The Case For A Private Teaching By Jesus Gets Stronger

One outcome of my awakening experience was my personal discovery of books from early Christianity that had been largely unknown until a large cache were discovered in the desert of Egypt in 1945. One book purported to be the secret teachings of Jesus to his innermost circle. What I realized, or thought I did, was that these books were describing awakening with a pretty high degree of specificity. It wasn’t only that, but how they appeared to veil the teachings in many cases by using descriptions that made it difficult for anyone not having the experience to even know what the writers were refering to. It was to my mind like a way of coding the teachings just enough that it made it hard to understand. This may have been intentional, but it could also have been the result of not having a specific enough vocabulary with which to do the describing.

This might sound strange, but let me give you an example for what I mean. Not long into awakening, me and a person who awoke along with me (a country apart, didn’t know each other, this all happened from a distance) we both referred to what was happening to us as “it.” That was how sophisticated our vocabulary was. We had no reference point, no context, nor a teaching to guide us. Overnight, innexplicably, we had a tellepathic connection (which was proven numerous times each week). “It” fit though, because how on earth would you describe “this” (we used that term also)? It also kept what was happening to us from prying eyes and ears since who would understand or believe it? There was no real context in which to put it in. When that’s the case, you create a language or vocabulary for it much like people who are dealing with it do today (witness the use of words like “downloads” and “portals” to refer to aspects of the experience). You create your own vocabulary to help describe what is happening to you.

How could it be, I wondered, that these books were described as heresy by certain people within the church when they so clearly revealed a sophisticated understanding of a very rare state of being?

When I first found these books and realized they were pretty clearly describing my state, I considered that it was a conspiracy that they were not just shoved aside, but that in many cases, the books that were part of an unnacceptable take on Christian thought were destroyed. Now however, I am realizing it was little more than a conspiracy of ignorance…and an easy trap to fall for by anyone who was not in the know, who hadn’t had the experience, or wasn’t initiated into the system.

Was it as many scholars have asserted, that these books were jibberish, mere speculation, and could not be tied to Jesus at all? Was it true that as some Orthodox apologists have said, that these people, called “Gnostics” were late-comers? Were they forging documents, slapping Jesus’s name on them in order to give their own “wild speculations and fantasies” more caché?

I have learned that the opposition will say just about anything in order to put a good man or woman down. Maybe this speculation was right, and my initial gut sense was all wrong. There were times when this certainly appeared to be the case.

This question put me on a 15 year journey where I made myself familiar with early Christianity. I didn’t spend years in seminary getting my doctorate in divinity, nor did I learn Greek or Hebrew. I knew next to nothing about the field and I just couldn’t square my sense that these early Christians were on to something of immense importance versus what those in what would become known as the Orthodox church had to say about these teachings. Something didn’t add up.

I have realized that while I lack the background in the history of early Christianity that many scholars in the field have, I have something most (perhaps nearly all) do not: I have the experience of awakening with all of its dizzying effects, signs, and symptoms. I have read at length even scholars who specialize in the Gnostic texts speculating about the meanings of the gospel of Thomas or Philip. My sense from the beginning was that these Gnostics were the real deal, and that these works constitutes a “lost Christianity” as Bart Ehrman has described it. Having said this, I will also say that they go far afield from the words of Jesus as we have come to know them. The difference between an esoteric system and an exoteric one (the Gnostics as we refer to them ate esoteric) is that esoteric systems have much greater production of documents because the followers keep having experiences and writing about them. In the case of these early Christians, they believed that the Christ was revealed to be within a person (some Gnostics considered Paul to be a bit of a hero because he writes in his letters that God revealed to him the Christ which was within him when he was struck by a blinding light on his way to Damascus). For the Gnostics, then, the crucifixion lost much of its importance because they found salvation from the awakening to the indwelling Christ.

I ask you: what teaching by Jesus ever made anything appear to be outside of ones self? The kingdom was all within one, and seeking was done inwardly. Those who “seek him” were seeking a quality that was already there. It is worth noting that this is precisely what most Eastern traditions that describe awakening say. It is also a completely different story that Orthodox Christians have put forward since about 100-130 A.D.

I will say, however, that there were times in my work on this subject where it looked like the Gnostics were a later “invention” or movement and could not be definitively pinned to Jesus. I was, for a time, considering that for as insightful as they were, there just wasn’t a connection to Jesus’s life. I got used to the idea that these were amazing people who spun their own insights into what the Christ was all about. Maybe they were a seperate development that still managed to “get there” even though they came later.

That was before I found out about the work of Walter Bauer who did a study or survey of documents from earliest Christianity, who, in the 1930’s (and before the discovery in 1945 of this cache of early books in Egypt) determined that heresy came first and Orthodoxy came later. Orthodoxy, based on Bauer’s work, placed Orthodoxy a hundred years after the heretics (give or take a decade or two). Source: Orthodoxy & Heresy In Earliest Christianity

Heresy has always been described by the church as that branch off of the “main vine” that represents a divergence from the central truths of the dogma (see church father Origen since he originated this concept). This begged the question: how could this be so in light of what Bauer found? This may have been the result of the church, a group within it, seeking to hide the truth about how things were in the early days of the movement. It could have been as simple as ignorance by another group who didn’t have the deeper teachings (and thus could easily not understand them even when they saw them).

Then there is the troubling reality that Bart Ehrman points out in his book Jesus Interupted which is that most of the discoveries we have made in the last 100 years of Christian documents are nearly all Gnostic (which is used to describe this group of Christians today—gnosticism meaning ‘one who knows’ or who has inner knowledge not attained through books or instruction alone). Ehrman asks pointedly, did the Orthodoxy not have anything to say that there have been so few new discoveries of Orthodox books or letters during the same time period? It is plausible, then, that Gnosticism was far more robust, engaged, and involved in the matters of Christian thought than the early heresy hunters would have us believe. The historical record is certainly showing us this in spades in this regard. In Bauer’s work he points out letters that show that the church gave up trying to convert Asia Minor because the heretics were so numerous and resistant to their message. It would be easy to just say they were deluded and utterly lost, but it hides the fact that this was a situation that had always been described as no big deal by those in the Orthodox wing of the church, something more like a few flies that needed to be swatted away as the Orthodoxy has tried to represent it as. No, “heresy” was much more developed than Orthodoxy was, and at a very early period. It begs the question as to which tradition was the original or earliest one.

When I think about what happens to our leaders today it is easy to see how each side in a political campaign seeks to demonize and dethrone the leader who is in the opposition. Those with the loudest voices wind up being heard and believed. We are well aware of the sentiment that the winners of a war get to tell the history as they want it told.

Orthodoxy won the war of ideas not because their thinking was superior but because they were more worldly and systematic in their willingness to take down what they considered an opponent. You can easily see just how harsh the rhetoric was by reading the writings of these noted antiheretics like Tertulian, St. Justin, and others like them. In fact, we know a lot about early Christian “heretics” because the diatribes about them were so long-winded (and detailed) by those who were opposing them. Christians don’t like the idea that there may have been a larger story here because they have lived with a version of a story they have come to know and love. But to say that a belief system is right simply because we have lived with it for 1600 years or more is not evidence that it is necessarily right or the final word. It only means that one group stamped out another group such that their knowledge base was silenced.

Yes it seems strange and foreign, and yet this is just what archeology has revealed and the voice that was silenced was showing us the very keys to the kingdom. These keys as I call them are a suit of methods that appear in the so-called Gnostic writings mostly found in the Nag Hammadi Libray but that are also found in documents discovered earlier like the Pistis Sophia. These documents describe the same phenomenon as those in Eastern schools of though which describe the process of enlightenment.

I am not suggesting that these people went to India, but managed it on their own and that the “ressurrection” of the soul was achieved by attaining a quality that one culture called Christ while another called it Buddha. As such, this knowledge wasn’t predicated on belief alone, but pointed to a universal quality that every person has regardless of race or creed.

Rumi, the great poet and mystic once wrote about how we all squabble over the names of things and that we try to differentiate the light falling in one place as fundamentally different from the light falling in another when it is all the same source, the same thing. I think Orthodoxy tried to do this in an effort to carve out its own seemingly unique niche when in fact it had discarded important elements along the way that would have enriched it tremendously.

The Mar Saba Discovery

Then along comes Morton Smith in the 20th century. Morton Smith claimed to have made a discovery of a book in Mar Saba near Israel in the early 1960’s that contained writing by Clement, a figure from early Christianity. Clement quotes lines from a book that he calls “Secret Mark” which was, as he described it, part of a private teaching Jesus gave to his closest followers. Clement emphasizes that these teachings were never spoken before the uninitiated, a situation Jesus cautions about even in the synoptic gospels when he refers to swine and pearls, those who were “without.” In this case, Jesus was pointedly obfuscating his teaching so the Gentiles could not understand lest they be saved. The book was intended for the “perfecting” of those who were followers of this Jesus.

Morton Smith took photographs of the document and when he returned later to examine the book again, it had vanished. It has not been seen since. Here’s the thing: forensic examination of the photographs themselves have established that the book is an authentic document of the era. Christian apologists go so far as to criticize the writing as being “too Clementine” which to me may well be enough to prove the point. The writing style is consistent with what historians know about Clement, who has many writings attributed to him. Those within scholarly circles who are Christian apologists set upon Smith in attack after attack, however.

The letter was about one thousand words and had been copied onto the endpages of a seventeenth century book which no one had ever mentioned before. The find shook the scholarly world, although it’s existance made hardly a ripple in popular Christian circles because the letter denounced the group involved as heretical. That seems to be enough for any reasonable believer of the faith, but it raised important questions for many who find the discoveries of this kind to be suggestive of what Bauer had found to be the case and which continuing discoveries like the Nag Hammadi Library texts had done two decades prior, which was whether we have been told the whole story. Here is an excerpt from an article in The Nation about the discovery:

These heretics, as Clement and Theodore saw them, claimed that they possessed a secret version of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus, they believed, had taught his followers that they were freed from the law and could do whatever they wanted without sinning. According to one of their Christian critics, Irenaeus, they actually thought they earned salvation by “doing all those things which we dare not either speak or hear of, nay, which we must not even conceive in our thoughts.”

The Nation, Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith, January 8, 2009, Anthony Grafton.

It is worth noting that as a result of scholarly research we now know that it was Mark’s gospel that was the earliest of all the gospels. While Clement denounced the teachings in Secret Mark, he did not say that this Mark didn’t exist. Here we have a proof that books like Secret Mark were later destroyed by the Orthodox church, with copies that have yet to surface. Consider what would happen if the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of today were against you, what would you do? Would you perhaps hide away the books that you do have in order to preserve them? If your books were unapproved of, they would be destroyed with fire.

While some scholars like Ehrman have suggested that the Nag Hammadi find may well have been an effort on the part of local Christians to free up space in their libraries by burying the collection several kilometers away, I am reminded of an email from Elaine Pagels recently that the burial of the NHL documents is well within the same time frame as the letter by Bishop Athanasius, written in 365 A.D. which spelled out what books were to be acceptable for use in the church. Every book Athanasius mentioned in his list is contained in the New Testament today. It was Athanasius’s letter that would set the die for all that would follow. Anything else would come under scrutiny and risk being remanded to the flames. Remember, before the printing press, books were copied by hand in what could take many months to complete. Burning one book or two could end an important thread within the early movement. Back then, in the first century, stories abounded about the life of Jesus, an oral tradition, that was only later written down after Jesus’s death.

This article is helpful to gain the full scope of the issue about how the New Testament was formed.

My thesis has been and continues to be that Jesus was a man who attained awakening. The books attributed to his private teaching happen to also describe what is known in India as kundalini. While there isn’t compelling evidence that Jesus had gone to India, there is no good reason to suggest that in order to awaken he would need to study under an enlightened guru either. It’s possible he got instruction locally from John the Baptist, or the Essenes. We just don’t know because for as a man as famous as Jesus is, there is a huge gaping hole that is unaccounted for in his life in terms of time. I never studied under a guru and managed to trigger the first initiatory steps into awakening on my own. Likewise, it is quite possible that Jesus did the same. All he would need would be a quality of intense curiosity and a drive to seek. I suspect that this is just what Jesus meant when he said seek and ye shall find. He sought, and he found. But what did he find? He described it as a world that was within each person. At no point does Jesus ever say that his kingdom was outside of himself. All of this was an inside job. So meditation would have been part of it, something Jews of the time were well familiar with. The right kind of meditation would do it, nothing fancy, but something that would serve to achieve a first release of inner emotional material followed by inner inquiry.

It turns out that I did precisely what the heretical Jesus prescribed, which was to remove what keeps one divided within the self. This is actually a prescription Jesus mentions in the gospel of Thomas and mentions in the gospel of Phillip. The way I achieved this was through a conversation with a holy man when I felt a long-standing frustration guilt, and frustration with the universe, afterwhich everything began to change. I unburdened myself of a giant knot that had me tied up for decades, it was almost like an insurmountable impasse for me at the time.

I suspect that the story of Jesus’s baptism was like this or served a similar purpose for him because in the Gnostic texts he is teaching about how to attain the kingdom by resolving what divides you within, and a teacher always relays to his or her students how they achieved it themselves. The elephant in the room is if Jesus was God why was he going to John to have his sin removed? Why did Jesus need baptism? He obviously felt like he needed it, and instead of seeking the God, according to Orthodox scripture, which had always been within him. It’s a huge leap around the question that Christians never seem to ask. I think that it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask and actually makes loads of sense once the private teachings are known and taken into consideration.

With John, who claimed he could relieve the burden of sin through ritual washing, or baptism, Jesus was relieved enough of his own burden for the first flashes of “the light” to begin showing through. Jesus also spent forty days fasting and praying in the wilderness near where John was located. I will point out that this is the same approximate time that the Taoists prescribe for awakening the secret of the golden flower, their take on the awakening process. Similarly, in Hindu practice the number of 40 to 45 days comes up a lot for a time frame. It takes some effort to break through the veil of the earthly self to attain to the “heavenly” one (regardless of what tradition you ascribe to). Orthodoxy glosses over this precisely because it knows nothing about these practices. Then, when presented with the very means to do so, they cried foul heresy. The kingdom thus was found and then lost within a few short generations. The apostolic era came to an end not because of some God-ordained event with dubious reasoning but precisely because people no longer had access to the teachings that would have kept the era chugging along nicely. All of the signs of the holy ghost, and of awakening, were gone because the knowledge had exited the building.

If Jesus had awakened, the libertine attitude shown in the works of some of the Christian mystics like the Carpocrations that Clementine was speaking out against in his letter mentioned earlier has a very good chance of being true. Awakening pushes you beyond the normally accepted mores of the time by virtue of the fact that the energy of awakening vivifies and stimulates the body in new and novel ways. The Hindu describe it as a libidinous force, a creative current that leads one to new levels of bliss that are experienced and described as orgasmic. It’s not that it is literally so, but that this is the only way to aptly describe it so it can be halfway understood. Awakening absolutely impacts the master glands of the body resulting in high outputs of all sorts of hormones. Kundalini a sexual energy? I have always felt that the energy of awakening stimulates all sorts of things, including libido. Kundalini does much more than just stimulating libido.

Many people who are awakened know about the futility of skirting issues. No, the energy seems to push us to leap headlong into the cleansing fire that is the holy ghost, the feminine aspect, what in India would be called Shakti or the Ida current. All of this is consistent with awakening, and there is no reason to think it wasn’t the case with Jesus.

The problem with the Orthodoxy was that none of the secret teachings made any sense to them. How was it possible that by finding the savior within, the Christ, one washed away ones shame of human sexuality? Or guilt, or any other issue that represents stored emotional material that awakening can help the person to clear? Awakening can do this, though. It cleanses and returns you to a renewed mind and state of being. It is a salvific force.

It is now more likely that Jesus did have a private teaching and that the synoptic gospels represent only a thin slice of a larger picture. While Clement railed against this “Secret Mark” as heretical, I ask the question: says who? On whose authority? Why should I pay any attention to someone who was never included in the private teachings of a realized master? Even when Jesus says “No one comes to the father except by me” Christians don’t consider how that statement could mean something significantly different than what they assume it does. In Jesus’s day he was the only person around who had attained to the level that he had, so yes, Jesus was the only game in town. Like any great teacher, if you wanted to get there quickly, you studied under him like any teacher anywhere who had a grip on the esoteric or hidden things.

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Kundalini: The Sacred Marriage Of The Left And Right Brain

if you search articles in neurophysiology or neuroanatomy, you will see a raging debate about something called “hemisphericity” which implies that you can have one hemisphere more dominant than the other. Well yes you do, in some ways, and in other ways, no.

THIS article explains that you CANNOT train one hemisphere to be more dominant since the brain is so involved in cooperating between its different regions and “sides” that such an idea is impossible (and debunked in the 1980’s).

