  Either we have a collective awareness of these beings as serpent-like or it was part of a very ancient and wide-spread symbology that was used in most every culture in one form or another.

The Coming of Quetzalcoatl first appeared on the blog Divine Alignment.  To read more there, find D.A. HERE.

The Dream Process In Awakening

When I awoke I did so with a corresponding increase in the vividness and intensity of my dreamscape.  Before awakening occurred in total, I was already having dreams that were pointing to the fact that awakening was upon me.  Most of my dreaming is a rather intense experience, but is one that now seems much more purposeful and I am more aware of the fact that my dream world is very much a place for me to process my feelings about a host of things.

Just as awakening was getting under way I had an dream that lasted all through the night.  It was one giant dream that stretched from one end of the night to the early morning.  It was like a marathon in which I examined all of the major material present in my life at the time.  It was like taking an inventory.  In the end I was shown my own personal demon.  This was a revelatory process of digging as deeply as possible into the psyche using all the tools available.  Only in doing this, only in digging deep to examine the unexamined do we ever manage, I think, to come to a different place in ourselves.

My observation is that we are amazingly unexamined beings.  We live in the soup of our feelings and memories, and yet we shove so much material down into ourselves, and this place in ourselves, the subconscious, becomes a kind of dumping ground for things we would rather not examine very closely.  So out of the way, these things slip into the night and they wind up coming back later, as Jung and Freud observed, in  far worse shape than when they were when they were originally buried in the backyards of our minds and hearts. In our case, we bury different things in different parts of our energy bodies based on the vibration of the energy.  Then, as we begin to dredge the depths, these things start to release from certain areas of the Light Body, and we find that we have some clearing of an old block in the root, or sacral, or solar plexus, heart, throat or third eye or crown.  All of this has levels, layers, and what was cleared on the first pass in the heart can be cleared again at another layer in the same spot but with different things entirely.  It turns out that this observation was also made by the Hindus and they call this the “etheric sheaths” which sets up a layering effect to our energy body.  You don’t JUST clear the energy body or the chakras by having kundalini rise and pierce each center.  It seems, at least in my experience, that kundalini cleanses the chakras with this libidinous energy that bring awareness but it also does so in a deeper and deeper way with each “pass” through the center.  There are a number of very good methods for assisting in the release of blockages of an energetic type, but for now, I am going to focus on dreams.

Since 2006, my dreams have taken a sudden change, that is for sure.  And yet, I find that they still serve to help me in identifying old material I thought I had dealt with.  Just last night I had another round of these dreams where I was going through to very old relationships and coming face to face with people I had known decades ago.  I pay attention to my dreams.  I used to keep journals all through my college days up until about fifteen years ago when I stopped recording them. But paying attention to the harder dreams are key because they most often are involved in helping me to dissolve some fear issue.  Sometimes you can just FEEL it in your body as it happens.  Then, in facing the fear, it can actually be transformed.  Its a wonderful process, but always fees like a cliffhanger as its happening!

One thing that kundalini has done for me is it has dissolved some of the veils between waking and dreaming.  I can, while awake, utilize the symbolic imagery of dream by using my third eye to drum up images from the subconscious to help me to understand better what it is that is taking place in the here and now.  When I first awoke, I found that I could talk to this energy and it would respond.  I could ask it to rise and it would rise and become stronger (oops!) or I could ask it things and it would offer me up images in my third eye or as some people say their “mind’s eye.”

When I asked this energetic presence in me why it was here and what its purpose was, I was shown the inside of a very large warehouse building with pallets of material stacked high.  As I looked at it, the images contained all this information.  I understood; I saw myself going through each box, each pallet, identifying all of this forgotten warehoused material that was the ancient backlog of karma.  But the curious thing about this process was that whenever kundalini led me to a place where there was a block or old inventory of material, all I ahd to do was to acknowledge it in order to feel the block clear up.  I could then feel the energy rush through that center into the next center.  It was like going through a vast fiber optic network and cleaning off the sheaths of fiber so the signal could get through more clearly.  It seemed so simple, so straight forward.  I found that the more I identified, through ego, with a given knot, the harder it was to let it go.  The ego was holding on.  It was far better to not even LOOK at whatever it was the kundalini presence was trying to show me.  I would just pick it up like a rock and kiss it and toss it aside.  After a while, the fire of kundalini which had burned down the stubble of this vast prairie of my soul, had revealed all these stones peeking up our of the fresh grass.  Each one we picked up, blessed, and moved on.  this process worked very well in the beginning.  the early work was in many ways the easiest even though I knew the least about what was happening.  As I dived deeper, it has seemed that the deeper material is more central to ego and is thus much harder to dig out and let go of.

The phenomenon of ego death (a term I do not like because it is misleading) does help considerably in allowing one to let go of this material.  WIth ego so centrally positioned within ourselves, it naturally is far more active than it needs to be.  For me, this “death” was itself a collapse of the old arrangement and the creation of a new one.  It was in may ways like rearranging the furniture or transplanting a flower from the center of the garden out to the edges.  Ego just gets in the way for a variety of reasons and is not all that we are.  But ego is important and if we think we have killed it off, we are fooling ourselves.  We need it for survival purposes, and it seems that ego corresponds with some cognitive functions in the left hemisphere that allow us to identify individual objects and to make decisions in a linear, rather than nonlinear way.  These tasks are important, yes, and may have been much more important in our past then they are today.  As a result we have more freedom now to shift into the goddess mind, into the right brain more, which is what I think is helping to drive such incredible and peaceful change in awakening and the world.

