Death & Bliss

I had allowed the shadow of death to knock me from my perch. It happened as a gradual accretion, a belief based on coincidental symptoms that had emerged over the last two years that I might be sick and that I might die from what the symptoms were suggesting that I had. I have spent weeks trying to feel out if it even feels right to write about this. There was, I realize some unrecognized silliness involved, too. This is not something that I have mentioned to but a few people in my life.

It’s true. I began having symptoms for what I thought was for a type of intestinal cancer. Normally very healthy, I didn’t carry health insurance. It was tricky to sign up for: you can only sign up November through December. Those are the two busiest months in my studio business, and for as lame as it sounds, I missed the signup dates two years running. I knew the clock was ticking and yet I was also being pulled into a feeling of inevitability.

I knew that the only way I was ever going to see a doctor was with the right insurance. The importance of this was driven home by something I learned about first-hand about cancer diagnosis and treatment. A family had come to me this past year to ask that I put the ashes of their loved one into molten glass, something I do with something called Journey Glass. I saw during a visit to the studio how they had tried to keep their loved one alive with chemo treatments. When she finally passed, her husband was 1.2 million dollars in debt. It was startlingly easy to do with the cost of a single dose of IV administered chemo at nineteen thousand dollars. They went into receivership just trying to keep her alive. I knew the only way I would see a doctor was with insurance. I also knew every case was unique, and I knew the clock was ticking. The back story on this was that I could feel a block in a region of my body corresponding to the LV 12 meridian point and I had had several therapists work in and around that energy line as early as 2013 onward. I could FEEL the energetic block for a while before it manifested into a physical malady. Being me, I assumed the worst instead of staying open and receptive.

The symptoms were all consistent with cancer, though. When I would research the symptoms, this was all that ever came up with. How could it be anything but that? After two years of this dogging me, I finally was able to see a doctor who ordered a battery of tests. The abdominal pain had gotten so bad that I was having difficulty using bliss states to ameliorate the pain. This tossed a few more pints of gas on the fire of my fears. It turned out, though, that it was just that; an unfounded concern based on symptoms that sounded nearly identical to the “big C.”

One big reason why I fell for this was that in years past, as I worked through blocked energy with kundalini assisting, I could feel the presence of the blocked energy in what I identified was the LV 12 region of the meridian system. I had been to an acupuncturist, which did result in some releases, and then later I was guided to a Kahuna healer whose therapy room was within walking distance of my home. Of all the people out there, I had a therapist who knew and understood energy work using a modality that focused on the balance between yin and yang energies, which was exactly what I had been hoping to find. She had lived in New Zealand where she first learned her craft. Here she was, within walking distance of my home. She too helped me when a group of Reiki healers could only go so far. I wrote a few years ago about how one of these healers admonished me to not “go trying to find problems where problems didn’t exist” because she could not feel the presence of the block herself. I thanked her and the rest of the crew. A month later I found Violet, my Kahuna healer, who felt the block and went straight to work letting a portion of it go. There was still something there that I could feel vividly, that remained. About a year later, another energy healer worked on this area of my body, revealing still more material stored there. That, too, was a welcome relief. I said that I was concerned about moving this block because I was afraid it could wind up turning into disease and kill me. Because of some cancer in my family, my mind went to that as the potential invisible culprit. It was there that things stayed and after a few more years, I had the uneasy sense that the energy was turning into a physical symptom of illness. I was ready for the worst, which has been one of the Achilles heels in my life. Why had I fallen for the negative instead of remaining open to the possibilities?

Somewhere along the line I allowed this niggling fear to eat away at my bliss, the same kind of bliss that I felt when an angelic presence entered my room one early morning at four a.m. and did to me the same thing that I would later read had happened to St Theresa of Avilla. An arrow had been thrust into her heart, which set her ablaze with bliss and a love for God. Her insides felt as though they were being drawn out of her. I had the same experience, except that my angelic presence pulled something that felt like my insides out of me, leaving me emptied of something I knew was old past material. It was this experience with that angelic being that I was able to taste a bliss that was beyond all bliss. It was that one experience that forever changed me from that moment forward, leaving me to reach for some semblance of that bliss felt on the morning of Good Friday in 2008, about a year after kundalini first rose in me. It showed me that I didn’t need to be a believer, much like Paul wasn’t a believer either, but was nonetheless struck by a blinding light which changed his life forever. I am not suggesting that I am a Paul, no, but rather to underscore that belief is not a prerequisite (like it was with Paul). It is something that is in all of us, a potential which is revealed in each of us just as Paul described it as the Christ that was revealed in him in that moment. We don’t get it by looking outside of ourselves, but by always looking within to find the “architecture,” the structure in our own consciousness that makes such a state possible. The reward is this brilliant bliss that heals and transforms. It humbles, too, while opened the mind to our greater potential. It’s as though we often suffer at the hands of our limitations, of feeling cut off somehow from a quality that we in truth have but do not realize that we have. I had allowed myself to drift from that perch that I had found. I am reminded that this is a daily challenge to always attune myself to this quality and to do so in silence and in thanksgiving.