Everyone, from winners of the Nobel Prize in physics to the artists behind the Archibald Prize, used both sides of the brain when performing any task. In fact, the idea that people can be classified as left- or right-brained was debunked in scientific literature in the 1980’s

https://theconversation.com/mondays-medical-myth-you-can-selectively-train-your-left-or-right-brain-4704

The problem, I think, is that we are dealing with an incredibly complex and also nuanced biological machine we call the brain. So many regions responsible for different functions, we think, based on the data so far collected. Something gets lost in translation, I think. And while you might be using one part of your brain for one type of function, you might also be using other parts as well. If your body is in motion, well, you have the motor cortex in on the game, too. Lot’s of busy-busy. And to my mind, based on the research I have been doing over the years on the brain, I think some scholars and researchers tend to get lost in the details….because let’s be honest, there are a lot of details when it comes to our grey matter.

The same source goes on to say:

Despite this, left/right-brain training programs appear to be gaining popularity. This is puzzling because there’s no evidence indicating that you can train just one side of your brain. Such attempts are doomed because the two hemispheres are heavily interconnected and constantly communicating.

Ibid

Again, there is truth in what the writer is saying, but there is another side to all of this and it has everything to do with how we do indeed train ourselves how to utilize the abilities that appear, thus far, to be seated in one hemisphere in the brain. You might wonder where I am going with this and how this is tied into kundalini, but give me a minute.

When I was in art school, I was keen to be the best that I could be as an artist, and part of this was to learn how to use my mind to its fullest as it related to the creative process. Betty Edwards had come out with a book entitled Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain a decade previously, and we were beginning to know a few things as it related to the (visual) arts where the brain is concerned. In this seminal work in the field of art, she explained how many people often use the wrong side of their brain when creating artwork, or in creating likenesses of people in portrait work, sculpture, or landscapes, for example. The problem, she explained, was the left brain is reductive in its approach, meaning that it tends to create abstractions and stores “ideas” of what an object looks like, not really the real thing. The left brain is great for making cartoons, but it’s terrible for creating real-life likenesses (“abstraction” means to take those details that you feel are the most important and isolate them—such a left brained thing to do). This is one reason why many beginning artists are so bad at making a realistic likeness, which is due in part to their drawing on an inner image of what they think something looks like rather than what is in front of them. It is a very difficult habit to break in our species it seems.

Over and over, Edwards showed how art students would draw an eye and a mouth all in the same stilted manner, making almonds for eyes and sardines for lips. But look more closely; do they really look like that? “Draw what you SEE!” was the admonition by my teachers. Of course, do that, but you have to get out of the part of your mind that tells you what it is that you THINK that you see. And what are the implications of being in that abstract left brain process? You are in fact living in the past. You are drawing on an inner image of what it is that you think you are looking at. You wont EVER see what is in front of you so long as you let the left brain continue its dominance in your thinking and doing.

This has everything to do with enlightenment, I promise, and it can show you the folly of trying to use the “rational” left brain in the process of enlightenment. But hang on, I am going to string you along a little longer!

By the way, you can pick up a very inexpensive copy of Edwards’ book here at Thrift Books in case you would like to be better at drawing. The book has a lot of very good exercises that actually work if you want to be better at art.

There was something about art making that I always found curious, and it had to do with what we call inspiration. It was always this elusive thing. I knew enough about it that I could lay my hands on it when I needed to. I understood it intuitively, but it wasn’t like it was something that I could force. In fact, it was the opposite of forcing. I had to bid it come. I had to be receptive to it. And that was the point. Inspiration, I found, was not something that happened in the way the logic circuits of my left brain worked. What was even more interesting to me was that I often bumped up against a very interesting outcome of the inspired state when things got really intense, and that was that i often would wind up feeling sexually aroused when things were really cooking. I can remember staying up late into the night working on piece after piece. Inspiration would breed more of itself in those solitary hours as I worked in the studio. I felt funny because I had never heard of this before. Was I weird? Was it just me? I later learned that I wasn’t alone, that a number of other artists and writers commented on the coincidence of the sexual with the inspired state. The writer Anais Nin wrote about it a good deal, as did other artists. Maybe it was natural. I felt like it must be. I suspected that the channels that carried creative energy and sexual energy might not be all that different. They might in fact be the same. Our idea of creativity might actually be the stumbling block. Some of the great artists had a charisma and were notable in their sexuality often (although not always). I always felt like there was a connection here even if I was too young to know enough to say definitively.

Fast forward twenty-five years or so, and I wake up after using a meditation technique a friend I met through an online forum who had passed it on to me. I have yet to meet him, but we had a lot of very lively conversations through email back in 2006. The result of my using this meditation method was that I inched closer to awakening with it. Suddenly suffused in a brilliant white light during meditation, I was flabbergasted, and after which everything picked up steam in the strangeness department and in a few months I “popped” and the cosmic egg was cracked. I didn’t go into this thinking that I was going to try to awaken. Back then “awakening” wasn’t that much of thing, not like it is today.

I had no idea what it was that I had. I considered I could have had a brain tumor (yes really). I didn’t speak about what happened to me to my family for close to a year. I was concerned that I could be carted off to the hospital or institutionalized. As a result of this, I spent a lot of time observing what was taking place inside of me with this new energy. I had a keen sense that I had stepped into something entirely new and I was very much on my own now. It was exhilarating and lonely all at once. I sensed that whatever this was that had happened, it was permanent. there was no going back to Kansas, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. There was no being normal again. I felt like a stranger in a strange land. It was both death and rebirth, caterpillar and butterfly. I had no resources upon which to refer to. I studied the phenomenon closely as it unfolded within my mind and my body. I wanted to know as much about as I could summon so I could take my notes and see if they compared to any other experiences other people had had so I could get a better understanding about it. It is interesting what happens when you rely on yourself in this way. As you ask, so shall you receive. Miracles tended to happen, small ones, inexplicable ones, sometimes on a daily basis. I would later learn that these were called synchronicities, a term coined by the Swedish analyst and researcher Carl Gustav Jung.

One of the important aspects of the awakening process for me was how I felt like some new state was being brought online, activated, and it was different from the way I normally had felt. I also saw how similar the awakened state was to inspiration, something I was very familiar with. In fact, I would say, they were identical in terms of how they felt and behaved, the only difference between the two was a matter of degree. One was much stronger than the other (can you guess which one?). I wondered if this wasn’t me shifting into my right brain more, or that perhaps what kundalini amounted to was breaking the bonds that kept the right brain constrained because this unrestrained portion seemed to emerge almost out of nowhere (“almost”). I began to feel that human beings were in fact left-brain dominant by nurture, even artists like myself. I suspected the entire race was this way, that we simply had developed this way as a means of survival. Linear logical things are extremely good for getting stuff done, no doubt about it, but I think that we as a race were (and are) moving out of that old paradigm so things are shifting now.

When I learned that what I had was kundalini, I saw how the Hindu’s use the imagery of the man and woman, how one side was depicted as the feminine, and the other masculine. These images were created for a reason, and I had already felt the twin energy of what felt masculine and feminine rise up through my body. They were speaking to me about my condition.

I got to watch this curious phenomenon in myself for months, close to a year, even, before ever cracking a book on kundalini. When I saw the merging of the masculine and feminine and on the correct sides of the body, I realized, they were describing the same thing I had been experiencing. They had images painted on the foreheads of yogis called a Tilak and it was shaped exactly in the same way as my third eye awakening proceeded. I actually can feel when my third eye opens, it creates a force of pressure that is exactly like the Tilak. They were on to it, and while I searched article after article, no one really was able to explain why the Tilak was shaped this way. I knew it was shaped this way because that is how it FEELS when the third eye is fully activated (more than just a small round dot in the forehead—this was a process that proceeded over a three day period in order to completely open the third eye, a chakra that spread all the way to the back of my head in bands horizontally and in a dual-forked energy vertically moving upwards, corresponding to the Ida, Pengala, and Sushuma nadi (energy channels — the feminine, masculine, and cosmic, respectively).

They say kundalini is the coming of the feminine Shakti. When I felt this take place, I recognized it as the part of my mind that I often used when making art. It was the same, but it was also much much more present, more powerfully present once the cosmic switch was flipped. Before all of this, I had to search for “her” and then I had to wait quietly, in a receptive state. I had to become that feminine trait that was in me in order to reach the inspired state. I began to consider that the cosmic light switch was using the mind to overcome the resistance we all seem to have to shift out of the logical confines of the linearity of thought that have so predominated our thinking for so long. To open up to the right brain was like a revelation. It felt like letting the genie out of the bottle, literally, as if it had been held in such tight confines for so long. And why does it feel like that? Because everything in the left brain is small, it is highly focused, linear and logical. We just don’t realize how caught up in that part of the brain that we are. The more that I slipped into this very large space that was the “feminine” I felt like I was set free. I also felt disoriented for a time, and sometimes would go scurrying back to the familiar prison of the left brain. This is most popularly called a “contraction” in awakening circles. Every time I did this, I felt a strange pain, the painbody so many were talking about. I made it my mission to break out of painbody once and for all. It took great effort, an effort at letting go of so much that I thought was important (but was really useless baggage).

I didn’t have any proof that my theory was correct, though, and to be honest, it seemed like the whole of science pertaining to the brain was against me. I went searching, and what I found was one brilliant gem, the work of Doctor Jill Bolte Taylor who, in her now famous TED talk, described how as a neuroanatomist, she realized one morning while getting ready for work that she was having a hemmorage in her left hemisphere. She knew it was her left because her language centers began to shut down. She had trouble understanding English, she had trouble even reading the keys on the phone to try and call someone to help her. This took her about 45 minutes to do, to call out to tell a friend that she needed help. As she recounts her harrowing ordeal, she found that another brain state started to come online, one that she had never experienced before, a mystic state where everything was connected: samādhi. She stood there, tears streaming down her face, describing how incredibly beautiful the experience was. She also proclaimed that, because of the shut-down of her left hemisphere, she was able to have a unique view into a state that is normally only experienced by yogis or gurus or by people like myself (and perhaps to you if you have experienced this). Her talk, entitled “A Stroke Of Insight” was the last nail holding down this idea that I had based on little more than my own observations that this comes about by way of letting go of the tightly held control that the left brain has, probably has had in people, for centuries.

Not long after this, I looked into the concept of the left brain acting as a brake against the right brain, and as if on cue, researchers were finding new evidence for this in fact being the case in the months prior to my thinking about how this appeared to me to be at play in the awakening process (how it overcomes this left-brained dominance). I read about people whose corpus collosum, the nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, which had been damaged in utero through disease, exhibited some unique traits of superconsciousness, but which also kept them from being able to fully participate in society because they had limited communication between their two hemispheres. It was amazing to watch and to read how these people have incredible genius and yet had trouble tying their shoes are making up a grocery list or coping with the rigors of linear life in our world. I saw an analog with their ability to calculate numbers; I had answers come into my mind with lightening speed often, vast amounts of information, a storm of it, processed in fractions of a second. I sensed that my experience was tied to their same abilities, except because I had two intact hemispheres that could “talk” to one another, I could call on both sides of my mind, not just one.

When I began to catch on to how early Christians were talking about a unitive state that caused something to “rise” (see the gospel of Philip) and how people would go from being “dead” to alive, I felt like I was seeing how they were describing awakening. The more I read, the more I saw this pattern in their language emerge. It was curious, too, because these Christians were branded heretics and stamped out over a period of about two to three hundred years. In truth, the effort continues to this very day, but the main part of their work was done between about 200 to 400 A.D. more or less.

In their earliest writings these early Christians spoke of the “left and the right” of the “father and mother” coming together in the bridal chamber and out of their union came the Christ. While Christianity and Judaism before it had a notable and solid use of “left and right” meaning the goats and the sheep, the bad and the good, it certainly appeared that these Christians were turning these old conventions on their head (in the same way that they were turning the creation of Eve from Adam as that moment when our whole being was cleaved from its primal natural state into one that was responsible for our Fall even further because of some bite into Knowledge). Further, in the Gospel of Philip he goes so far as to say that those who do this aren’t just Christians, they are Christs. Whoo boy, nothing gets the Orthodox in a lather faster than insisting that the Christ dwells in all people and that this state of being comes about through the feminine and masculine coming into union with one another (the father and the holy ghost or sprit). Further, the feminine was revered by this group because it was she who brought so much wisdom, the ability to see deeply into things, to know (gnosis), not to simply believe (which is a poor substitute for knowledge) and to even heal.

Ideas like this sound strange to us today because we have about sixteen hundred years of entrenched belief behind the notions that we think of as Orthodox (a compound word from the Greek meaning “right thought”), but for those early Christians whom we call Gnostic, this was the authentic path to becoming Christ. And precisely because of this constellation of the feminine, masculine, and the indwelling Christ (which was treated in the same way that the Buddha is in the East which is to say that the Buddha is not a person but a state of mind that each person has within them, but is in slumber…..or more accurately, the person is slumbering before their own inner Buddha), was why this was too much for the Orthodox wing of the church to handle. Hadn’t Eve been the one who brought down the whole house of humanity? Hadn’t it been Lot’s wife who turned to look back even though she was told not to? David can go on for chapters in Psalms about how many people he has killed and no one bats an eye. Never mind that he was transgressing against the Law of Moses.

When I felt this triadic quality in myself, I thought how perfect that was: as above, so below. We make babies through union physically and we make a new level of consciousness inwardly with the two like-male and like-female parts of ourselves, an engine for enlightenment, with these two qualities which are in ourselves. This was much more natural than the Orthodox way which was an all-male club. It just seemed more perfect, more in keeping with how we are actually composed esoterically. And what better way to fold the feminine into our spiritual lives here on earth by making her the mother? The Gnostics believed that two people so awakened to this inner seed of light in themselves should have babies because that light be would all the more be kindled in their progeny, the result being an elevation of the spiritual quality in humanity.

If you want to see mysogyny in motion, you need only see how Christianity stripped itself bare of any kind of decency in what it did with the early Christians which we now call the Gnostics. To do that, you have to dig into the texts (history) because you wont see any evidence in today’s church save for cries of heresy whenever such a thing is brought up. You have to look at what the heresy hunters had to say about these people in order to know what they were fighting against. It all sounded strange to them because they didn’t understand, they didn’t have that seed of light in them which would grow like a mustard seed. And yet, traditions throughout the world describe a means of reaching an exalted state of being that required no belief, just a few very simple methods for turning the attention inward and which often involved the union of opposites within. Meditation techniques work as well as they do because it is there in such a place of quiet mind that you can begin to glimpse the lightening strike that is the realization of who you really are inside. No two worlds could have been more different though: one was literal and linear and cramped and stuck-up sexually and the other was ecstatic, vibrant and full of inspiration and light where the masculine and the feminine merged in order to form a “ladder” by which your own consciousness could ascend into the heavenly states simply and in a natural organic fashion with those two working together, not against one another. This is the core of the secret, and the mystery of the divine marriage within. The failure of the Orthdoxy was one of awareness, knowledge, and imagination, three elements crucial for navigating the numinous.

When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then you will enter [the kingdom].

The Gospel Of Thomas, James Robinson ed., p. 129

I use the above quote because during what I later learned was a temporary “kundalini flash” a few months before the full rise of the energy, I wrote a piece that contained a passage nearly identical to the quoted passage in Thomas above. I posted it online on a forum. My friend who gave me the meditation technique pointed out how it was similar to Thomas. The only problem was I didn’t know that Thomas even existed. I really didn’t know, and I read it for the first time in the Fall of 2006 online. My jaw dropped to the floor. They were describing an arrangement by which one reaches a state of inner unity where the spark of awakening is kindled. I would later realize that none of this was an accident, and it had unfolded in the way that it had in order for me to realize something very important about earliest Christianity (and my role in it in the Fourth Century). It was known that there was a quality that was like a man and woman, and that they were arranged as if one was on one side of the body and the other on the other side of the body, very much in keeping with how the Hindus described it. This wasn’t an article of faith, but was instead the very thrust of the Gnostics which was they knew. They didn’t need to believe because what they had was the indwelling awareness that made union with the divine possible. And you know what? They were right.

Today as I worked in the studio, I entered into that familiar place I go where ecstacy waits. Nowadays, I don’t have to be deep in meditation, all I have to do is open to it and there it is. I have learned that this state, like the inspired state, is one where I let myself be seduced, to surrender to something higher where I then rest in a state of deep devotion and love as I go about my work. I can listen to a radio show, I can get distracted, I can even get frustrated now and it comes right back. It didn’t used to do that. All of this took time to cultivate, and I have largely done it on my own. No guru, no teacher, but a series of events and people who all had something to teach me as they came and went. Others are also doing this in their own way all across the world as more and more of us continue to awaken all on our own. Ripe. Vibrant. Alive. Awake.