In dream, ego is safely asleep and out of the way.  We can see things more for what they are, albeit dressed in the symbology or imagery of dreaming.  These dreams can help to dissolve the emotional blocks that keep the flow of energy at bay or from reaching into other portions of the light body.

For me, the energy was relentless.  I would dissolve a block, would feel elated at managing to do this, would spend about a day in celebratory jubilation only to find that the energy had moved to the next position, to the next place that needed to be cleared.  the energy would move on to the next spot, would begin to work around the blocked area and my awareness seemed critical in going there and recognizing it.  As a result of this I developed a kind of process that is very easy in some cases, for some blocks where all you need to do is be present and do this one thing that makes the entire process so much easier.

I think we feel as though we have to solve something when it comes to clearing blocks, but really, if you are honest with yourself, I think you will find its much more about recognizing something and making peace with it.  However you do this is your own way of relating to it, but ultimately it means you let go of it. It then loses all power over you, over your energy, over how you feel and how you react in all kinds of situations. For me, it has meant no longer focusing on what OTHER PEOPLE THINK.  Somehow, that seems a pretty mighty distraction for me, and is much of what I was writing about in my previous post about vulnerability.  Energetically, when we can do things like forgive ourselves, or seek forgiveness from some authority figure (a stand in for our own inner god-dess authority), we often can trigger just the right kind of feeling within us that releases this material.  It is like a kind of reset button gets pushed and POOF!  It is gone.  Just gone. Nada.  No more.  Let me tell you, the sense of freedom that is felt in that moment is amazing and perfect.

Then, the energy just flows in such a beautiful way.  Until kundalini raises its hand and gets your attention to come back to the back forty of your awareness to find this old dead body you buried there.  The body is actually YOU…..and as you look at it….what might have been shame or hurt slowly slips away and you realize “it is gone….that was in the past….I cannot change it….so I need not hold onto it…I can let it go…..and sin no more….”  And just so you know, after having to take a two-semester course in religion in college years ago, I was fortunate to have learned from people who were not teaching faith but teaching facts.  My teacher explained “the concept of sin was very different from the one we have now….sin was anything that caused harm to your soul…anger, jealousy….pain, envy…..it didn’t have the objectified sense of judgement attached.”  It seemed that we can cause hurt to our very tender circuitry if we aren’t careful.  I noted that as I awoke I became incredibly sensitive to all kinds of stimuli.  I could look at things and be overcome with bliss and wonder or incredible hurt.  I stopped watching t.v., I stopped watching news and all the rest.  I was jut so open and its circuitry was just so vibrant and alive in me.  I had to be careful what I looked at, what I felt.  It was like all my senses were sharper and more alive.  What was a whisper could be heard as a scream.  This was what all of this cleaning of the circuitry was doing to me, for me.  As ego stepped back, so much just slipped and fell away.

To understand this, I am reminded of this dream that was told to me once.  this guy had this recurring dream that was a bit of a nightmare.  In it, he was pursued by a pack of angry werewolves.  What is more scary than werewolves?  Zombies?  Well anyway, he was menaced by these dreams.  Over and over they would plague him.  Then, one night, as he found himself cornered by a pack of these werewolves, the alpha male walked up to him with this grimacing look on his face.  He moved closer and closer to the guy and as he did this, he noticed that he could see his reflection in the eyes of the werewolf.  What he found so peculiar was that HE looked like a werewolf too!  Then, quite suddenly, the dream changed.  The grimaces on the wolves turned into smiles as the man relaxed and took off hooting and howling with his mates as they took off through the forest.  What he realized was that the thing that he feared most, he WAS.  By just letting himself BE this thing, he gave up all resistance to is and it took on an entirely different gloss.  So okay, maybe he was a wild animal deep down, but once he realized this and embraced it, it wasn’t nearly so bad as what was happening when he was resisting it.  It was in resisting it that he was getting scary dreams, fear, and anxiety.  He integrated the shadow into himself and then realized there really wasn’t anything to fear.  So it seems we embrace and accept at a deep level so that the nature of whatever it is we feel has the opportunity to change.  And after all, isn’t is ALL just energy?  Isn’t it all in how we mold and shape it?  For me at least, kundalini is the opportunity to change how I feel about what it was I have created in the PAST.  This is all about dissolving the PAST so that I can have a more vibrant PRESENT.  By doing that, I am not affected in big and small ways by that back log of material silently and perhaps subconsciously playing like a loop or program in the backs of my mind or heart, or sacral, or root, or solar plexus, or throat chakra.

But don’t get me wrong; there is more work to do.  More more more.  And the thing is, I am back to it, learning more than ever the things that will absolutely hang me up and cause me hurt and pain and that NOW is the time for letting all of that simply go and live a radically different life.  So in dream, I get the wonderful opportunity to be reminded of the old material that remains and instead of feeling defeated over something remaining from two decades ago, I feel like a librarian who finds some dusty old novel in the back stacks, smiles and holds the book for a few moments while whispering, “you were such a great story weren’t you?  We thought you were the cat’s pajamas, and now look at you…..” and with that, it gets put on the cart and taken to the curb.  Yes, its a good little book, and perhaps someone else might like it, but there is just no more room for it in this library.  The process in all of this is changing how we feel about things.  If I am afraid of something in a dream, I know that I have to conquer that fear somehow.  I have to know it is not something to fear anymore because that very fear blocks energy.  As I change my perceptions of something, it also correspondingly changes some small aspect of my life.  Piece by piece, the events in my life take on a very different quality.