So finally, I was able to go to a doctor. Tests were ordered up, a whole battery of them. One by one, the results came in: negative for cancer. I was happy to have been wrong! I had reached a place in life where the world just seemed like it was going off the rails. It was like the world was going mad to me, and it was disheartening to witness it all. I saw how terrible people were being to one another in the midst of a pandemic, I saw how those who questioned the mainstream narrative were being treated much like any group in our past has been treated: they were the enemy. Why? Why was one narrative being pushed so hard? Why was early treatment being treated as though it was the worst possible thing a person could do to themselves or to others? Doctors lost their ability to practice medicine. People were deplatformed from social media sites for speaking up about alternatives. I read meta studies that showed the efficacy of other methods. And why not? How had so many seemed to have lost their minds? Fear. That’s what happened. In fact, I had also fallen for the power of fear myself with the concern that I had cancer, so I wasn’t immune from this. My condition all seemed to fit a given illness trajectory, except fear kept me from considering other alternatives that could have led me to different conclusions or the possibility of them. It took tests to show that my fear was unfounded. All of this left me feeling like maybe leaving this life might not be such a bad thing.

I know how that sounds, but if you know me, you know that working with kundalini left me largely free from the fear of death. I knew what waited for me on the other side of all of this. And yet, I was not completely immune from fear about something else. So? It was for me a big lesson, an important one, and it had more to do with not giving up so fast, to stay with the challenge that this life offered me. The lesson was one of having a better attitude. The rest, I have come to learn involves availing myself of how to help my body heal from a couple of issues that created the symptoms that I thought might be cancer related.

Despite this, I had already begun to have big shifts in my life, with an ex who finally came to apologize to me for her treatment, something I never thought could or would happen. This had happened in part as a result of what power truth has in our lives. We can run from the truth, but it gets harder and harder to hide. Eventually it eats away at your peace, which was predicated on something that was false. I am not suggesting that karma is something that is some righteousness coming to take anyone down, but rather that when we hide from the truth, the truth stalks us since that truth is so important for our happiness and wellbeing. My ex’s life had been whittled away because of living an untruth and seeking to promulgate untruths about me. I wrote about this recently, just as it caused me to consider the effect the same acts others have perpetrated in my life which involved being dishonest. Would it stalk them too? Of course, but that wasn’t my story and they were out of my orbit, thankfully. I too wasn’t being honest about my truer nature and had allowed the worst of my fears to grip me. Luckily, I was able to dispel those fears once and for all. I mention this recent event with my ex because in that moment I felt this great weight lift, and when that happens, many more other things often tend to have a way of happening, too. But as for my condition, this swirl of concern over my health and mortality? It showed me that there is something beyond the pinched view I had in regards to what my ex had done and I read this event as my soul finally being heard before I might kick the bucket. But there was another possibility beyond my thinking that this was a presage to some kind of transition. Silly me.

I had so much to do, I thought, so much left to do that my soul came here in physical form to work through. I had several writing projects hanging over my head and I really needed to finish those so I could tick them off my soul contract. I had not spoken to anyone about these concerns except for just a few people, and none of them in my family. I didn’t want anyone to worry, least of all my daughter who was getting ready to finish up her last semester at college. I figured if it was bad like I feared, then I would have to look at chemo and surgery perhaps, and that would be a bridge I would have to cross once I got there. No use in setting off alarms and distracting people. On the other hand, I still considered this could be something else, so I stayed quiet. I am glad that I did. I am also glad I was able to get the question cleared up.