What the Orthodoxy failed to see or grasp was how important our sexuality is spiritually. The reason why it is important is for the same reason why awakening happens in the first place, which is a union of opposites brought together in a rare moment where often there is a roar of sound, a sudden riotous vibration, or a flash of light (as was in my case). When I give myself completely over to this ecstacy, my mind opens like a flower opens and new faculties show themselves. I do not have to have any article of belief, but I know something divine is at work. Yes, there is nothing that compare to it except the orgasmic, but with a difference; it is as if the electrons go into a glorious precession that acts as a waveform that unites my being and in a state like there, wherever I put the beam of my awareness, impossible things begin to happen. I might think of someone and know something I can only know was true only later, or I might peer into the core of matter, or I might gain insight into something that I need to do, this insight being like a vast bundle like how a dream is often untangled or remembered after a night of dreaming. People call this today a “download” and certainly the term is apt because sometimes it can take hours for me to feel the bundle unwind. I often will remember that I had had a dream about this issue years ago, different state of mind are touched on, and none of this process is in the least logical but is driven instead by what I sense is a superconsciousness and intelligence that I rarely possess in my day to day except for when I am in love with the universe and it is in love with me. All of this sounds like what a mad person might say except that as a practical mystic, I have always sought to try and note my experiences, jotting them down when I can, to see if there is any correlation later with something in physical reality. Many times I have seen things there was no way for me to see and known things that had I told a physicist, they would just assume I was lying, that I had read a journal somewhere. I know that this experience, this ecstacy, opens us to our greater potential. And while I really take no joy in writing about it because of how it is often frowned upon because it seems boastful, I only mention it here because doing so is like me shaking your arm and pointing to the phenomenon because I know that it is possible for you to do the same. “What I do you will do also, and you will do even greater things…”

Kundalini has been described as a “libidinous” force, sexual in character, and while this is true, that it sparks sexual energy, that isn’t all that it is. I have found that everything that we have in the body exists first in spirit, that everything we are emerges out of consciousness, not the other way around, and as such, what we think of as sexual energy here on earth, which makes new life, there is a higher dimensional aspect of our sexuality which is connected to our spiritual selves, that part which survives physical death and which exists in all time. It is this aspect, which we call “sacred sexuality” which is, to my mind, nothing more than the spiritual compliment to our sexual selves. It is this part of ourselves that allows us to have union with the divine. And while some will cry heresy, I can tell you that when the moment comes when you do reach union with the divine, it will be that part of you which surrenders like one surrenders to a lover, that will make such a union possible. I can also say that when you do touch the divine, the divine will have zero shame about any of this, unlike ourselves who try to point fingers and try to make a beautiful thing an object of shame. Some of us, it seems, have a lot of growing up to do. This isn’t a mental exercise, but is instead something that encompasses parts of yourself that you may not have even known existed before. Instead of feeling shame, you will come out of that cloud of light renewed, healed, revived. Each time you step into that state, it seems as if some bit of the hard crust falls away and the mind is opened more and the logic centers go quiet because none of this is the domain of the logical. The only thing it can do is to write down what it is that that happened to you, and it will always do so poorly because language exists in the left brain and this experience cannot be contained or compassed by words.

In awakening, it is known that those who are too logical have a very hard time of it. Taisen Deshimoru, the Zen master, who taught in France said in The Ring Of The Way that monks who are “mental” were the ones who had the hardest time with Cosmic Mind. You just can’t get there with the left logical mind. You have to use the part of the brain that specializes in the holistic, the nonlinear, and that is the right brain. In fact, Dr. Taylor came back from her stroke describing the brain in just this way, despite what all of the researchers might want to say (she was there, she saw it happen in motion as a trained researcher in the field). The biggest lesson that I learned was how to stop trying to understand everything logically, to learn how to FEEL (this is not to be confused with emotion—feeling is a capacity that we have like intelligence is a capacity that we have intellectually for example). When I did this, I shifted more into the right brain process and moved into the much larger realm of awareness. The logical mind was never intended to grasp the mysteries of the cosmos. It’s job is to learn how to build a ladder to the stars, not contemplate the meaning that is behind them. It is the feminine in us that alone has the wisdom to open us to ever-larger realms of awareness. And to be clear; the two work best when the feminine is given the room she needs while not being silenced by the left brain. The feminine must now find her voice in all of us. In the process, we will all grow wiser because of it. We might even help stamp out mysogyny and begin to craft a new way to be in the world. The Gnostics had a word for those who had discovered this inner feminine and masculine trait in union: syzygy. Some have referred to it as an androgynous outcome to enlightenment, but I have not seen it this way at all. Instead, I experience it as a highly cooperative and dynamic state where two rely on each other for what it is they themselves do not possess, and which, I will point out, is very similar to what two people fall in love do, which is to admire and even lean upon those opposite traits in their beloved which they do not have. In the process of this that is spiritual and individual, it fuels the outer process as well (how we relate in the world). I know what it is like for a woman to love a man and I also know what it is like for a man to love a woman. My own gnosis has shown me in those moments of ecstacy how it must be or can be if we just learn how to develop or cultivate this form of inner and outer cooperation. I can dream.

The left brain reflects on what is known or what it think it knows. The right brain does not, in my experience, have this facility. Instead, it does the opposite; it looks much more impartially at what is happening in the present. There is a reason why so many, since Buddha first mentioned the power of being fully present, have gone on to write books about the awareness that happens in the present moment. Ram Das wrote “Be Here Now” and Tolle wrote “The Power of Now” and they are both saying the same thing that Buddha said first. This is a right-brained activity, this ability to be in the present. But more: quiet the mind so that you can begin to sense what is beneath all of the mind-chatter. It is there, they all insist, where the greater awareness lies. It is not something that you do, it is something that you are and which your thoughts keep you distracted from perhaps ever finding. The left brain will always be in a prejudiced state, and it is this part of us that seems to be running so much of the show when it comes to awareness. It think it knows, but it is only basing its thoughts on conjecture based on what has happened in the past. To know this new state you must be open to what can be, not what has been. I contend that when you can reach into this silence in yourself you are quieting the mind and that this allows you access to the parts of you which are not wed to time and space. This is the same space that is written about by the Gnostics, the Pleroma, the fullness. We are all related, we are all family, from the largest to the smallest. It is an unimaginably large family, but knowing your place in it will forever alter any sense that you have that you are ever alone or set adrift or singular only. Even in the synoptic gospels Jesus reminds the Pharisees that their scripture did say “ye are gods.” What the Orthodoxy could not imagine was that we all are. Did they just want Jesus to be that beacon of a light on a hill that we all seek to give ourselves to? Was it all just a way to herd the sheep into an ever-tightening space spiritually for control? Or was it just a conspiracy of ignorance, a failure of imagination?

Contained within these two parts of us is all the wisdom and knowing that we need to navigate them. You literally have access to vast amounts of information that is part of what the Gnostics called the Pleroma (Koinē Greek: πλήρωμα, literally “fullness”). It is here that the sacred marriage of takes place. It is firstly within, and can be bolstered by others who are likewise centered and known to themselves. Staring into the awakened can be like staring into the same infinite that one feels within ones own self. This is also where the “deficiency” that the Gnostic Jesus spoke about was resolved. This idea that we are not good enough, this feeling that we are set adrift, sinful, bad, and unloved. All of this is washed away or redeemed in the Pleroma. And Jesus was showing the way.

Even as I say all of this, you cannot get there simply by becoming more aware of what the right brain can do for you. Something else needs to happen, and unfortunately, even the yogis of India, for as good as their systems are for explaining all of this based on numerous observations by monks in the past, cannot explain what happens when we awaken. The energy rises, they say….it is aroused, they say. But by what means, exactly? The Gnostics explain this simply: by becoming one with ones self, to become known to one’s self, and then by going as deeply as one can in silence, you can then touch on that place where the union of the opposites creates the spark that cracks open the wall separating you from a super-conscious state. “Remove what divides you” said the Gnostic Jesus, something I read six months after I had done exactly this very thing which I knew at the time was the first step into self-initiation into the mysteries of the kingdom. Once there, it is a self-sustaining font of energy which gets busy clearing the “knots” of emotion, the samscaras in the Sanscrit, of the stored emotion which is out “baggage.”

It is a quantum leap, but once you reach it, you have it forever. Its power may wax and wane over time afterwards, but its force will purify and clear you so that you can be a vessel for both the divine and who you really are. In many ways it has felt like my whole body became a sensing organ, a body of awareness. Was this new mind tapping into the wisdom of the body? Do all of the neurons scientists have found existing in our organs also provide thinking potential, as vessels for awareness also? I am afraid we don’t know yet, but I have a sinking suspicion that there is a connection whereby what we think of as the brain extends itself in awakening to include the body, and expresses its twin character of like-male and like-female qualities of what the Gnostics called “the left and the right.” When I say all of this I also know that awakening itself is a fairly simple thing, but it can take years to get there. It seems you have to want it badly enough, because who else could stick with its relentlessness, its intelligence, long enough to allow the changes to take place that makes a broader awakening possible?

Achieving this state could be done through years and years of preparation. What I know is that it is possible for it to happen much faster than that. I would suggest that you don’t do that, though, since getting yourself ready for it can be of immense importance. It is true as many in India have suggested, that this is in all truth, a more deeply fundamental state which is less something that you reach for but is instead something that you already are. It seems to be activated, but it is more like waking up to what you already are. It is your get out of jail free card. I ask; are you really ready to be that free?

FiNalLy!

In the past week we had ourselves a nice snow storm here in the mountains. The temperatures have dipped down low enough that it has kept the snow melt at a minimum. There is a feeling of so much that is on hold, and I don’t mean just getting out and running errands or doing things that I might otherwise be doing if the snow wasn’t there. The snow has a way of muffling sound with its soft powder acting like a noise suppressor or absorber. It does close things in, and many things come to a halt. It is in such a place, a few days ago, where I began working on a project that I have been researching for a decade and a half. In fact, the project is as old as my own awakening process is. That project is about the ties that earliest Christianity has with the phenomenon of awakening. I have gone through this, through all of the books available to us now, the history, the archeological digs, what we know about kundalini from other cultures which used to be knowledge that was only known to a select few. We are in a different time now and the doors are opening. I need to get started on this.

I already have an unwieldy manuscript that I began writing a couple of years into awakening that I felt could serve as perspective on the experience, a kind of memoir of sorts that was started before this book concept about early Christianity was begun. The problem for me with this first manuscript was that at the time I was trying to write it, I was so deep into altered states, doing release work, and being swept away by this powerful force in my awareness, that it was really hard to write a book that had a cohesive feel. It grew to 750 pages…..I spent months editing it down to 180 pages, only to find I had lost the heart of the work. It was frustratingly difficult. Then my friend and gifted intuitive Ali said when I was getting ready to gas up the car on the way to the airport, “Don’t you have a second book, Parker?” As I was getting ready to get out of the car to gas up I quickly said, “No I don’t.” She did that thing she does which tells me she is scanning something. She looked out across the lot to the road into the distance with that look. Ali is never wrong. I know it is tricky when we speak in absolutes, but Ali’s ability to dig into something she knows nothing about is astounding. I know that might be hard to believe, but it is true.

At the time, my mind wasn’t on another book, my mind was on this book I had been wrestling with, this memoir. She added while she sat there musing, “My guidance is telling me that you have a second book…” I knew what she was talking about, but I wasn’t thinking about it as a book. It was an idea for a book, something I hadn’t told anyone else about. The last thing I wanted to do at that point in time was to start a new project. I then admitted to her so her own inner intuitive abilities wouldn’t be jammed up in her head, “I have an idea for a book, but it isn’t anything I have started on.” She continued looking out into the rain as we sat parked under the canopy of the gas station, adding, “My guidance is telling me that your second book needs to be your first.” When I heard this, I was stuck with the idea of getting this first manuscript into a better state before I could begin contemplating this concept which I hadn’t even started on, beyond just research. “I don’t feel like I can begin another project right now, I have so much to do on this first one!” She took in a breath and steeled herself a bit, she knows how I am. I am hard-headed and I can be difficult to deal with when I get in this kind of space. “My guidance tells me that this is THE book, Parker, that it needs to be the first one, then finish your second one later….how about you just put this book you are working on aside for a bit and give this second one they are telling me about a try?”

I was dismissive and impatient with all of this. I was stuck wrestling with this first project that was at that time in front of me, which had so many arms. I wish I could have been more patient with her ideas, which she was getting in an authentic space where she nearly always hits bullseyes. What I did do over the next nine months was I promised myself that after digging into a major edit, I would try to put it aside to see what would come up in regards to this second project. One edit turned into about half a dozen, and this process took nine months. I have close to a dozen variants of that project saved on my computer. I finally just walked away from it, cleared my head and forgot about writing at all.

Only after I did this, did ideas begin to slowly filter in about that second project. I didn’t put word to paper for years but instead immersed myself in study and research into a field that most Christians think they know a lot about and have some very strong opinions on. I’m not a historian on the subject, and while I have spent a good deal of time in academia both as a student as an educator, I didn’t get my degree in divinity. I had a lot of work to do, a lot to learn. Luckily, I was able to begin learning what the last hundred years or so have turned up since archeology became a serious field of study. The earth has given up her secrets and we now have more information on the history of Christianity than we have ever had, short of the documents that the church has held in their collections (which has formed most of our thinking before this period in our history). The problem though, with what the church has held and what the earth has offered up, is that what we keep finding are not books or fragments of books that are Orthodox in nature, but heretical ones. Additionally, the more work that is being done on this front, the more the subject of heresy keeps coming up in the historical record, and not in the way that the church has used it, which has been to put down any story that it felt stood at odds with the standard they were bearing. I am not using “heresy” in this case to mean what is not true but what has been labelled by the church as not true. You perhaps can see where I am going with this.

What we know now is that essentially the Orthodox church chose books that it agreed with, that it understood. It put those books forward….but there were other books. While it is true that there were many books that were deemed by the church as non-authentic, such as stories of the early life of Jesus clapping his hands and making something he made out of mud turn into birds and fly away, there is the issue of a body of work that was completely suppressed and nearly destroyed in order to keep those stories from coming forward. The church will say that those books were heresy and this is why it acted as it did. However, what scholars are seeing in this last century is that this was more about choosing what stories you wanted put forward in order to formulate doctrine based on those narratives that the Orthodox wing of Christianity thought it understood. There were some very important books that were simply dismissed out of hand because (I suspect) they were so poorly understood. They were poorly understood because of the nature of the writings themselves and what it was that they were intended to achieve. What this body of work did was to pull back the veil on consciousness to reveal a capacity that all humans have for realizing the divine within. As I will show in my book, what they were on about was revolutionary for the location, the religion that it came from (Judaism first, then Christianity later), and the culture from which it sprang. It wasn’t a bunch of incoherent gobbledy-gook, however, despite how some have received these newly discovered texts and gospels. In some important cases, these books represent some of the most sophisticated writings having to do with how to reach enlightenment and to achieve a full activation of awakening, something which the Hindu call kundalini and what the Taoists call the Golden Flower. It doesn’t help that the scholars who first examined these books (Thomas and Philip to name a few) were not versed in world religion or philosophy because they described them as being influenced by Hermeticism. To say this is like saying I was influenced by the Hermetic teachings because I had awakened even though I was completely unfamiliar and unschooled in that strand of philosophy that emerged in Egypt. But the fact that these books were found in Egypt doesn’t mean they are Egyptian in character. The only thing the discovery reveals is that the dry desert of Egypt helps to preserve documents on papyrus very well (as many texts that are not Christian that have been unearthed there attest to). There is a lot to cover in this book, the least of which is how Orthodox Christianity developed ideas over time which appear to us today as having always been there. No, Christianity evolved like all religions evolve. It was the Orthodoxy that put forward the idea that what they had to say about Christianity and Jesus himself had always been from the very beginning when in fact this was not the case at all. Rather than trying to tear down Christianity, I am seeking to correct the record using historical evidence, archeological discoveries, studies of the texts both within the so-called Gnostic strand as well as the Orthodox strand of the same religion. While that will be looked at askance by many, there is evidence that now exists for why this second look is necessary if we are to understand Christianity and how the victors in the battle of the “truth” got to tell their story while another deeper story didn’t get to be told until 50 years ago when the Nag Hammadi Library began hitting bookstore shelves after a protracted period of translating the codices.

This book will be a story about two competing camps and how their perspectives were very different. One was an outer understanding stripped of a deeper knowledge and carried elements pointing to this deeper knowledge, while the other was representative of a deeper knowing, both of who we are and how the divine works in us. The two diverged in degrees over time until the two were only partially related. When you look at the two camps today, they look almost completely unrelated. Neither camp had writings that were “perfect” in the sense that there are transcription errors, or deeper doctrinal issues that keep scholars busy at work printing books on the subject. They are both, though, speaking to the same phenomenon but with a different understanding. It is a bit like holding a piece of string that is white on one end and blue on the other. The two look completely different at their most extreme ends, but they are in fact all the same string. One camp, the Orthodox one, fought very hard to dismiss this other camp and did so by flatly stating that what these so-called Christians were on about was sheer heresy, nothing more. The Orthodox church had books that proved it. But what was actually going on was a war over ideas and values about the very foundation of human spirituality. The Orthodoxy won out and they continued to choose the stories that agreed with their particular view, and they had the resources to press their view, making their imprint on humanity appear as though it had always been the view, and never-mind those dirty heretics. This is the perspective we still have today as codified by the Orthodox view, and it only looks like it was always that way. Billions of believers think so to this day. It wasn’t always that way, however. Not by a long shot. Yes, in light of what Orthodoxy has put forward, this other camp which got buried in this conflict looks very strange and incompatible….heretical, even. Like I have said, though, the earth keeps offering up her truths and we have learned a lot in a pretty short time.

Many cornerstone concepts of Orthodoxy were created. To the casual observer, this isn’t obvious at first. The effort will be to show what new knowledge we have from our most recent discoveries and see how it compares with the historical accounts and what Orthodoxy has put forward, at least in part. An example of this is the divinity of Jesus as the son of God. This wasn’t something that was known about from the get-go. This only came along later, it was a development that grew with each generation. We know enough about when the synoptic gospels were written and scholars today can trace the development of the ideas surrounding Jesus’s divinity and identity as human, as God, or as someone who was adopted at God’s son (these ideas were all existing at the same time early on) for example. Some of the synoptic gospels don’t mention Jesus being God. This was something that the church came up with and put it into the belief system and then said “world without end, amen” and that was that. You also wont know the full story if you don’t go looking, but given how belief itself works, who is going to bother to question their beliefs or what they perceive is the foundation of their faith? This is one example how doctrine was formed and how human a process it was. There were other ideas that some take as an article of faith today that are just like this.

The camp that lost out was a group of Christians who formed the esoteric wing of the faith which we call today the Gnostics. They didn’t call themselves Gnostics, though. If you asked any one of them they would have said that they were Christians. These people and their teachings seem strange to us today in large part because we have been fed a steady diet of Orthodoxy, the outer-most understanding of the deeper principles within Christianity. Some of what the so-called Gnostics have on offer cast new light on our spirituality and they also reveal discrepancies with regard to the Orthodox view. One example is that Orthodoxy essentially says that you need to accept Christ into yourself, to accept his act of sacrifice in order to be saved. The so-called Gnostics, however, pointed out that Jesus was teaching his closest followers how to BE Christs. Like all esoteric traditions, though, they veiled the teachings in order to make them inaccessible for all but those who were in the process of being initiated into the deeper teachings and experiences that led to an innermost realization which they called gnosis, or knowledge. For these Christians, you didn’t need to believe in the crucifixion and what that meant, instead it was the knowledge that would save and free people. What is so interesting about this process and these teachings is that they describe in identical form, but using different vocabulary, identical concepts contained in other esoteric traditions the world over. There is no evidence that suggests that there was contact between the cultures of India and Judea during this time. While modern scholars suggest that the Gnositc texts have ties to Hermeticism, I suggest in my book another possibility and it is informed by my own experience with awakening.

The book will do its best to make the case for the Gnostics and why their work deserves a second look. It is a story about how the kingdom was found, then lost, within a century or two. Part of the book will be my own experience, notes taken from my journal in those first weeks and months after awakening happened and the observations that I made at a time when I had no idea what was happening to me. I will show how what I observed as the central symptoms of the experience match those in the Gnostic texts as well as parts of the Orthodox ones, and how this then reveals at the least that the Gnostics had grasped something that is incredibly rare and difficult to reach for the average person. It will show how a school sprung up around this knowledge which was later put down by the tide of Orthodoxy that came after the “heretics” came onto the scene, not before. We know this because of careful research that has been conducted by numerous archeologists, a linguist, and other researchers. I will reveal that while the early church had these heretical teachings at its earliest core, the look and feel of the church was also very different in its earliest days. The beliefs were different, too, as the ideas that would become the Orthodox view would evolve over time into what many of us know today.

Concurrent with the later tide of Orthodoxy came an effort to marginalize the role of women in the church. Hand-in-glove with this effort was also an effort to marginalize knowledge of the true source of the Holy Ghost as a feminine quality of the divine. As above, so below. I will show that the early church was a very different animal from the one it is today, and how it is that we are all poorer for it. The book isn’t out to seek converts but instead may well be a cautionary tale about what happens when we allow an authority who is less capable than ourselves to call the shots. Augustine, who was one of the early church fathers, once said that he would not believe anything unless the church itself said that it was true. Most people just want to be told what the truth is without ever really examining it and doing the vetting themselves (“The kingdom is within’). The Orthodox story is a great one but it isn’t the only one and isn’t the whole story given how much that we now know. It is just one strand of comprehension about a drama that played out while Jesus lived on earth. We now have evidence that women served as bishops in early Christianity. So much for the writer of Timothy (which most scholars today explain is a forged letter attributed to Paul) telling women to shut up in Church and submit to their husbands. For Timothy, a woman could save herself by bearing a man children. Yes, the early church was a very different animal than it was just two hundred years later.

I am not writing this book in an effort to fuel controversy, however. My purpose is to show how the Gnostic texts are tied to an authentic phenomenon in consciousness and how it fuels a transformation of the personality and self. It will also show the discrepancies that are contained in the Orthodox view and how what it said does not mesh with the facts. Many Christians believe that the Bible is a perfect document given from God. That notion itself is simply not true and I will show how this is so. From miss-translations, to outright forgeries, the story has been massaged and changed in key ways in the Bible. The book will be an effort at laying out the facts instead of resting on just what those in Orthodoxy have said was the truth (“trust us” they have said, “what we tell you IS the truth!”). Trust but confirm. The book will be about how two different camps were addressing two ends of the same string and that both have something to tell us about ourselves and our ability to reach the divine that is found within (“The kingdom is within you”).

What I will also be doing with the book is bringing contemporary voices into the divide to help illuminate how awakening is the same thing that early Christianity was teaching about privately to those who were prepared for it. My hope is to add enough voices to help to paint a picture and make the case for why the Gnostics had something important going on in regards to understanding the Christ drama. My hope is to be able to assemble numerous first-hand accounts of contemporary awakening stories. To that end, I am interested in your story should you be interested in contributing to this project. One aspect of this book will be to point out that awakening does not require belief in any religion in order to achieve it and that those who were on to this rare phenomenon were themselves probably not well understood in their day and that much of the deeper teachings of Jesus were lost for a very long time. It is my sense that awakening was precisely what Jesus was speaking to when he was quoted in both Philip and Thomas and that he was showing a way for a person to know themselves better and their place in the divine drama. To that end, accounts will not be tied to the religion as much as they will be tied to the phenomenon described in the Nag Hammadi Library and how this was fed into the ministry of Jesus. I understand that for some people, there is a concern about remaining anonymous, so any material that you provide me will be treated in the manner which you have requested. The effort here will be to shed new light on an old story and how Christianity as we know it might need a second or third look. If you are interested in finding out more, you can contact me, Parker Stafford, at info@staffordartglass.com.

Energetic Update

 

In the last week I had an unexpected release of an old block.  For the last couple of years now block release has gone from fast and furious to slower and more difficult as I have gotten down to what I know are the deepest of my blocked energy.  It is now like chiseling away stone.  While this has required greater patience than ever before, the reward has been great.

 

The interesting thing about the release of this latest block was that I was able to trace it back through history to a past life event.  While I do not know the exact date of the event, I have been able to locate it in the third to fourth century AD.  This was interesting, and this was not something that was on my radar at all.  In fact, I have in numerous instances been over this same ground that involved this block many times, but never had much of a reaction one way or the other.

 

It involved burying a cache of ancient documents, and it helps to explain why, before the block lifted, I felt the way I did.  For years I had this driving feeling as though something had been hidden that told the story , the untold story of a very important, a foundational, aspect of Christian thought.  This sense within me has driven me since I was a small child, and honestly, it wasn’t the best sense for a child to have.  How do you explain to someone that you KNOW that something had been hidden, but upon being questioned, you don’t have ANY details about what on earth this could be?  So you see the conundrum. This is why I have always kept this sense entirely to myself, with only a few people ever even knowing I felt this way.

 

To give you just enough back story without loading you down with details, I had to bury documents I considered sacred and extremely important to spiritual maturity (a code word for awakening) in order to hide them from the church. I hid them in order that they might be protected, so they might be found by someone at a later date who could appreciate their importance. I was hiding these documents because the church had deemed documents such as these heretical and were an anathema to Orthodox belief. This experience was not ot unlike placing a child in a boat on a river alone, hoping that they might survive. Things were so bad where I was that doing this was the last and final option. It was my message in a bottle. Hidden. Would they ever be found? Would they survive?  The desert is a sea where no oar is dipped, so say the Muslims. I placed my hopes in the hands of that great ocean of sand and said many prayers that they might come back to a more inquisitive kind of human in the future. This was in a day when everything was written down, not printed and widely distributed as today. 
Once the block was encountered and the emotions fully processed, this driving feeling in me that I had felt most of my life went away completely. What is interesting about this, though, is that I lost the “fire in the belly” over this issue…which has made my recent work more difficult because now I am left without this driving feeling as though something was done that should not have been and am instead left with a peace and bliss that comes as a result of fully processing these blocks.  All of this repressed emotion was what was driving me forward with such conviction and vigor….it ate at me, you could say, and this is very important to understand about how blocks affect us.  They just keep turning in us until we resolve them. Depending on the nature of the block, it could be very destructive to all you hold dear. 

 

I find it very curious that I would have a block like this pushed so far down.  I say this because over the course of my awakening process, I have noticed the the easier blocks all went first.  There were a lot of inconsequential blocks, many I had no clue what they were that simply evaporated, and these left in complete anonymity in numbers beyond my counting (but every one is accounted for in how they will affect us until it’s released).  I am happy not to know what they were about because I no longer am affected by them….whatever they were.  This has simply left me at a greater place of peace. But this last one, because I had a memory of how it was connected into the an event in the past and my connection to sacred texts, and because it came later in an area of the light body where the blocks have been notoriously difficult to dig out, I have been given a view of how this block has affected me and for so long. This was not an inconsequential one. How would you feel if you knew you had to hide the truth because those in power didn’t want to hear it? When I look back on the people I have known whose lies have degraded my joy, or destroyed parts of it, and I see how I did what I did, the guilt, the sadness, all of it, served to attract or draw to me lights that were less than the one great Light. This was what we called it back then because it was a great unfathomable beautiful mystery that was the Light!

 

Below is an image of the meridian where the block released.  In the hip there are three locations for acupuncture points 10-12.  It was on the #12 point that this last block released.  I could feel it quite vividly.  Shoot, I felt the presence of the block long before then nearly every day as a hard tense tight and burning sensation.  Really.  I am blessed to be able to feel these points, even though I feel them all the time.  But when you wake up, it seems that when you are able to feel more deeply, as is often the case, you feel all of it, right down to where blocks reside. Knowing where they are is one very useful step in releasing them.
It is on my right side that this block was located.  

Before I began feeling the specific meridians where blocks are now located, I felt them previously in a more regional way, and they were also released in a regional way through the action of the stirring effect of the major chakra centers.  Now, though, the chakras seem less at play as I get down to the last blocks in the major chakra regions. It seems that now I am down to doing this piecemeal.  But by feeling them as clearly as I do, I have been able to point directly to the specific blocked area on my body and either my acupuncturist or my body worker (a lovely Kahuna healer who is perfect for this kind of work at this stage in the game) were then able to go directly to the site and begin working their magic on me in those places.

 

In an odd twist, though, it helps me to see how close this issue of getting the word out is to my own soul.  As a result, while I now feel freer than ever before, I have this calm sense of resolve that I do indeed need to finish this work. No fire in the belly, no, but I have something much better perhaps.  A quiet calm knowing.  To know that something I did in the past helped in some way to preserve the esoteric wing of early Christian thought is like having the past reach out to me and touch me on my heart, telling me that while we are at a time when these books can be seen anew, or seen for the first time in a new context, the work is perhaps even more important so I can round the end of this one chapter that has been almost 1600 years in the making. I get to tell the story I didn’t get to tell, you see. My work will be for the texts themselves and what they meant to me and how it was that I understood them when others did not seem to know.  The research I am doing will seek to illuminate this to show just how revolutionary and how similar these teachings were to other very different traditions in other parts of the globe.  

We each do not see the sun rise through the eyes of a Muslim or Christian or Zorasterian.  We see them through human eyes and awakening is very much a human experience, not one attained by way of religion (our self-imposed ignorance as a race has seen to that!).

 

The other really interesting thing is how it has loosened up my energy.  The heart center, which has been one center that has cleared the most in my ten years at this work, now suddenly seemed to explode with a new found sense of energy.  The heart center was not the one blocked, though, but when a block near the root opened up, it put the heart center into what felt like was a new context.  It has provided a vibrant presence of this energy within me that is remarkable.  That is a beautiful outcome. This is showing me yet again the complex reciprocity between all aspects of the light body (yes, heart is open and clear, but when the root is clear, the heart can know continuously what it could only feel in peak states previously).  It also gives me an unexpected level of hope and excitement about clearing up the two other blocked areas in the root that I can feel vividly. This last release helped to confirm what I had felt in my body before laying eyes on a meridian chart, which was a cluster of points (and blocks in each) that corresponds to an acupuncture meridian that has three points along it.   That is pretty cool, I think, because it shows that those Chinese who helped develop these charts really knew their energy centers and could feel them like I do. It’s almost as if I can see them talking now, “Xiao, I feel resistance right here in my hip!”
“Write it down on the chart! A new point! Now let us observe if anyone else has it and what its nature is!”

 

With each release, there is also sometimes a certain kind of confusion over why I am feeling the emotional reaction that I am feeling.  Often, for me at least, a few days before a block lets go, I begin feeling all kinds of emotions that are tied to the block….except I don’t know in the beginning that it is associated with that block.  I just feel all this emotion and I wonder if I am just “in a mood” or just what is going on!  But, as is often the case, my mind turns to the possibility that it is a block releasing and it is then that I quietly observe and just do as I have always done, which is the work to help the block go ahead and release.  In some cases, physical movement helps this.  Shaking, massage (deep tissue), breath work, and some other somatic work can help.  In this case, actually feeling the emotion and seeing where the block happened, can in some cases help me to realize its origin and to just let it go by flushing the emotion in my system partly by processing the emotion more fully.  In this case, this meant feeling such an intense mix of emotions was what took place.  Over the period of one day, this emotion kept coming up.  In moments through the day I mourned the loss of something I knew were texts that were  central to understanding how to help people to wake up.  And the narrative changed considerably after that date as Orthodoxy stretched out its limiting hand on Christian thought.  In its origins, what these people had was nothing short of explosive, and it was largely lost to time until about 60 years ago when some of them were recovered.  But how do you explain to people who don’t get it how important these books were?  Most often, people’s eyes glaze over when they are confronted with something someone says is important Christian thought.  But this was itself a different Christianity, an aspect that never made its way to the light of day.  I have had people criticize my thesis on this because, well, they only know what they know as a result of what Orthodoxy has handed down to them.  But this….this was something powerful, and there were people who had a clear view and understanding of it.  What it means is that human experience is human experience.  This prefigures ALL religion because an awakening is NOT Christian or Hindu or Muslim or Sufi or Native American.  Each has its unique cultural coloring, but its all like Rumi said, just water.  We all argue over the water in one bottle over another, simply because the labels are different.  But really, they all come from the same well, the same source.  We all experience it the same way the world over.  This is what people have a hard time coming around to.  But it is the truth.  It is also what will set us free. We all are seeing the same light. Our water all has the same source. Call it heresy if you must, so we all must face a common heresy because we are made by the same one who created the truth that we call heresy.

 

We don’t often feel a connection to the church because, it lost its own connection with the truth….or an important aspect of it.  The church has much good to say, some about a glorious garden whose keys to they themselves have lost. And it is here, in the midst of this, that I have been set free.  Here, the flow of life force is so strong, I am excited over getting the rest of the blocks cleared so that I can know a greater peace and a field of undisturbed bliss.  It is already better than it has ever been before.  
It is interesting to see how it will affect those who have been caught up in karma contrary to my own who have not themselves come to the truth of their own soul. And really, who knows.  It is their story.  I have my own, and in the end, we are each like flowers opening before the light of this new day, aren’t we?  Isn’t this a pretty amazing time?  And no matter what happens, we each know that at the least, we helped to bring the collective to a point of greater realization than has happened in a very long time.  It would be nice to continue just to witness even bigger miracles on the world stage. I suspect that in the next six months, we will be in for a very bumpy ride.  All of it, though, will be the collective consciousness coming to grips with many of the issues that still dog it. Some will see the change coming and miss understand the forces at work seeking to work it’s own agenda. If that sounds cryptic, hang on because the last leg holding up our economic table is about to be assaulted. And soon! This will unfold in such a way that someone who could have brought great change will be, very likely will be, neutered in effectiveness. If events unfold as I feel they will, this event is soon upon us.