This experience has helped to also underline the importance of taking care of my gut health because my gut has felt like it has been zapped with electricity since the rise of kundalini 15 years ago. Those who practice Chi Gung claim that chi resides in the gut, and it may be that it exists as a kind of biological battery of sorts. I had developed symptoms of nausea after awakening (kundalini flue they call it), as well as a five month period where my body stopped feeling hunger, a period of time that led to the shedding of loads of blocked energy and also helping my system adjust to this new normal. The zapping of my gut though was always an issue, one that came and went, and now as I write this I find that the many notes that I wrote in my journal about way of supporting good gut health are now coming in handy. While I am not a doctor, I can feel how food effects my system and how I need to change my diet a little more. Some of this involves getting rid of wheat as a possible culprit for one aspect of my symptoms, another involves supporting healthy gut bacteria. There is more work to do, and my hope is that I can heal a very cranky system that has led me to a great deal of discomfort at times.

I remain concerned about the state of the world, one that feels like it is somehow running off the rails emotionally. I see groups seeking to seize control of the narrative in order to direct policy in a global way that I frankly find beyond worrisome. When I see leaders embracing a green ideology while at the same time banning the use of fossil fuels while they themselves are opening up new markets for their own liquified natural gas in Europe, I see hypocricy. When I see passports for tracking our carbon footprint and whether someone has had a vaccine, I see another form of control and the loss of freedom in the process. Freedom is messy, but the ability to speak freely even though it means listening to voices we do not agree with is the cornerstone of our form of government here in the U.S. and in other democratic societies. Without dialog we lose the means of thrashing through our challenges in a broader way, imperfect though it may be, and even if it inconveniences our own personal values. We have so much promise as a species and yet, if we are not free to work through our challenges in an open way, we lose the very thing that will help us to find new solutions to old problems. We have so much potential and I hate to think that we as a species might squander it. Only through freedom do I sense that we will open up the lanes of possibility which could lead us to a brighter tomorrow.

My big lesson in all of this is not to shrink from controversy, nor to allow my own inner fear get the best of me. Only by being neutral and open will I be able to see with clearer eyes. I am glad that I was wrong, at least on this one thing. There is a bliss that exists at the center of our being. So many have been cut off from this fundamental nature, and so often fear is the killer of this bliss. But even death does not stop it, as this too is part of the natural order of our existence. For myself, I am getting back to the pass of bliss again as the way through, but not around my own challenges. It is in the bliss state that I find my own mind is expanded and curiously, my own intuitive powers strengthened. It is as it has always been, this new mind birthed from the union of opposites in our consciousness. This bliss represents the fullest expression of the synthesis that takes hold of those who “wake up” and find their consciousness changed in a twinkling. I think this is the way through for many of us, and hopefully it will be the way for many more to follow.

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You have lived in wonder

captured by its magic

carried by its vitality

that was both you

and the cosmos upon which you rode…

 

Long before you were taught

you knew.

More was known in the nurseries of you infancy

than could be scarcely dreamed

by those who had grown older

and had forgotten.

But we all know what is true,

a truth that lives in marrow and sinew,

the fiber of your whole being

unbounded by the limits of belief.

Its reality cannot be spoken in mere words

but in the syllables of feeling

and the syntax of awe.

 

Somewhere you grew up and set aside those dreams

which were so precious

necessary for knowing what you are

as you tried to grow up…

but since you forgot or lay aside what you knew

you abandoned something

necessary

and free.

 

You knew once that no one could tell you how you must be

for it was self-evident

so sure.

But doubt took its place

and it took years to shake that off

and now here you stand

knowing that the poetry of your soul

is contained in every rock and river

in butterflies

whirlwinds

and change.

The earth speaks to you

through you

like a divine marriage

as the stars whirl overhead

in their endless dance of time.

 

You lived a mystic existence

and nothing offended you

save for forgetfulness

of what we truly are.

 

This is why the realm of fairie

is so real to the young

and the world of myth

stands so close to the world of the child.

There are greater truths told in tale such as these

than in any of our books written by older hands

and darkened hearts.

 

In all of this

there was light

and unbearable lightness

which was its own reward.

But it seems that forgetting became its own passage

to teach us of the contrast

that we might know the continuity of our own consciousness

with all things

and then  find ourselves joined to it,

merging with nature,

speaking its own language…

which is the same language of the heart of the child.

Was there a purpose in being dislocated from the Beloved?

 

Nothing can stand between you and this world again

if you so choose it.