 

Not long ago I was gifted with a reading by a really great person who works with ancient systems of knowledge and divination.  I know how that might sound, but when I talked to him, I explained that I never felt like I could do the work he was saying I would be doing because I had not fully cleared my field.  I have just always felt that before I do healing work with others, I need to be clear.  He explained that I needed to begin the work now because doing the work would get me to where I needed to be.  He had his ideas about what this would look like, but in doing this work with this book, which he didn’t see as playing a very big role in my future work, I have found that it has helped to do just what he was saying my work would do, which is to get me to that place of clarity.  While I have some ideas about what I am interested in delving into to help others, I don’t know what this will look like in specific because spirit always has a way of bringing me all the right events and opportunities in unbelievably synchronistic ways. So we will see how that unfolds, but by giving it the room it needs, the higher self will express itself as it needs to, with elbow room and with me not meddling too much in what I think it needs to look like. Maybe you have a few experiences with how that has worked out in your own life?

 

And all of this happening on the eve of my birthday.  I think I picked a great time to be born; a time when everything in the world is waking up, peeking out as new life.  How juicy it is to feel new life in me, right along with new life in the world.
Until next time…
-Parker

The Earth Shattering Implications Of Nonduality

I am going to go for the money shot and use words like “Earth Shattering” and “Implications” because I think its time to grab some attention.  It is time to grab your attention because there is something huge going on in the realm of hyperspatial realization…..otherwise known as nonduality.

In the same way that L.S.D. was a revolutionary drug during the 1960’s that helped people to see, feel, and look at the world differently, so too is nonduality every bit as revolutionary.  Actually, its more so because there is a chemistry in your physical body that is created that continues or drives your ability to continue to have these experiences of nonduality, its what Jana Dixon wrote about in her incredibly important book called The Physiology of Kundalini. Its her own observations about the chemistry of the experience, and there is a lot there. As you might know already, there is a dearth of research on the issue of kundalini, so a lot of what is related is based on observation and not peer review or having hundreds of subjects on board for testing (as this is still a somewhat rare experience that is slowly becoming less-rare there is a lag in information on the subject outside of the Vedas and Eastern traditions)

Nonduality is a mind-bending kind of experience because it has the power to remake your psyche.  It really is just that powerful of an experience.  You might wonder why on earth would your psyche need to be re-formed, and to that I will say that the very process of thought needs to change in some fundamental ways if the energetic flow o the source code material is to move through you.  You cannot send a signal of any kind unless the device is properly prepared.  The body and the nervous system and brain all must go through a reformation process if any of this is going to be successful, and this is hard for people who are strong in the ego department (which means most of us as westerners).  Trust me, for those of you who think you don’t have strong egos, ego goes far deeper than what we normally think it does.  Modern psychiatry has only scratched the surface of understanding the ego, never mind how to deal with ego once the force of kundalini is raging in you and ego is putting up a fight deep in the recesses of your subconscious self. This is where mania happens, or where psychotic breaks occur if you aren’t careful.  This is a powerful force, no less powerful than a DMT trip but absent the visual hallucinations, but full of feeling and awareness of the reality of how things are, dawning one moment to another moment within your awareness. It is a trip unlike any other, but it is also a trip that is about moving from illusion to reality.

For people who enter this realm who are overly rational and mental, this can spell winding up in an institution.  But for those who can go with the flow of the experience, then amazing things lie in wait. You might have been drawn to the idea of the exotic trip with ayahuasca in the Amazon or trying DMT or other psychedelics.  However, what I can promise you is that all of this same kind of chemistry already exists inside of you….not the kind of chemsitry where you trip or hallucinate necessarily, but an experience that opens you up dimensionally within your brain and cellular intelligence to the hyperdimensional nature of both your consciousness and the physical universe all at the same time.  And what is this universe? Its really kind of wild.  What appears to be random objects in space just bumping up against each other, all their own shape and form and for sentient life, their own individual selves, is actually a vast organism of being wherein everything is connected.  And this is not itself a seeming.  It is what is there once your mind opens or “blooms” through the thousand-petalled lotus of the Hindus or the Golden Flower of the Taoists.  This is the Ka of the Egyptians, and the Kah of the Maya and Polynesians.  It turns out that its all the same thing.

What makes nonduality so incredibly huge and important to us today is that when you are under its influence, you can literally become the thing you look at. I dont mean an illusion of sameness or connection, but independantly verifiable connection whereby just as two photons which have been “entangled” (connected through an association with each other) and when taken apart, one photon will react when the other photon is being energized.  This has been found to happen over vast distances and that time and space may have no effect on entangled particles. Deeper down this rabbit hole is the realization that physicsts are coming to which (is not surprise to me) is that is is potentially possible that EVERYTHING in the universe is somehow entangled with itself.  This means that we are all connected in together.  It means that when you are able to have the flow of energy moving through you that ancients have described as the universal force, you can FEEL anything that is out there.

The Gospel of Philip, which is rich in its use of nonduality elements explains that in our world here we can see the sun and then we can walk away and we know that we are separate from it.  We can do the same with people, with the moon, flowers, institutions, events, and atoms.  However, in the “other” world, as Philip puts it, when we look at the sun, be become the sun.  When we look at a person, we become that person.  When we see a war, we become that war, or other event.

What happens in nonduality is that the barrier betwen self and other falls away.  In truth, this barrier was not real. It never was.  It was a construct of the self to keep the self separate from everything else.  And yet, all of our seeking is actually about how we are connected to something larger, something bigger.  It is as though we cut ourselves off from a wonderful kingdom only to then go on pining for that land lifetime to lifetime.  This way of being is what we seek.  It is what we are after.  Religions will package it certain ways, but in all truth, you do not need a religion or method to know God or the living universe.  You just don’t. And without a religion, you have no beliefs that you MUST cling to, some of which are subject to the error of thousands of people who followed in the first teacher’s footsteps that then get copied through the texts as this material gets distributed through the world.  Why even go for such a “lossy” way of copying information. What if I told you that there is a way to knowing that is far more direct and transformative and that it does not require a drug trip nor a lot of money, or a teacher or a method, or any of that.

It is also the end of all belief if you are brave enough for that. It is the end of belief and the beginning of EXPERIENCE.  Why BELIEVE in a god when you can experience that god directly? You see, with nonduality, the seeming barrier between you and the other thing only exists in your mind.  YOU have created this barrier, and you have also maintained it, all the while holding back a VAST realm of energy. And you know, the world has gotten so expert at holding it back that it views letting go as the ultimate in defeat, of laziness, of not being “with it” or being focused here in this world.  It is in some measure not so different from what the beat and hipsters sought to do, which was to find a new way….ANY way out of the maze they had found themselves in.  The really courageous thing was that this did not involve religions necessarily, although a lot of people did trade a religion for something like Hindu gods and goddesses.  Some people even grew their hair, wore turbans and took eastern-sounding names like Ram Das or the like. I’m not criticizing those people because in a way, they needed to feel different and be different and this was a path for them to do it. They also gave up fundamentalism (most likely) for something far more embracing of differences and the great mystery of the universe. And certainly the Eastern traditions have a much better grasp on mystery than the western traditions ever seemed to have (except for the mystic strains that ran through Judaism, Islam, and Christianity).

The power to BE the thing that you observe.

What happens when this comes over you is that you FEEL the thing you observe.  You can quite literally receive direct imprints in the form of energetic psycho-physical data that is nearly instantaneous.  It leads to having high psi abilitiy as a result, or what we call psi. Yesterday I felt how my neighbor had suddenly come into my mind and I could feel his focus and presence on me in some way.  I found later that day as I got home that he had put a note on my door, the first of its kind ever since I have lived next to this guy, and it was about how he really wanted to see my house because he knows I am wanting to sell it. It turns out that at the same time when I felt his presence inside of me while visitng with a friend, he was on his way to my house sticking the note on my door.  This morning, for example, I could feel how an electronic transaction was being done that resulted in money being transferred to my account.  After four days of no activity on the end of the entity that was responsible for doing this, I suddenly could feel this rather cursory sense that someone or something had “seen” my transaction in a database somewhere and had marked my money for transfer. I had checked my account earlier and there was no money from this transaction.  Then within an hour of having feeling this, I checked my account to find that the money had been transferred at the time that I had felt it actually happening.  This is what I mean about this world that you enter into. It has a new set of rules, you could say, nd with it come a flood of different experiences. It also means a  different awareness and sense of responsibilty for what and HOW you feel.  I can tell you that its a strong motivational force for cleaning up the hard rough feelings that you can sometimes feel that is part of the inner architecture of the self that you once thought was separate and alone in this world.

But this is not for everyone.  Its only for those people who want to grapple with the truth of things.  If you want to make deals with reality, its best not to even try waking up this awareness within you because all you will have will be struggles.  I know this because I myself have tried this route and its hard, difficult, and can make you feel like you are being crushed under some amazing weight of indifferent truth that simply cannot be swayed or changed.  Gone are the days of your own private counterfeiting of reality and here is the reality of what actually IS.  The advantage to living your life WITH the truth is that your life is guided by an intelligence that is far more advanced than your own.  This is what Jesus meant when he said “I am one with the father.”  In truth, the documents had him saying “I am one with the father and mother.”  The whole concept of this being an engine of energy generation within the self has been completely lost in Christianity.  Also lost is the truth of how consciousness and the energy of consciousness is arranged the same way that electrical fields are oriented, which is in the shape of a torus.  This torus has a positive and negative polarity, the same polarity that the ancients called the feminine and masculine traits of consciousness.  This is also the same as the father and mother that Jesus spoke of.  It is the Shakti and Shiva of the Hindus.  It is the Yin and Yang of the Chinese.  The Holy Ghost in Christianity is the lost potential, the hidden face of our very consciousness and universe.  This “she” is the receptive side of all energy.  This is what all of the ancients have been describing all along.  Once this energy begins to connect into itself after you have removed the very real barriers in your cognition, the energy begins to flow automatically.  Kundalini flows, the Kah and the prana flow through you like liquid light.  You become incandescent.  You instantly achieve a high level of gnosis. You inherit something that was talked about over and over by Jesus, but has been largely miscomprehended….which is my word for “misunderstood.”  There was simply not a language that Jesus could describe all of this within and have it be well understood.  Jesus used words like “adultery” to explain how the self separates itself from this experience of nonduality, which divides one from the experience of being one with the father and mother.  He explains this in the Gospel of Mary, but most people who read these passages don’t even catch on to what it is he is saying. This is not just a simple case of misinterpretation on my part, its a lack of being able to understand the level at which this guy operated at.  The untold story was that he and his followers often operated at an incredibly high level of comprehension and yet they had very clumsy tools to try to get his across to people.  Consider that Jesus tells his disciples that he tells the masses about these secrets, put them right out in front of them in the form of parables, and yet it is like showing a blind person something that they just cannot and will not see.  He then says to his disciples that he speaks plainly to them and even THEY have a hard time understanding what it is he is saying. He was largely misunderstood. We turned his parables into stories about right and wrong and we lost the incredible depth that was there.

I am bringing up Jesus because he is a good example for how we just totally miss the boat on these things.  This is not an intellectual apprehension that is taking place.  This is something far more fundamental that is beginning to flower in your awareness, which is far more complex that mere thought.  When you become nondual your whole body begins sending you messages about this experience that is undeniable. It is also very powerful. It can also be overwhelming.  It takes a lot of willingness to stick with it and…..grow up.  To become more responsible and engaged with reality as it is and as it will unfold if you let it, and to also let go of your own individual need to try to make sense of things while your own mind merges into what I can only describe is a “superluminal mind” that is outside of time and has no restrictions placed on it. If there is any singularity that need take place in our tech world, it is the singularity of non-duality and how it can have wonderfully earth-shattering implications for us as individuals, as a culture, as a world, and as a universe.

But you need to hurry; we need more like you so others can understand just what it is I have been saying these last 2400 words.  There is no cost of admission but you do need to be ready for it.  Your innermost self will tell you if you are because you wont be able to keep it out of your mind.  Then, if that is the case, ask yourself if you can handle a practice that becomes a daily process wherein you become by shedding what you thought was important in favor of what will wind up, perhaps a decade from now, perfect for the self you will become.  The change will be rapid, fast-paced and it might be hard to keep old relationships.  It might be hard to work sometimes.  You might want to set aside some funds so you can go camping or go on a retreat or to work part-time for a while as your self unwinds lifetimes of error and distortions.  You shed a skin, or many skins, to find what you have been searching for.

P.

Kindling The Flame

When I awoke to being afire, I wondered if anyone before had such a thing happen to them. I had looked out for this for years, even ready about this act of self-immolation but never really “got” it or understood.  There is no way to understand because it just isn’t like that. How can I tell you what it is to kiss the lips of a goddess or god? I could, but you would make it up for yourself from my own words so that we would each have our own approximated versions.  They’d be different because words are so limited.  And because this is not something to be understood.  It is something to be experienced.

I had read around the edges of our esoteric understandings, hadn’t I?  Why didn’t I know what this thing was?  There is no way to know.  There is only experience. But when I did go looking, an intuitive friend suggested I try the Nag Hammadi.  It was there that I saw the world unfold before me.  It was not through the Hindu or Muslim or Zorasterian….but Christian.  Funny that awakening and the kundalini would be found there….but there it was.  It actually answered to me a deep sense of upset I have felt my whole life as an older life cam tumbling out of this like a bolt of cloth.  In this lifetime, I was one of those so-called “Gnostics” of a sort, which is to say that I once lived with the knowledge that what Yeshuah tried to do here was to wake us up, like all great teachers….but they did a real job on his teachings. In no other corner of our world of teaching has someone’s message been more subject to the slice and dice of bias and recreation of a man’s words for their own purposes.

The Apex Teachings of Jesus just didn’t have a chance of getting through.  What’s more, even the disciples seemed to feel it was dangerous to share this with just anyone. SO a lot was hidden.  Still more was driven underground or was simply not understood and was deemed “heretical.”  This was a very different Christianity.  The one we have today is fine, but it bears few threads that will lead ANYONE to liberation. The great teaching was reduced to a fine societal code for keeping people nice and docile. The followers were sheep and the shepherd moved the sheep around. Its kind of a mad thing, really, when you think of it.

The apex teachings of Jesus didn’t have a chance. No, this “new” Jesus that the new church fathers were going to fashion in 400 A.D. was going to be a chaste and pure man who was a god as surely as Jehovah was an authority over humankind.  And we would all OBEY this god of ours.  Its what humans do the best; control.  But liberation is not about control.  It is about allowing the impossible to happen.  It is about allowing every grain of sand to flow through your hand that lies on the earth in a moment of time.  It is possible for the human spirit to experience this.  It is possible to be entirely changed.  It is possible to win your freedom.  Jesus asks his own people if the teachings did not themselves say that humans are gods after he was criticized for speaking heresy.  He spoke it because he knew it to be the case.  In us lies not just the divine spark, but that which is godly.  What Jesus found, we each can find.  But who would need a church after finding the god or goddess within themselves?

Doing this, setting yourself aflame like this, though, is a lot of “work.”  It is a lot of work for us humans to be so honest, so candid with ourselves that we are willing to admit to all that we have done that has been in error, that has been twisted or turned, angled this way or that, to the brilliance of the great white light that is the source of all transformation.  We are riddled with error, my friends.  We are.  So sitting back and just letting this light into you is the healing thing…it will seem to tear you apart…but it is only because so much is nonessential….but as time goes by you will see it is the greatest of graces.  It takes so much effort to let ourselves be undone simply because we RESIST it so much and have done so for so long.

It is a lot of work for us silly humans because we do not know how to really learn sometimes.  I know, because I have resisted truly learning.  You cannot teach anyone who thinks they already know it all. Such full vessels are where the fools of the world seek repose and congratulate themselves that they have some piece of what is true, that they have it all figured out.  But there are so many “truths” are there not?  So many things to believe, so many biases to accept in the process of taking such delicious bait.  And yet, beyond all of our assumptions and knowing lies something still and entirely explosive.  Taking it into yourself, just this spark, is enough to engulf you in the purifying flame of the alchemical urge…..the divine spark rests in us all and it desires to set us each aflame.  I say “take it into you” but this is not true….you take it into your willingness to accept that it is already INSIDE of you. Awakening is what we all are.  It is a verb, not a noun.

This flame will burn away all thoughts about what you believed were true and leave you simple, less encumbered, sometimes lonely, even sad for the life you thought you had or wanted or the world you thought you had or wanted.  It takes time to adjust as you auger deeper into the depths of your soul and root out the errors that have been there for lifetimes.  Oh yes, you will learn that this is all a giant cycling from one moment to the next….from one life to another life…and to another and another….

We live so many lives because we are such stubborn beings, unwilling or unable to realize who or what we are deep down.  The gift of the deity is encoded in our cells, in the very atoms and subatomic particles that make up our bodies. You can feel this energy all the way down in the core of each atom in your body if you allow your awareness to open you that deep.  If you do, you will witness and fan the flames of an amazing immolation that is taking place.  I did not start this fire, but I am certainly fanning these flames.

Yeshuah said “No one comes to the Father and Mother except by me.” What he meant was that there was not anyone else that he knew of who had what he had, which was awakening.  So while it sounds like he was bringing something novel to earth, he really wasn’t.  He KNEW there was no one else who had it. He had studied, he had spent years in meditation, and he had traveled widely. He KNEW that this was rare.  Very rare.  When he said that no one came to it except by him, he meant it.  If you wanted to learn about it at that time or in the middle east, Jesus was the man. But this was taken to mean that NO ONE else anywhere or at any other time EVER had this except the would-be god-man named Jesus.  What Jesus did, you can do.  I did.  Thousands of others have.  Many more will.  And this kindling of flame in our spirits and bodies will bring great change, such that has not been seen before.  Mark my words. At no other time have so many awakened all within such a short period of time.

It will continue.  It will continue because the spirit has said so.  The second coming of the Christ is this….and it is just now filling thousands of people who often have had no tie to religion.  That is because this is not about a chosen group but those who have managed to do enough work to loosen themselves from the moorings of their old way of being.  They have done the three things critical to awakening that exist with every person who has ever awakened.

You do not need a church.  Waking up means you no longer need the structure of someone telling you what is or is not right.  consensus reality is itself something that is riddled with madness.  Why would anyone want to be like anyone “normal” ever again?  And even saying this, I see how it is that the followers of this Christ tried their best to make a wonder-filled church which had bits and pieces of the gold which did not tarnish peeking out here and there along with lesser brass or coppers, all pretty in their own way, but which do change due to their error.  The pure spark, the pure flame, which is eternally lit in us will bring us all to the doorstep of the divine as soon as we each discover the place inside of us where flame or spark meets the tinder that aches to be set afire and burned to ash so a wonder may emerge….

I learned of my condition not by way of the Hindu but the Christian because I think I had a small score to settle with the world of those who would seek to make my master’s teachings into a polluted lake of stale purity.  The Father and the Mother shall join in ecstatic embrace knowing that their union births the transformative Christ Consciousness.  It is ever-so whether Druid, Native American, Christian, Hindu, Muslim,Judaic, Zoroastrian, or any other faith.  Waking up to this leads one to knowing through direct experience and the end of all systems, which supposedly exist to help us reach liberation.  No system has ever been able to contain it, yet those who have known it will speak of it, even vainly, in the hopes of helping others.  It is a fire which will burn, but it is also a fire that will transmute.  Resisting it is not a way to move forward…..but resisting may well be the lesson many of us are set to learn (myself included).

I wish you the best, and I hope that you find the tri-fold path that leads to this most wondrous of all transformations.

P.

The Mother

When I awoke, when I had that burst of energy up my spine that left me changed as a human being, I really only had at that time the one thing I had always had at my command to make heads or tails of this experience; observation.  I didn’t know what it was that was happening to me.  I wasn’t terribly scared, but I was alarmed a bit and wondered what on earth had happened.  Observation is a powerful thing.  This is what I observed in that first year….

Once I realized that this energy was going to stay with me and was not some accident or stumble into some unknown land, I began to observe what this thing was doing to me.  It wasn’t hard.  I just sat quietly and began to do a simple form of what I would later learn was Mindfulness.  I just watched.

As I observed, I noticed that my awareness seemed to clarify.  I realized that I had not looked so closely at myself.  I had taken myself, my insides for granted, I suppose.  It isn’t that I didn’t observe myself before because I certainly did in meditation that I had developed over the years that I developed that was a good fit for me.  But this form of observing myself was…..different.  And the energy in me was different, too!  I guess it was like a new day.  It was.  It is hard to compare anything from the old ways to this thing.  What I noticed was that as I got very quiet, I could really feel the bliss flowing through me. When my mind was stilled from the rush of a thousand things we endlessly think about and chatter to ourselves about in any given moment, I was just amazed at the WOOSH of bliss.

Looking at this bliss, I asked what it felt like.  What was it?  How would I describe it?  What I realized was that one side of me felt masculine while the other side felt feminine.  I wasn’t always completely sure which side was which, and other times, it was very clear.  What was always clear was that there was this feeling as though something was embracing within me.  Something was now in an embrace that was without end.  It was an endless moment of love and the bliss that we feel when we are with someone whom we love, whom we yearn for, whom we cannot get enough of.  I felt into myself and found that the more I placed my awareness on them, the stronger their embrace became.  It really was an embrace.  I saw my body from a distance and as I looked down at it I saw these two forces as a masculine warm energy and a feminine cooler energy.  The thought here is that hot goes to cool. The man is drawn to the woman, and she is receptive to her beloved.  That was how this energy was.  And there was an intelligence within it!  As I let go of the who what when where and why’s, and simply let go and let this amazing crazy thing happen in me, I felt their energy grow in the way that a gentle wind might fan the flames of a fire.  As this energy grew, I became distinctly aware of an energy beginning to form between these two columns that went up my torso.

I didn’t know it, but I was describing kundalini.  I just wasn’t there yet.  I was there still observing, feeling into it, and wondering what on earth was happening to me.  I was lucky, I think, because it helped me to realize something hidden within Christianity that I had suspected, sensed, but did not know what it was….something had been missing, I knew it all my life growing up. There was a secret…..not some kind of conspiracy….just something hidden.  But what?  The answer came when I awoke.  The answer was there, and as I looked later, I saw it.  It was going to become plain as day.

Feeling into this this third energy, I thought about how I might describe it.  And really, it only had one description; it was a transcendental child.  It was the product of their union.  This was the most elegant image I could come up with.  And yet?  There was nobody there.  So odd.  And yet, there was someone there, a higher order consciousness was emerging within me and I was getting to observe this.  Something about consciousness could be described as a family unit!

I was at this early time in conversation with a pretty intuitive person who had gone to seminary but left because he found it too restrictive.  When I explained what I was feeling, he suggested that I take a look at the Nag Hammadi documents, those scrolls discovered in the desert of Egypt outside of the town the cache of documents is now named after.  These were early Christian documents that had a vocabulary that was very different from mainline Christianity.

As I read through some of these documents, two things stood out.  One, was that these old writings seemed just as riddled with distortive elements as any other Christian document, some because of translation errors, and others as a result of a story being told verbally enough that it changes or shifts depending on the person telling it.  There was enough evidence to show that these stories that make up the gospels were written  a good pace from the actual events.  Memory shifts, changes….and small misunderstandings creep in.  I say this because so much of what I read in these hidden documents were speaking directly to the experience of awakening.  The thing though, is reading the mainline gospels, the King James’s version, you might never catch on to what was being said….the deeper story.  For all its faults, these books were saying something pretty huge and the interesting thing is that they were the very first documents that I read that put me on the path to understanding what was going on with me.  Jesus was talking about Awakening!  The Kingdom, he said, was in us, all around us, and we see it not.  The Kingdom, he said to his followers, had already come, but they just didn’t know it.  They didn’t know it because they had not yet awakened. Did they wake up?  There is some suggestion that they at least got a taste of the Holy Ghost descending on them, but the degree to which they each tasted the elixir of this experience, I can only guess.

What I did find was Jesus saying “I am one with the father and the mother.”  Exactly.  He spoke about the death of the ego as the seminal event that takes place prior to moving mountains, the means by which the power of awakening is realized in ones life as evidenced in strange coincidences, small miracles, or synchronicities.  He spoke of this mother in a few places, yes, enough that it was clear that his followers had been told about it. Philip probably guaranteed that his gospel would never see the light of day when we mentioned the elephant in the room when he said, “Those who say Mary begat with the Holy Ghost are in error.  For when has a woman begot with another woman?”  He was pointing to a misunderstanding some had at the time about the family unit within human consciousness.  The Holy Ghost was the mother! Same as Shakti.  Same as Yin. And in Christianity, it is a very important missing piece.   It was not correct that the story would say she begot with a consciousness that was female, no, it would have been that she was overshadowed by the Father.  What this points to is how there may have been an effort to obfuscate the role that the feminine has within cosmic or Christ consciousness by effectively anonymizing her into a “ghost”  early on in the rise of Christianity as a path.  Perhaps even during Jesus’s own life, even.  It is clear his disciples bickered with each other, and did not “get” everything that Jesus was saying to them.  He even said so.  Were some of them simply dedicated to his cause but asleep?

The Ghost is this vast presence within all of matter, within all of creation, bred and born and replicated all through everything, and this ghost is She.  A vibration of energy, or consciousness, which we all seem to feel or know is part of the world dreaming, the creation, and is active in each and every moment that we are alive and rides on our own waves of creativity.  The more you are aware of this part of you, not as a literal woman, but something that is receptive, grace-filled, wonder-filled, and awe inspiring, the more that you can feel it.  Just as I sat and observed, the energy just went off the charts.  I am one with the Mother.  But to be one with her, she must lay upon my lips each moment.  In my journey, it has been easy and hard to do that, in turns.  I just keep asking, keep surrendering, keeping myself humble.  “Show me.  Please.  I am hard.  Soften me, melt me.  Take me apart; show me how I can be….different. Birth me anew.”

I will tell you that looking back into my past pre-awakening, for as artsy and right-brained as I was, I was also caught in the tide of paternalism as everyone here is.  There is so much that we are not even aware of that is taught, handed down, but not looked at. By not really looking at it, we leave it as it is and it remains static but alive in us.  This is how the generations can hand down behavior for thousands of years until something disrupts it, shakes things up, and changes things.  I woke up knowing there was this force in me, male and female-feeling.  I am returning to that awareness again, today, yesterday, last week, last month, asking it to teach me anew.  Teach me.  Show me. I need you in my life.  Soften me, break me apart.  Take me down to chaff and wheat.  Blow gently across my soul and leave only what is best in me.  Let the rest go.  I am ready.  I now know the love that you bear is powerful, once scary, now seen as so wise, so ruthless in its honesty.  I am the fool.  Make me into what I have not yet been able to become.  Maybe this is my practice…. If there is to be one.  I never really thought of myself as having a religion.  I haven’t. I have sought using my own compass to guide me. But silently, quietly, privately, I pray to the light.  I do.

This is not an abstraction for me.  It is right here, swirling in what the Taosits call the 10,000 things.  This presence is in everything, yin and yang, female and masculine-feeling.  It is the Shakti and her Siva.  And yet?  And there is nothing material there!  But there is Presence.  When my awareness opens to it, I feel something beautiful in me, that KNOWS the feminine superconsciousness because it is in some way inside of me.  Looking into myself, I see out into the multiverse.  You see, you CAN learn a lot by inquiring within.  We think we only learn by looking outward.  But the road goes both ways.  Look both ways.  Your parentage is waiting for you there.  They will help you to grow up.

For me, I let go of any expectations.  I have learned that the more I do this, the looser I am, the more ready I am for a strong wind to blow my petals open and spread the seed, or the chaff, or whatever it is that needs to go.  There is an overarching presence that is not without purpose.  You can think me crazy, I don’t really care.  But it is true.  It is beyond any religion, beyond any need to believe or spin stories or tales, even as we try to do just that.  In the midst of it, this coarse self, so hardened, so unmade, dissembled, is somehow redeemed.  I am shown the way to BE. And for years, I have slowly learned how, the way one might learn a dance. But this dance requires that I do these dance steps each and every moment.  Every breath, every moment turns into a prayer.  This prayer is not for anything except to learn to be like “it.”  “Please show me” I ask it.  It is as if it is aware of me but says nothing.  It knows just as I know that the only way is for me to surrender to its presence.  Its hands are like a strong-handed doctor reaching into your being and taking out what does not belong.  Sometimes this is just hard. Sometimes it is easy.  Sometimes I am afraid.  And this is the insanity I have practiced all these lifetimes, round and round; I have desired the devil I have known instead of the angel that I could become.  Maybe I feared change.  Maybe I was simply addicted to chaos.  Maybe I wanted to be right even though deep down I knew I was wrong.  Wrong!  But wrong how?

Wrong in how I chose to see, to feel, to be.  I say I was born into this life and was raised with no choice in the matter, but I now know that is not true.  I was DRAWN to this place, this time, this life, as a being living outside of time, within all possibility.  We are all immortals, taking on bodies.  How silly to try and set people up for being responsible for our own self-chosen journey!  And how powerless, too, we make ourselves by thinking this way.  Doing this has weakened my root centers, giving me no end of trouble, and trouble to others.  Something whispers that it must be strengthened with truth.  Sweet brutal truth.  It means turning away from the fault being any others but my own.  Always making judgements that were less about the world and more about my own broken record of a story.  I was, and still am, on this merry go round.  But the only difference is that with all of the chaff that has blown away since all of this began in 2007-ish, I know I am getting down to the most major end of the big stuff that has held me up and had me tied in knots.  No one else is responsible for how I feel except myself.  I was always there defining the moment in terms of light and dark, good or bad.  How does one, so soaked in sleep know how to be as one who is awake.

But aren’t I awake?  Now that is the rub, my friends.  It is what we each must bear in mind.  When you awaken, you are given this great gift, but you get that gift based on where you are in your accumulation or loss of the inner material that does not serve you.  You awaken amidst a giant garbage heap that is your self.  Awake, the work is to remove this garbage. For me, the awareness of this was early when I asked this energy what it was doing.  It showed me.  We were to get to work on a kind of inventory and release the stuff, the baggage, the STUFF once and for all.  So for a time, you have this remainder.  The idea that we wake up and simply change like a snap of fingers is itself not really true.  Even Buddha worked on this thing he found under that tree.  the realization is one thing, the becoming is another.  You have to cross over from shadow into light.  We have all been dancing in the shadows without fully realizing it.

These are notions and expectations and beliefs that are simply not in alignment with what IS.  Whatever we are not in alignment with is like being an adulterer to our higher nature.  It is a turning away.  This, I have said over and over, is the very nexus of what we think of as negative karma.  If you want to have good karma, you will learn to know who you are deep down and seek your authentic being, the father and mother within, and know them intimately.  They alone will save you.  No church outside of you will be able to do it.  So powerful is this force that it will take you apart to the degree that you just trust its mighty force.

I am praying, you see.  All of this, is nothing more than my prayers.  Always has been.  Find your own prayer, feel deep within and ask yourself where your error lies.  This is not something you will be able to rationally know.  it is what you will feel as a simple certainty, or a dreadful sense that you are just on the wrong path.  And yet?  And yet, we so often stay on that path because it is…..familiar.  Boom.  Wow.

Could it be so easy to turn over the cart and begin an entirely new journey?  How many times have you tried to change for another person in order that your very being would fit into their lives?  How often has your own nature come into conflict with others in a way that it made you feel bad to be you?  When one is resting in the authentic self, anyone who seeks to change you is themselves living in illusion.  Didn’t the Hindus say that all of this is an illusion, a dream?  Well…..I prefer to see it as a creation, full of possibility, a grand chalk board of a place where we get to discover and create wildly.  But within us…..is there a splinter?  A pain?  A hurt?  A feeling of something not fulfilled?  Our real selves are fulfilled already, needing precious little except to feel bliss and absorb the moment.  Do this, or do that, it is your freewill.  But when you come across something that feels like resistance, look within and ask yourself; is it you or them?  And maybe it is them.  And later, you might realize it was both….both of you mirroring in a place of “illusion” or delusional feeling and thinking.  My task, at least, is to find the highest.  Me, I am a bit of a glorious mess, but there is something inside of me that is perfect.  I will for now seek that, for the mother will heal, the father inspire, and the two will show me that we are two-into-three-as-one.

For me, as a descendent of the world or the paternal journey, it is now my journey to open up to the softening of the feminine super consciousness.  It is time to get to know the Mother.

So don’t think that I am someone who has it all down.  I don’t.  I am here praying, I am here singing to the light because I am a creature of the physical.  I am creative…..in my own way, these are my prayers.  So take them as that.  I am not here as any proclaimer of anyone else’s truth.  We each find it ourselves.  And maybe you might wonder what the point is.  It seems that this is how it all comes down.  Increasingly, as you will notice, I have become less and less verbose.  I sometimes wonder, what is the point, really, when it is so clear that we each have that compass point within us.  We each have to realize it.  No one can do it for us.  The inevitability of it was spoken to me in the first weeks of awakening as I passed over a river and felt it speak: “It is inevitable that you will return to the ocean…”  I had no idea what it meant then, but something in me seemed to know. We are each like fish swimming from creeks to ocean and back again.  We know the way.  We do.  You just need to keep it simple because the relationship of these forces in you are also simple, ubiquitous.  Thank goodness.