It may not be the readily-crossed path

but it is the only one that matters most

for there existed love and joy and  abundance wonder and awe

whose language you spoke so fluently.

The world need not be the danger you grew to believe

but a place that supports you

and conspires to see you succeed.

Your hands became the bird wings that fluttered in the air, your eyelids grew heavy like leaves in Autumn…and you knew that you were truly wedded to life and life to you as your naked feet rested firm and loving on the ancient ground.

This is the nature of all creativity

regardless of how it expresses itself.

We each choose whether to bring it to the purpose of light

or the dark.

In each, we so our consequences

and so learn by them

to return again with different choices

and brighter souls.

While the world has innumerable challenges and threats

you do not need to place yourself where danger resides

for even the wisdom of children know

that in the sweetness of the honey

lies also the threat of a sting.

But this is not enough to make the world evil or bad

but filled with people who each have their own level of awareness

and knowing.

I speak to the child that is so necessary to kindle

new worlds

and deeper love.

 

Curled up within the world that we know are those codes which we can tap into

limitless knowledge for building a new world.

Hard-heads may choose to prevail

but no one needs to define your existence.

So listen to your intuition

to the vibrancy contained in your childhood

when limits were unknown

and everything seemed possible.

It can be so again

when you choose to live a life

unbounded by belief

and inspired by this secret knowledge resting in the heart

that we once believed could only exist

in childhood’s dream.

 

Within or Without

I ask you, where is the love you seek?  Is it something that you seek in the world?  Are you on a journey to find this perfect love?  It is a curious thing to find that as long as one seeks, what one finds is itself a mirror of all of their own currently realized potentials, hopes and dreams.  We look out on the world and say we cannot find this perfect love, that it seems to always come up short, or it has remained elusive.  Somehow, in loving, we wind up feeling dissatisfied somehow.  In loving, we find we are less than able to find that deepest of places we know surely exists within us, which is the power to feel incredible ecstasy, remarkable presence that is magical that transports us to what we know inside of us is true.  Because we create our own reality, what we see outwardly is a reflection of what we are inside of us.  If we hope for love but wind up coming up short, we need only look deeper within for the cause.  When we cease looking for love outwardly and seek to love ourselves perfectly, this naturally leads to healing all of the places within that keeps us from knowing this love all around us because what the world is, is a mirror of us, even though this might seem impossible.  We must  find love to be perfect within us before we can find love perfectly from without.  Being able to realize this means doing the work of removing the competing memes and signals that exist like small subroutines in our subconscious that play throughout our day whether we are aware of it or not.  It seems I had grown accustomed to a near-constant barrage of negative thoughts for years.  I had simply grown used to it, and numbed by it.  When I awoke, this numbing down began to reverse itself so that I could feel what I had denied for so long.  While hard, it was also itself a life-saver.  Awareness is huge in learning how to heal.

I have been witness to the undoing of a vast array of possibilities and outcomes, often stopped dead in their tracks by a shifting inner world, not a shifting outer world.  As I changed, the world around me changed, and it would happen the moment that something in me shifted, healed, or was let go.  All of these little feelings that we have like “I so want to be loved, but deep down, I feel like I am somehow not worthy of it’ is just the cocktail of ingredients that leaves a person locked in a search for love but never finding it.  How can you know this love if you yourself do not first feel it within?  And what might happen, do you think, when we stopped seeking to be filled by things outside of ourselves and begin filling ourselves on our own, of seeing that we already ARE love, that we can at any time become this love by doing one thing; letting go of the fear that we carry inside of us.

The only thing that EVER scattered love was fear. We have all kinds of fear, but it all resolves back into one common source.  The journey to love is a journey within first.  Curiously, as we do this, we find the very kind of love outside that we find inside.  If that love is limited through fear, or shot down out of the sky by feelings of lack of worth, well it just so happens that this love actually also gets shot down in our lives at some point or another. Maybe we feel we do deserve love but fear more inwardly that all love ends and will go away eventually,  and allow ourselves to feel it for a time but wait, secretly, for the day when that love goes away, and so in our lives, we watch as love dies and goes away, which is itself a perfect script to the one playing out inside of us in terms of our own hidden expectations. The anxiety that things will somehow be less than perfect can lead us to meeting people who will dutifully play this scenario out with us.  It isn’t that we somehow MAKE Them be anything else than what they are, no, we simply attract those elements within a person, or even event, that matches the lack or fear within us. But in just the same way that we can fear, we can also choose to release this fear.  As we do, events begin to change.  We then begin to live a life that is not cloaked in fear ( we are bolstered by each and every release of fear so that it becomes easier to release more of the remaining material…a real plus!).   When I saw all of this in action in my life I was amazed to see how we have an ability for choosing certain people over others who will, perhaps years in the future, do exactly what we fear they will do.  And yet, all of this can be reversed and played the other way!  Just as we might play the music of our lives in discord, we can also choose to play it in harmony.  It all winds up coming down to a choice, but a choice we are not aware of making in the moment as we attract what we are inside.