The Bridal Chamber

When I awoke, when I began to realize that something quite different had happened to me and that whatever “this” was, it wasn’t just imagination or some unusual effect of my physiology….I wondered what on earth this was….I wondered if there was any sort of explanation that would help me to understand what this force was that had entered my body and my life.  

Since I did not know what this thing was that was taking place within me, I was free to simply watch and observe, which was itself a great gift.  As I did this, I communicated with a friend about this happening to some degree and based on what I was telling him about my sense of two forces rising up within me that felt like a cosmic yin/yang, he pointed me in the direction of the Gnostic texts most notably found in the Nag Hammadi. He had studied in the seminary and knew these documents and how the church had sought to turn a blind eye to them as being inconvenient to church doctrine. 

I found to my surprise that these documents were describing what I was experiencing better than anything I had up to that moment I had found out there.  I would later come across the Hindu texts about kundalini, but it seemed that for the moment I needed very much to see all of this through an old lens of Christianity first.  I sense that it has been part of healing a rift I have felt I have carried about what went down with Christianity.  Its another story and I wont bore you, except to say that I felt since I was young that something was seriously amiss with our canon or bible.  The experience of finding the Nag Hammadi texts (most notably Thomas, Philip and Mary) have helped to really clear some things up.  Jesus was himself a carrier, a channel for the divine, yes, but had been a man who had done the work in order to help his disciples to know it as well.  It was becoming more and more evident that he had even spent decades in India and came home, translating all of the language of awakening into his local language and ways and customs so that others could know.  Jesus was like any other person and attained a knowing or sense of the divine within himself.  While prophecies swirled around his life as “the one” I think that this was a convenient gift for the man but it also brought in all kinds of distortive elements for the simple reason that when you bring the divine and earthly power together, the divine has to be the one calling the shots or else everything becomes distorted. Put theologians in charge of the mystical and you wind up holding a corpse.

Kundalini, the two forces of yin and yang had “risen” within my body, carefully piercing each chakra as it rose, establishing a blinding path of energy along the way which altered me forever.

Christ instead became a king who stood above all others, a kind of inaccessible force or presence that you had to entreat for his forgiveness or to gain his grace through his sacrifice.  This was itself a story that made no sense to me.  If Jesus was awakened, he knew there was nothing that he, as a man, was going to lose.  There was no death for such a man.  So where did the concept of resurrection come from?  It came from Awakening which the gnostics all described as having been “as if dead one day and then alive the next.”  It was not a literal death and birth…it was a resurrection OF THE SPIRIT.  When we awaken, this is exactly what happens.  And it happens regardless of religious affiliation; Jew, Christian, Native American, Hindu, Taoist.  Somewhere someone inserted the idea of sacrifice into the story.  Jesus may well have been crucified, yes, but what he sacrificed was his old earthly self in favor of “putting on the better person [man]” which the Gnostic Jesus entreated his followers to do.  What was moving in me was a dual energy that brought incredible bliss and transformation.  Further, this was a force that was absolutely in love with its opposite end of itself, its compliment.  And even more than this, these two forces WERE NOT SEPARATE!  If this was not a mind bending notion at the time, I don’t know what was!  Kundalini, the two forces of yin and yang had “risen” within my body, carefully piercing each chakra as it rose, establishing a blinding path of energy along the way which altered me forever. My new condition would be about getting used to the new forces alive in me and adapting to this new world I found myself in.  I lived with an energy that was in love in my body.  This idea could get reflected outward as my feeling intense love also.   

What I discovered was a LOT of information that hit the nail on the head where my own experience was concerned.  I had to pick and choose some, though, because like all ancient texts, these texts showed signs of having been revised by different people over long periods of time.  These were, after all, handwritten texts, and not everyone was able to just make a photocopy of the original, but sometimes added or took away. This is the same situation with the canonical texts, too, if you dig into the history of these books.  It was in these heretical books, though,this Nag Hammadi,  that I found the most direct and clear description of the experience of awakening, of the union with the two-part nature of the deity or God, and what happens during such a sacred and mystical union.  All of it is achieved by way of images. Know that these are just images and that they are merely there to describe an experience that stand behind the words.  Know what is behind the words and you shall inherit the universe.  I know that sounds grand….and it is….but in so doing, a great humility has always come over me that has shown me that now that I know, it is like knowing powerful things that now must be honored and respected. 

Remember when Einstein had that BRILLIANT realization that energy = matter?  Wow.  Now what did others seek to do with that knowledge?  they built bombs with it.  Horrible things that had the power to wipe life off the face of the planet if the wrong hairless apes got a hold of them.  For 40 years the world was literaly held hostage by forces who played with this knowledge now existing as bombs and fissile material.  It was just as possible that we could have done very different things with this knowledge.  Yes, energy and matter are the same.  What implications does this have for us here?  How can we use this for the good of all?  This is the kind of responsibility I am talking about.  It is the same responsibility I felt when I began to see energy fields.  Doing this meant I had another level of awareness that I could use for healing or it opposite.  So in seeking and finding, always choosing the good is very important.  If we do not choose the good, depending on how high the stakes are, we can stunt ourselves or we can literally loft ourselves over the moon.  Lofting ourselves collectively over the moon sounds a lot better to me.  It may not serve the agenda of a small cabal of people who want all the goods for themselves (which has been the human story all over and all across time), but it does, I sense, serve the unfolding of the creation in an wonderful and ecstatic fashion.  We can know this ecstatic vision.  It is here right now and we each need to simply grasp it and make it our own and allow its presence in us to temper and guide our choices in each moment:  how does my actions help to serve the good of all, the highest?  Okay….that was my soap box moment.  But it is important for us in this moment, NOW, to get what is facing us now right. 

So the Nag Hammadi….

Union with the Deity was described less as facing the deity but more a revealing effect wherein the person would feel the presence of the “Father” and the “Mother” within themselves.  This powerful effect was a mirroring.  This was a bridal chamber because of how blissful that it is.  It was not called a grand reunion, no, and it was called the bridal chamber for a very important reason.  It is because when we reach this place within ourselves, when we touch upon the divine within, it is the most incredible experience we could ever know.  And part of it is a feeling of having fallen deeply into love with someone, a deep and abiding sense of engagement.  Looking into ones own self, a mirrored world opened up, a place where one wanted to make onse self more beautiful for the Other.  For me, I was watching this passion play unfold as two forces on each side of my spine sought to enfold the other.  I felt like I had suddenly become a vessel for the cosmic forces of the heavenly and divine.  I often wondered about this accelerated form of consciousness…..and I wondered what it was thinking.  I knew how it was acting and behaving.  I KNEW how it felt in my body.  I knew that something had taken up residence within and even as I let go of those first uncomfortable stabs of worry over what this presence intended to do within me, I found that it was all bliss for the most part…..except for when I resisted….in which case it would become misery. I quickly learned that this force did not have a single bad thing in mind for me.  I was not being possessed in the normal sense, but I was entering into a channel that exists inside each of us for the divine to flow. 

You “rise” in the spirit and in the flesh, which is the very essence of the resurrection.

The Gnostics described it well.  Jesus asks his followers what they would do when upon entering the Bridal Chamber that they discover that they are two?   One walks into the bridal chamber but two walk out.  Most people who have not experienced this might not realize what he was getting at.   You “rise” in the spirit and in the flesh, which is the very essence of the resurrection. In fact, Philip explains that we must rise in the flesh or else when we die, we get nothing.  We are here seeking to learn, to attain something that he says will not happen in the next life.  Perhaps it wont happen in the next life simply because all life is one life, whether in flesh or not.  If you can’t do it here, how can you do it anywhere else or in any other body?  Further, he also described ego-death and the aspect of the miraculous ability to cause events to happen in perfect timing, something we call synchronicity today.  This was most certainly what the first Christians were talking about.  The further you get from the fount of the bubbling spring that Jesus flowed out to his followers, the harder it is to get the original sense of mystery wonder and awe of the experience.  So it was by the time that the Church was formed that the theologians and politicians could not see or understand what these deep mystical texts were saying.  It did not help that a lot of the texts had some really quite messed up thinking attached to them.  Yes, there were some really messed up thinking that was in the mix of many of what we call today as Gnostic texts.  When I say messed up thinking, I mean that the books have some material added in that is just….well….it is way off base, even when being interpreted in an allegorical way, which many of these texts need to be, even the Bridal Chamber, which is itself not a real chamber that is physical, but a deep and wonderful communion with the divine within ones own self. 

The language used to describe what happens to you when you awaken to this presence of the two within was not that different from what Hindu and Chinese mystics have described as the yin/yang or the Shakti and Shiva.  St. Theresa of Avilla describes her awakening as the cleansing of seven rooms within her being where she found communion with her spouse, God/Jesus and looked forward to the day when she could leave this earth so she could go be with her spouse in heaven.  And this was just how it was for me.  I was absorbed completely into this and it was absorbed into me.  Whatever that had existed before that served to be the boundary between knowing this so deeply and not feeling so deeply only moments before it “rose” in me, the effect was one of an essence of spirit that was in no way built on anything resembling the old life I had known where everything existed as individual objects, divided out, separate and alone.  In fact, all of life seemed to rise upward into my awareness like individual objects being suspended, supported, and fed by this endless ocean or web of living presence that my own consciousness had a habit of being able to seep so far down into that I would lose myself in visions of how it was made or composed.  It was not too unlike what it was like if you were to awaken as a cell in your own body and were given a tour of your body, which would no doubt look like a vast teeming realm, seemingly endless in scale or scope and fascinating and amazing for how wherever you looked, you “saw” (felt deeply) the presence of this ocean….this field….this web of life supporting everything quietly, non-judgmentally and lovingly. 

I had come to peace with the reality that my own sexuality would be used as a vessel for the divine.

In fact, I had to come to peace with the reality that my own sexuality would be used as a vessel for the divine.  All of my energy which flowed through me was now…..taken.  But hadn’t it been given?  When you touch such sweetness there is nothing you can do but to say yes.  Every single act of resistance is turned into compliance in such moments as those.  It is simply too powerful.  While we may each give ourselves to it or resist out of fear, in the end it seems that this is all a large-scaled event wherein it is not always easy to see the whole picture simply because the picture is endless.  Something in this consciousness does not divide itself because to do that would be to deny life to some part of itself.  I learned that the divine simply had no shame.  This is the work we have to do here, which is to realize that when this force takes us, it takes us innocently and completely.  It does not know half-way or less than all the way.  It does so totally because….to do any less would mean that the presence of the divine somehow does not feed all of its creation equally or evenly. There is simply no exception or division or limit.  And so the sensual character, the mental, the emotional, the sexual….ALL of it becomes a vessel for the divine to reside and know itself in you.And this is the marriage that takes place. 

As these two forces rise in your body, what the Gnostics called the Mother and Father, they reach a deep embrace that is like sexual union that gives rise to the creation of a third, a child, what we call cosmic consiousness or the Christ.  It is a transcendent energy…..it is hardly just a person but a force, too.  It coheres the a sense of presence but also goes beyond our usual sense of what a personality might be as a deity or divine presence.  I would say that what we think of as the presence of ego is different.  This less identified ego allows the presence to flow in and out of things, out of you and me with great ease without feeling a sense of losing itself.  It is, I would say, a perfect form of ego where the presence still is itself but is able to flow through all things. 

But what I found was that if I could simply resist feeling shame over being found to have this junk in me and instead just opened deeply to this presence, it would cleanse me of this darker material and my own energy and experience would refine.

This experience has shown me that as I surrender to this presence within, I am letting “it” more deeply into my being, into my light body, which is where all sorts of old knots and blockages once existed and were cleared away.  But as this energy flowed in me, the effect that it had was to amplify all of my feelings.  Even the sexual ones, too. It was itself a process of union where I let it into the deepest and most intimate parts of myself knowing that I would be consumed with this great love and passion and even lust.  All of it would rise up within me as this presence came in.  It was like I was the moon being illuminated by the sun whenever it would come into my silence and meditations at night and in my day to day work and thoughts. So for a time I had to deal with all of the old baggage getting knocked about the interior of this bridal chamber, a lot of muck being kicked up for a time.  But what I found was that if I could simply resist feeling shame over being found to have this junk in me and instead just opened deeply to this presence, it would cleanse me of this darker material and my own energy and experience would refine.  Even as I tried with all my might to hold on to the old familiar ways of feeling as a human being….i would slowly lose my grip and learn, in degrees, that I COULD become a different person…..not difference in essence, but different in what motivated me, affected me, or moved me.

This presence would move into me and create such a storm of feeling within…..and it was often a feeling from something to something.  For a time I would feel the Presence sending me love until I learned to hold that love within myself.  When I could do that, somethign quite miraculous would happen; I would find myself wed even more deeply and more inexpicably into the msytery of this experience, which is to say I would experience a still deeper sense of union where the notion of the “other” would simply dissapear.  That, or it was so deep within me it did not matter whether I say one part of me is the me I have always known and the other part is this ancient yet forever new presence that is this “other.”  This is why it is so important for me to not seek to always understand it, but to allow it to unfold like a mystery because any effort at trying to make sense of it using my logical mind will trap me and keep me caught in something that was never intended to be used for knowing the mind of God. 

There is no greater love in the universe than this, so continually seeking to surrender to it opens it up within yourself.  Struggling with it or fighting it is fighting with what you are.  How can anything good be expected to come from that? 

God does not feel shame.  It is totality in all it does.  If it feels union, it is because it does so totally.  So when you feel God truly, it will be as though one is suddenly gripped in the presence or heart of something so amazingly vast yet also so incredibly personable and so ready to take over your entire body in order to worship and love and adore you that to resist is to invite psychosis.  There is no greater love in the universe than this, so continually seeking to surrender to it opens it up within yourself.  Struggling with it or fighting it is fighting with what you are.  How can anything good be expected to come from that? 

When I do this I find that I am like a mandala that, folded, continues to unfold around its outer edges, revealing a little more dimension each time.  Something inside of me that is at once me and the divine, unfolds.  I know that this is the mystery of creation….that as I touch the bliss of being in unity with the divine, I am made more….I unfold….I am more aware of more that is at once me and also the universe.  How can that be?  That is because the divine dwells within everything.  It literally looks out from within EVERYTHING.  It is silent and it waits until, through grace, each particle that it inhabits, begins to realize that the vibration that it has is purely divine and reaches it back to its creator. The Shri Yantra unfolds within me as larger and larger triangles of phenomena, like ripples on the surface of the water, spread outward.  As they spread outward, so too does my awareness expand along with it. I have become one with the divine.  I ride along with it just as surely as it has been riding within my cells waiting for the day when I awoke to the truth of my being. 

The Hopi, who describe a dividing of the way that would happen someday in the coming of the next world, where some people would take a high road and others a lower road, may be happening now.  And like all prophecy, nothing is written.

And now, it is your time to consider who and what you are.  This is a flame that is composed of both fire and water, of the totality of all opposites and all union that will move and purify your body mind and spirit.  This is the essence of what awakening has brought to me.  It is not for anyone who is not ready to take it on and allow the work to unfold.  To resist it is to know madness.  And even as I flow with it, I too have my moments of resistance, and resistance I don’t even know yet that I am resisting.  And yet, even as I know this, I also know that I have unfolded….and will continue to do so and that there is no force that is seeking to judge me, no force that is within my cosmic orbit.  

There is not a sense as though anything is wrong or bad, just a simple matter of cleaning this all up…because the world is FULL of faults and “bad” if you want to really get honest about it and those who point fingers the most are the ones who have been the worst transgressors most often.  Motes and beams, motes and beams…..what I saw in a vision as the purification of the earth that the many native tribes of north America have foretold would happen.  The Hopi, who describe a dividing of the way that would happen someday in the coming of the next world, where some people would take a high road and others a lower road, may be happening now.  And like all prophecy, nothing is written.  Do we take a drop along with us or do we swell that drop to an ocean?  there is not real timelines on any of this and I urge you to follow your passion, your wonder, your awe and live life as fully as you can no matter what that might mean.  Be you a computer tech, a designer, a teacher, or a builder or a service worker or Mommy who nurtures her children full time or a farmer…….all that seems to be asked of us is that we punch it all up a notch or two in order to expand our awareness of what we are beyond our more dim visions into a larger vision of what we are and what we can be.

You are two-in-one, the divine awareness that is love and does love itself.

We have lived under the canopy of separation consciousness for a long time.  That is now changing as we reach into a state within ourselves, individually, where we can touch and know and feel the totality.  You are two-in-one, the divine awareness that is love and does love itself. We can sense the sacredness of the experience and be informed and changed by it. No matter who we are or what we are doing…..for the simple fact that the divine is everywhere…..it is in the atoms of the tire that the mechanic is changing in his shop, and it is moving in currents beyond the stars and is a force holding everything her together as a cohesive unit.  No matter who or what you are…..it will meet you perfectly because it is without any thought of limitation or judgement.  Truly.  If you would get to know this force you will learn that each and every act of judgement was you.  It is already awake and aware and is patiently waiting, silently and softly for each of us to come to our senses. 

And so this is a little of what I experience.  It is a deep and difficult depth to explain or plumb.  IN the end, there are no words.  In the end, it is simply what it is and I often tire of telling of it because it takes me away from my direct experience.  And while, yes, I seek bliss with the divine, I do so knowing that in each moment, that bliss heals me so I make no excuses for feeling it and letting it into my life.  It has set so much right and is setting more that still remains to be right.  I hope that you may find such fulfillment and love and wonder. 

The Return Of The Goddess

 

I have written extensively about this on other blogs, and I am now putting it here as it is a very important aspect to where we are headed as a species.  This is not a spiritual thing, a nice idea to hold or to cleave to.  It is part of the inner workings of the divine cosmos, the air, the atoms, the vibrations of all energy. What we have come to call the yin and yang, the masculine and feminine seen in myriad forms from Shakti and Shiva to the Goddess and the Horned God or Cernunonos, these images express an infinitely broad aspect of all reality, all being, all experience.  What a physicist describes as an energy pattern of positive moving to negative, the Hindu describes as the natural continuum of energy between these seeming opposites.  The images, the symbols, are merely that, and yet, within the electromagnetic spectrum wherein our own experience rides, we feel these currents as the bedrock of our very experience.  You can make this as personal or as impersonal as you want to; the presence of these forces are so broad, they are simply everywhere and are everything.

 

The reality is that even as males and females are seen as distinct, they both carry the chemistry of the other within them.  the most manly of men produce estrogen and women rely on some testosterone for normal bodily function and the regulation of libido.  We all have oxytocin in our bodies, that interesting hormone that is known to play an important role in pair bonding and family unity.  It is also a neurotransmitter (true!) and we all have it.  In just the same way, consciousness carries aspects of both masculine and feminine perhaps in less rigidly formed ways within us.  When kundalini rose in me I was aware of two energies that were in perfect union and that the very force of this energy was not one of the other, but BOTH.  The bliss from this force was the union.  When I pulled awareness away from this perfection in union, bliss ceased and I became really quite ordinary. Luckily, it took a very strong emotional force or “constriction” to cause this to happen.  We are, whether we know it, top to bottom, operating on this seemingly “dual” energy which appears to be in all truth only workable when it is in union, when they work dynamically together.

 

So look at our cultures as a subset of this union concept.  If these “two” are everywhere, top to bottom, then you will see it reflected in everything, including a culture. To understand how this union of these opposites is at work at the individual level, you can look at the culture.  Look at the institutions, the laws, the rules, the taboos, the beliefs.  All of these will be a perfect mirror for the body of the dimension as a whole.  For this dimension, it is a culture or a group.  How we reflect or are aware of these two determines how they are expressed.

 

Step back and look at humanity across the globe and you will see a real slant towards paternalism that has been going on four many thousands of years.  The Goddess, the yin, has been swept under the rug in our awareness.  Women have been persecuted in big and small ways, limited, marginalized in big and small ways. This effect has happened on the individual level and it has happened to ALL of us.  Even women. Over time, even women themselves have come under the beliefs and biases that have kept them limited.  This, though, is beginning to change.  As each individual person, regardless of their own sexual orientation physically or psychologically, begins to step out of this old pattern, we will, and are, seeing change take place.  Yes, this change has been slow, and yet it has been steady.  People are waking up to how things CAN be and the Goddess is returning.

 

There is a ways to go.  We know this.  And yet, we will continue to get there and as we do, we will literally build a collective bank of energy that helps to bring the unfathomable force that is the feminine in the universe to bear in our world. You simply cannot believe the changes that will take place as we make the change individually within.  You may not believe that it is possible to change things in this way, that it is akin to thinking things into being, and yet, in truth, this is what we do all the time. All great movements begin as ideas. All creation begins with the act of INTENTION. I know that in my own experience, in my own life, post awakening, that the things I have been able to accomplish, the greatest of them, did not involve me lifting a finger.

 

It is interesting, as a side note, to mention the lesser-known Gnostic texts in which Jesus is speaking about a process that takes place that he called the “kingdom.” In it, he maps out the very process of awakening.  He didn’t use the Hindu language set, but he used one that is entirely consistent with kundalini.  But as those who know who are awakened, kundalini is not a religion or philosophy, but is a HUMAN experience that happens in every culture, we just have different names for it, a different language or vocabulary for it.  He explained that the singular self knows resurrection by way of the presence of the Mother and Father within.  This was also called Pistis, Pistis Sophia, and the Holy Ghost.  they were all used interchangeably enough in these texts that we know what it was they were talking about.  He described this as the one being two and the two then becoming one.  You begin as a person who seems to be a singular person but then awaken to the reality of these two forces within called the Mother and Father.  These then are in union and thus become one.  He explained that you resolve all division within yourself to achieve this.  To do that, you resolve any hitches in your awareness that are helping to keep the awareness of this subtle force at bay within you.  Then, after this, one enters into what he and others called The Bridal Chamber.  This was so called because of the bliss that the union of these two forces created in awareness.  In kundalini, this is the bliss of the union of Shakti and Shiva.  I feel this force everyday, all day, if I allow myself to simply remain perfectly perched on the crest of the wave that makes it all possible.  I remain in union with them, and their union creates a third force, the Christ.  And Jesus was very much about helping birth Christs.  And this Christ, while embodied in a man’s teachings, is not something that is male or female.  It is the very bliss of union that creates a transcendent state.  It is this transcendent state that he explained brought on something he described as “When you are destroyed.”  This is consistent with what the Hindus call ego death.  This is the severing of the head which is shown in many images in Hindu culture.  This is the loss of the usual sense of self as Kali severs the head and attains dominion over the self.  This is symbolic language for what kundalini shakti, expressed as the feminine force coming into awareness, does to us.  We become less mental, we become more like her; intuitive.  Yes, Kali is a severe expression, but it also expresses the inevitability of the process whereby a true breakthrough is only possible with the severe action that kundalini will bring to you as you go through the loosening of the bonds that you have to your old configuration…..your head….your ego.

 

Jesus then says something important, and key.  He says that once this happens, when you bid the mountain to move, it will move. You do not MOVE the mountain, you simply use your intent to make it so.  This sounds miraculous, and yet, miracles follow many who are awakened.  I know that for me, minor miracles follow me on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.  And it might seem miraculous, but in truth, it is part of a larger understanding of how the universe works.

 

So yes, we can sit still and bid great change to take place.  It depends on your capacity for knowing how to work with this energy, and the locus of its effect emerges from you through sheer will or intent and if nothing stands in the way (via bias or hidden belief) then it will happen. So yes, we have way more power than any of us might want to realize or admit.  But we do.  With it comes great responsibility because as the energy gets higher and knowing increases, there is a great potential for falling flat on your face and building huge karmic entanglements.  I know.  What I though was just the universe bringing me things I later realized was my own presence on this wave and I was causing it all to happen.  Instead of believing it was the universe, I had to realize the causal relationship between intent and event.  When we can get this honest, we can also save ourselves a lot of error.  Sure, it IS the universe bringing you this in a sense, but there is no one granting you something because some deity decides that it is right for you to have it.  It doesn’t work that way, and this is important to realize as we grow up energetically.  We were given this huge gift of free will, and it is this that makes us creators. Godlings. Now don’t let that go to your head, but focus on the important part, which is anything in life where there is great responsibility. With this freedom is also responsibility.  Now own it.  Owning it will also cause you, most likely, to look at your own shit.  I know that is a bit of an indelicate term, but it is one that hits it hard and clearly with no equivocation.  It is the dross that we need to remove.  And here we have great opportunity to make huge change in less and less time.  Like a snowball rolling down a hill, this process can gain size and momentum very quickly.  It is, I observe, growing day by day. Three weeks ago I was listening to a broadcast on women in politics at the state level and it was so hopeful to me to hear these women speaking about their concerns and how these were translating into shifts in policy.  These women were all looking at the big picture and asking what would the results be for everyone when a certain policy is changed.  they wanted to see the biggest benefit not to key individuals, but for the whole.  This is huge and can literally begin reforming our political landscape. Twenty years ago, the closest that a broadcast would come to actually covering things like this were when women would speak about what they would do if they ran for office.  Well, now they ARE in office in greater numbers and the change is taking place.

 

The entrance of the goddess in all her forms is coming, and we can give her a warm landing spot by simply holding her presence in each of us.  We all have her in us.  Me, a masculine man has learned that this force does indeed live inside of him.  She humanizes me both as a force that is part of my psychological makeup and also operates at a level that appears almost archetypal.  She has begun to turn around inside of me enough for me to experience her as a definite presence that has aided me in moments of great healing.  Without her in us, we are bereft of the very tools we need to become more whole. This, though, has not changed me into some sort of androgyne.  It has made me more aware of the importance of the feminine current in all things.  It has made me more aware of how she fits, how she works in all things and how important her presence is in ALL of us.

 

The biggest way to effect change is to simply BE the change.  How do you go about doing this?  You do it moment by moment.  Be aware of your thoughts and feelings.  Do you think first or act first? Which side of the dynamic are you working from moment to moment?  Are you overly harsh, do you plunge into things without exercising your intuition?  Or do you wind up feeling too observant of the range of possibilities and thus feel stuck unable to decide? Being able to balance all of these traits will bring you to a place of balance within….a kind of unbalanced balance.  If you are a male, being able to soften your edges with HER can be a huge benefit as it will make you more compassionate, and great leaders are also compassionate.  Despots have no compassion, and people fear them.  Do you want to rule in love or fear? The notion that a soft approach wont work because people only understand force is one notion that is erroneous. We are showing how this can change the balance of power over and over.  As countries seek the old paradigm to accomplish their political ends, more and more people will grow tired of it and demand a change.  Gradual at first, but the snowball grows.  As I soften, as I am more compassionate, I am able to relate to my children in an entirely different way.  I can now offer them opportunities that I could not just five years ago.  My daughter is now being nurtured by a man who is much more aware and cognizant of his actions, and she will grow up having known a father who is more considered, who is more balanced, and she will go on to year for a mate who will more closely follow the man I have become.  Because that is just how raising children works out.  Daughters often seek what is familiar from their early lives in some fashion just as sons do. As a result, I am rewriting the future not just for me, but for my daughter and for every person both she and I come into contact with.  Imagine if a million people were to do this.  The effects are huge.  A small pebble dropped in the water has far-reaching ripples.

 

Maya Angelou in a talk a few years ago spoke of how small things become big things and she did this by telling a story about her life growing up.  She was sent to her grandparents to live with them, and the small things they did for their family had long reaching effects later in those children’s lives.  It was really a beautiful story that only Maya can tell in the same way.  And she was then able to speak to others about the power of such small kindnesses and shifts that we make and inspired entire audiences to consider, if only for a moment, what their own individual actions might do to bring change.  We ARE the change.

 

So the answer, if there is to be one, is not in letting the pendulum to swing far into the goddess realm, but to once and for all seek a balance between the two.  Otherwise, we just keep the polarizing effect of the swing of energy to keep going on.  We do this by simply making the decision to do things differently and to not behave as victims.  It is easy to sit back and say how bad men have been to women as if the men now are involved in making the same inroads to persecution that have happened in the past.  As long as we put the sins of the past on the present, we merely carry those sins forward and keep the wounds fresh. Men will feel defensive and under the gun and be less capable of finding that shining self that is beyond all the dramas of the past.  Likewise, women will teach themselves again the way toward power is in using their prior victimhood as a source of power, a great shield against which they protect themselves from the world and for what is.  We all wind up poorer for it. For this to work, it requires honesty, bravery, and a lot of compassion and a willingness to let the past be the past.

 

 

When we are able to do this, we literally write a new script for the future.  NOW. We let the past feelings go and begin identifying with a new way to be. All of this takes great strength and compassion and bravery. And we wont be perfect at it always.  But in time, we will see women who are coming into entirely new experiences of the Goddess within simply due to the past limits they and the rest of society placed on them.  They will be less afraid, and will explore the great depths of HER more. As a man with the vision to see HER presence, I can tell you that there is so much more we have yet to uncover and experience.  The awakening of the goddess within will also serve to bring out the god within each person also. The frailties of the man will be healed at an ever-increasing rate as men also become less afraid to express their fundamental natures or essential selves.

 

John Farnham once wrote a song entitled “You Are The Voice” in which he explains that we have the power to write what we want to write, to change the world….the power is in our hands.  Yours. Mine. Hers.  His.  I promise you, as you step upon this path, there is no end to how deep all of this goes.

Nemasté

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Promise Of Awakening

How kundalni awakening has benefited me, in a nutshell, would be the awakening of the two energies together in my awareness that served to be the very essence of kundalini itself.  At the time I did not know that this thing had a name like kundalini.  I had even read up on this phenomenon many years previously, but when it came it went over my head.  This was not something apart from me, not something I had “caught” but that was rising up from the very depths of who I was.  Kundalini, before I gave it a name, made it quite clear to me what it was.  For me, I was aware of two energies inn union throughout my entire being.  This was like a libidinous force wherein a presence was released in me, set free from the cage of the root to flow freely throughout my entire being.  My whole body had become bathed in the energy of this thing, these “two” energies in this tight embrace, this constant unstopping embrace of pure bliss.  I was aware that a third energy was created, though, and I saw this as a triadic form of three pillars of energy rising through me.  The two pillars were like two lovers in full embrace, and out of their union there emerged this other powerful transcendent presence and energy and this was what I called for a time “the child.”  This was the fruit of their union.  It made perfect sense to me to label it in this way.  This was what it was.  However, this child was something different from its parents, and yet was also connected deeply with them.  NONE of them could have existed without the other.  Their existence was somehow defined by their context TOGETHER.

I did not feel the masculine rise without the feminine.  The very power of kundalini was in the immediate and constant embrace of the two together.  “The child” seemed to develop in my awareness after a number of weeks and months, however.  I found myself lost in the reverie of this embrace within me, my mind soaking it up and feeling into it.  The energy was itself highly intelligent.  Wherever my mind was directed, I seemed to apprehend the meaning of whatever it was I was curious about.  I felt hooked into a kind of inner network of energy.  People who had died who came back spoke of having instant knowledge of anything they put their mind to.  I wondered if this wasn’t all that different.  I felt hooked into something….something vast.  The energy seemed to contain information within its “DNA” that I could unlock and see and feel and know.

Searching to see if I could find anything that described this experience, I found an exact description in early Christian works.  The Gnostic texts spoke directly to my experience of the Mother and Father and the “perfect seed” being the Christ or “child” I had felt moving through me.  The Mother, though, would be the Holy Ghost in later works, an attempt to perhaps hide her reality.  I realized that there were those who could not, for whatever reasons, recognize the feminine side of this experience perhaps because it would put women on par spiritually with men.  What a contraversy to have a feminine power so alive within yourself that it is undeniable as to the nature of spiritual experience!  So it has gone.

But today, we are open to the necessity for a balance.  I know that for me, I experienced this balance alive in me, and continue to do so.  It is the divine feminine that I felt from the very moment that kundalini awakened that gave me such rich insight into women, into myself as a man, and about how the two fit together both in the day to day and on a cosmic level.  It became clearer and clearer to me that in order for them to fit well here on earth, we had to learn how to mirror them in ourselves in order to align to a “destiny” and mate who would most perfectly fit this part of ourselves which is already ascended and is not showing us the way.

Kundalini, I knew, was a time traveller, an advanced stage of consciousness looping back into its past to help raise itself up.  I have since had some interesting experiences with going back into my own past to bear messages and help to my younger self and I have come to the conclusion that time does not stop us from doing this.  Only our bodies that have mass may keep us planted in our own river of time but the mind is free to roam as it has no mass.  And we do.  And we will continue to do so, leaping back and forward to repair and heal and boost ourselves from a variety of different time lines. Sound impossible?  My dear, there is nothing that is not possible.  The stories I could tell you about time and traveling within its many varied currents!

So the saving grace has been in awareness.  This inner beloved, called the bridal chamber by the Gnostics for the libidinous bliss that it confers, is the fire, the catalyst that actually bears transformation.  In the beginning, it was a hard thing to deal with.  It was almost too much.  But in time, I learned to develop ever widening capacities for it, to become the vessel for it that I had to be.  Resistance is futile.  In this are lessons to the feminine aspects of the self as well as the masculine.

I think person by person, we are being shown a way to be, a way to feel, a way to become that is entirely personal and individual.  Instead of conquering nations, individual hearts will be conquered by this, piece by piece until the world is a giant patchwork of this light.  Perhaps it will continue to spread.  My first sense was that this energy was doing just this.  Spreading.  It is no accident that you are now reading this!