So ask yourself how you can live abundantly, how your own thoughts sabotage you, and offer you up something less than what you wish for in your heart.  Consider thinking of love as something that is like a wellspring within you, a bubbling stream that flows with abundance instead of one that gets choked off through fear.  Consider that you come to life through being full instead of empty and seeking to be filled by people and things, and when you do this, you attract those things that will always, themselves, be naturally abundant.

Doing this means digging down inside of yourself and being emotionally honest.  For as much as some will say that emotion is the downfall of so many, emotion is merely the fuel for propelling you through your life.  Emotion is the cosmic propellant and if you put fear behind it, then the journey will be fearful.  If you put love behind it, it will be one of love.  Emotion is the means by which we propel  our thoughts onto the canvas of reality.  So often our emotions reflect fear and pain and worry instead of courage, joy, and love. The world is your canvass, and you are the one who paints upon it. Will  it be dark or light colors?  Once you have enough experiences with clearing old emotional blocks, you can begin to see a gradual change in how your life unfolds.  If you can get into the bigger blocks and root them out, you will see bigger changes.  It is true that some, many, blocks are small ones and we are littered with them, and that the changes in the world around us will happen in a proportional way, so it takes the very force of love within us to keep us moving.  Perhaps this is where a little faith can take you a long way.

This is not always an easy path because of the sheer accumulation of material we carry, but the truth is, you got into it, you can also get out.  I am doing this very thing, and while in some ways I sometimes wish I could have a more normal life, I also know that this life is itself pretty special.  Something in me says “You must have known you would be up for the job or else you would not be here doing this great work of your soul…”  Something inside of me must know that this life becomes the great pivot point for changing the outcome of countless other lives and realities.  Shored up by this sense, I go forward puzzle piece by puzzle piece as the scene of my being is set right.  When I first began this process seven years ago, the scene I was shown was that of a congested warehouse full of material, an “inventory” of items that was to be my work to clear out of my being.

All of the material I have removed has been all of the material that serves to compete with anything that is less than love.  At first it felt daunting to know so much existed to clear away, but now as I look back into it, things are different. There is more room to feel one thing and one thing only; love.  And the more I am able to clear those old voices of fear and worry away, there is less and less in my inner space that is anything less than love.  I am here to tell you its a process, and no I am not completely finished.  Are we ever?  It’s hard for me to really answer that, but my sense is that all of this results in greater and greater awareness of something about ourselves that the clearing away of old material helps to provide a clearer view.  Since every release has been an epiphany moment, I know that this is likely how it will always be; a  continuous resolving of awareness about what I am, how I am, and the love that exists within me just waiting to express itself.

As each competing meme or fear or small piece of pre-programmed negative material is cleared out of my light body and awareness, I find that I am increasingly more aware of a central force in all of life that is what we can align to. Some might want to call this the divine, or God, or any number of things.  While it could certainly seem to be that, I am less able to discern exactly what it is.  Maybe it is an aspect of my higher self, perhaps it is an aspect of ALL life and all being. What I do know is that I can feel my being seeking to be in closer and closer union with this force and that this one feeling is itself the central form of yoga I practice.  I do not do it through postures or methods, I simply do it through feeling since it seems to me that it is out of feeling that so many things emerge and flow.  The feeling of this central force is guiding and supportive and loving. By remaining aligned to it, my life improves.  I continue moving forward, not always knowing what is next, but anxious to know what waits for me.

Currently, there is a larger current in the world where the Collective Awareness or Self of human kind is waking up to itself.  As more people begin to see or sense this connection, they are naturally brought to the realization of how everything is connected both inwardly and outwardly.  The realization comes that all of what we see is because of something much larger than all of us, but is part of a life that can sweep us all up and raise us all up if we do one thing; choose love over fear. As more people join this current of awareness, the stronger that it gets.  It is part of a brilliant form of intelligence and is itself connected to still larger forms of awareness.  Knowing one can lead to knowing All.  It is an inner crystalline or energetic matrix that is the very web of life in the same way that your own body is crisscrossed by invisible lines of force that make up what is called your light body.  This is the force that binds all things together, and while that may make me sound like I am slipping into a Star Wars movie character, truth is truth.  This event is remarkable and can be pushed forward by each person simply waking up to a bigger picture.  At no time in earths history (and if not the first, it has been a very long time since) has there been a better time for waking up in this way.  But waking up to what?  It really is very simple; we are waking up to love as a powerful force that can carry us and strengthen us.  It is, after all, what we are in our truest sense, and is one that you get to choose!

Being Alive

The goal of most people who seek is to find those things that are missing in their life that will bring them to a new place of fulfillment spiritually.  As a seeker, I did not always know exactly what this thing was I was seeking except that I had this very instinctual sense that it was somehow up ahead and I was still trying to find it. I considered, too, that all of life may be like this; a constant state of becoming and seeking. Something pulled me forward in a very specific way.  My search was a very private affair since it took me into areas I realized most people didn’t either seem to go or talk about.  People didn’t seem like they were very well oriented to this other world of experience.

I know now that my seeking was stilled one I awakened. It didn’t happen all at once, but it happened, and it was a shift that was about thirty five years in the making.  The tension pulling me forward to know, to discover, had changed in a pretty significant way.  What I sought in an outward way resolved back into my own journey. What I found was a much simpler thing than what I thought I might have been looking for, even if I really had not preformed idea what it was I was looking for, only that I knew that whatever it was I needed was not going to be found in the usual way.

I have come to realize that my past has been a kind of presage for knowing how to be in the world and that I had accumulated the tools necessary for the unfolding of all of this.  Perhaps it just provides me with a perspective that is good for me.  For whatever it is worth, I have been provided with some things that I think we are missing.  Like how to be alive.

Most of what has held me back from embracing awakening in the beginning, and even some today, is fear.  Fear serves to keep me from fully embracing life, and I think it does this for all of us. The curious thing about fear is that it is often not recognized but is part of our tendency to project it outward onto the world in such a way that it becomes more like a feature IN the world than IN us.  This way we can tell ourselves that the world is a dangerous place and pull back from it rather than taking full responsibility for that fear and all it represents. Carl Jung was all over this, and it is something I see in people, including myself, as I go through life.

Contrary to conventional thinking, our reincarnational lives are not as entirely linear as we might think.  That is, our lives are not just a progression from one lesson to another as we move from point A to point B.  I think we have trained ourselves to think this way because of how the left brain works and how our rational processes work that fill that mind and inform how it processes information. This is more a belief than anything based in real fact.  Some lives can be lived that bring up very hard karma and in so doing, can often overcome a person and with free choice, we can lead a diminished life, while in a previous life we may have lived a life that was relatively free from these karmic tendencies due to the choices we made.  I have had the unique opportunity in my life to have known someone as a small child who people in my life knew well who died and returned many years later as a new person. I wont go into how or why I know this simply due to brevities sake, but only know that it is not just a guess but something that has been confirmed through a variety of sources. What is interesting is how similar this person’s karma has been from that previous life into the one today.  What is also curious, too, is how differently that person has chosen to respond to that karma this time around. In many ways, this person has taken something that did not affect him as much in a previous life and is now living a life where the same unresolved karma is affecting his life in a much bigger, harder, and more obvious way.  The choices were different, the challenges this time are perhaps more intense, the people involved are a little different, too, but the energy is all the same because the karma is all the same.  In one life the karmic flames was relatively understated while today the flames grow into huge drama. I have also observed similar differences in my own life experience.

When I was 18 years old I had a past life memory that fell into my lap.  It came entirely out of left field and was in actuality more a warp in time than just a replay of some past event.  It is something I write about in my book Waking the Infinite.  I mention this partly because it helps to underscore how it is that we can actually move through time to affect change in our lives.  I have actually used this principle to good effect in dreaming to go back into my earlier life to bring change in the dream life of myself when I was younger.  We may not have figured out how to take mass through time, but we are simply not limited when it comes to energy, and consciousness is energy.  Consciousness, then, is not bound by time, only by awareness or belief. This memory was from a time when the Native cultures were encountering the whites for the first time and the big change was swiftly coming upon the New World as the Europeans called it. As you know, even before contact with Whites the lives of Native Americans were changing with the spread of chicken pox and mumps which often served to wipe out entire groups of Native People.  What didn’t get them through disease, was done by the near incompatibility of the two world views of White and Red. The memories I had were in series and would help me to piece together something in my present life today that would help me with my work and is something I write about. It goes to the nature of who we are and what we are.  Part of it came through an unusual vision about the Thunder Beings.

What has helped me the most about having had this contact with this past life is just how incredibly alive these people were. The idea of living in fear was like being sick in that culture; you did everything you could do to cure yourself of it.  My people were called by other clans or tribes “the killers” and “grizzlies.” What I know, though, is that when we do not understand something, we can mislabel it, adding in our own unresolved fears.  Whites called most Indians savages, but they refused to realize that this seemingly savage behavior was part culture clash and part self preservation.  The Whites were there to take land and a way of life.

I can remember feeling fear when I recalled the looks in the eyes of some of the people I knew. Something about their eyes was startling.  I knew in an instant that this look comes about as a result of someone who is incredibly present and alive.  These people had been living as individual sovereign beings with no one ruling over them.  Native society, at least in my experience, was one where leadership was not about agendas in the usual way we encounter in politics. There was less fragmentation between spiritual belief and physical life.  The way of living so close to the earth also meant that a person was awake and aware of everything around them since this toolkit was important for survival. Tom Brown who is the author of a number of books about his experiences with a Native American man who was a tracker and who taught him his skills describes how it seemed he and his teacher seemed to live in two different worlds at first.  His teacher, Stalking Wolf, was aware of an entirely different set of sensory inputs than he as he struggled at first to “tune in” the world that his teacher was seeking to show him.  These were not merely states of awareness that were put on conveniently, but were part of life, part of a much more engaged form of sensory awareness.

There has been and continues to be an intense fascination with Native culture on the part of Whites.  This is so, I feel, because of an intuitive sense that these cultures had what we have been missing and that we all crave something deep down inside of us, which is essentially about living a fuller and more richer kind of life. One of the things I think that the old way can offer is how to learn to live a life that is more whole, more integrated and thus potentially more vibrant and alive.

The advantages to living in this way were many.  One is that by living so close to the earth the body was in finely tuned shape. The senses were sharp and the mind was in the moment. Moment by moment one lived in a state of being that was free of a lot of the fears and taboos normally associated with life.  Since everyone was encouraged to seek the truth from the Source through dream work, observation in nature, or the vision quest, there was a tendency for people to honor the bit of insight each person dug up. Each path was lived based on these kinds of promptings, and I think that as a result, on balance, it helped to support a greater level of individual authenticity.

Fear is what divides us, keeping us from embracing life more fully. Fear keeps minds shut down and fear serves a world of purposes that are not terribly freeing. Freedom, on the other hand opens up the mind and the heart and love can only thrive most powerfully when we remain free.  There is less struggle, fewer issues that come up that are impediments to love.  We are less neurotic, we hold fewer distortive beliefs about how the world works and we are able to see what is instead of what we are. Being able to have the courage to just be yourself is the most freeing thing a person can experience in life.  So often, because of our fear, we hold back, we conform, we worry about what others think of us or might say.  When you can be authentic and just be yourself, you send a signal that you are ready for those things that will match that level of authenticity.  Quite naturally, the world conspires to assist you in this as your own world changes.  The matrix or canvas that you are creating moment by moment then can change because of the change in you.  You are free to create differently.  Now some have called this matrix an illusion, and I think that is fine if you want to think that it is not real, but I prefer to think of it as a creation, which is a fundamental feature of our being and part of our individuality and freewill.  If life is a creation, then you are free to create differently, right?  It isn’t that what we see isn’t real, but that it is responding moment by moment to how we are and if we change what we are, the world around us also changes.  The tree outside will still remain, but will have something that it did not have the day before.  Layer by layer, life can change in subtle and then in more overt and obvious ways.  Getting started and sticking to your guns is I think the only way that you will ever really know if what I am telling you is on the mark or not.

As for myself, living life without fear has been the core of my work over the last six years, and being able to remove that backlog of material in order to see a clearer version of what is possible for me seems to me to be the one way that I am focused in my day to day life.