A Voice In The Wilderness: A Revised Understanding Of Christian History

Many Christians today are accustomed to thinking in certain ways about their faith which is based on a narrative that the Orthodox church put forward over centuries. It has been a way of thinking that I have come to call “orthocentric” thinking. It has resulted in conclusions that range from defining the divinity of Jesus, his nature, and the composition of the trinity.

Today, most Christians take these beliefs for granted as if they were always known. In the early days of the Christian movement, there was a broad range of ideas and interpretations about what a number of central themes meant. What hasn’t been clear to today’s Christians were the broad range of beliefs or ideas that existed back then. This often comes as a surprise to many of the Christian faithful. Wasn’t it all perfectly clear from the beginning what the life of Christ was all about?

What the Christian Orthodox movement did was to make it seem as though there was only ever one right way to understand or interpret the life of Jesus. In large part due to discoveries of documents that were suppressed by the orthocentric view, most people didn’t know that there were as many differing ideas about Jesus Christ as there were. What happened was with 1600 years of Orthodoxy able to define and frame the belief system so completely, that would seem like a very strong indication that Orthodoxy was right….right? The story isn’t that simple.

Orthoxy fought and won a war of ideas and the winner was the one who then got to write the history. The history that was written was what agreed with their view. Why this matters is that for Christians who might want to know the deeper story, a lot of it isn’t available anymore. That isn’t just Dan Brown sensationalism about a hidden truth at the core of the church, it is part of what happened if you are willing to discover what we know now about the lost Christianities that existed early on. There was more there, and it showed a broad and deep understanding about the mechanisms within consciousness that made union with the divine possible.

Most believers know little to nothing about these movements because even understanding it required a new or more advanced level of awareness, and here we are with a 1600 year entrenched belief that has been handed down through the generations. The refrain has often been “If there was more to all of this we would know about it.” The problem here is that no, the point apears to have kept these ideas from mainstream Christianity, and of course the church did this very well. Pastors don’t tell their parishioners about it either, even though most are schooled in the ideas that constituted “wings” within the church.

It was easy to push this more advanced understanding off the stage because those in the know about these different ideas were a minority once the tide of Orthodoxy came along. It surprises many people to discover that Orthodoxy was a late-comer to the belief in the beginning. This would be in the time period of the first two centuries after the death of Christ.

Enlightenment has always been a rare bud that blooms ocassionally and few see it for what it is. Why do you think so many visionaries have met their end with such violence? The conspiracy to keep people in the dark about a deeper more esoteric tradition, was one of ignorance. Orthodoxy does not know what it does not know and is not aware of the riches that it took from humanity. It may also be true that the people forming Orthodoxy knew and just didn’t care.

The other strands within Christianity at the time were quickly driven from the stage by the tide of Orthodox thinking, and these movements or groups in the faith that differed from the Orthodox one were both reviled and criticized by early church fathers within the that wing of the church. The orthocentric view won out so that there existed for centuries no other accepted way of understanding what the Christ drama was about. If you wanted to know about Jesus and Christ, your go-to books were the ones that were sanctioned by the Orthodox wing of the church.

The orthocentric view has created the impression that there was only ever one acceptable way of approaching Christianity, and that group went to great lengths to make sure that their view was the one that would be accepted. Part of this orthocentric view includes the idea that heresy was a kind of later outgrowth, a distortion of the original “truth” of Christianity. Origen, an early church father and Christian historian, characterized heresy as that action which took place after the “truth” was known, a “veering” away as he put it, from what we all know is the one accepted group of central truths that animate Christianity and give it it’s life. While Origen in his day struck out against what he believed was heresy, he was later was deemed a heretic himself, an act that was performed after he had died. Still, the idea stuck and his characterization would be taken up by new generations of heresy hunters.

This, though, isn’t true. In 1935 Walter Bauer wrote a book entitled Orthodoxy & Heresy In Earliest Christianity. In it, he poured over numerous letters and other writings from earliest Christianity and found that instead of heresy being a late-comer to the faith, it was instead present even before Orthodox thinking got a foothold in the early Christ movement. The upshot of his work was that Orthodoxy was the late-comer, not heresy. The suggestion here was that maybe heresy wasn’t quite what we thought it was or that we were told it was. But how could that be?

Over and over, as Bauer conducted his detailed survey, he found the language of heresy was preexistant over Orthodox language and thinking. He found many examples that heresy, as the later church would describe it, was more robust and established from the very beginning, which is contrary to the writings of Orthodox writers and historians from the first three to four centuries. Now a believer in the Orthodox view might well ask, “Doesn’t this just prove only that there were heretics from the very beginning?” Not if what these “heretics” knew and believed in was something more substantive than the Orthodox strand understood. Orthodoxy, based on what Bauer dug up, was the late-comer.

It should be noted that “heresy” was itself not a unified or monolithic body of thought but was composed of many different groups with different thoughts on a range of ideas such as the divinity of Jesus, and whether Jesus was a man who became God, or that was a man who was later adopted by God when he was baptised by John, for example. There were the earliest converts to Christianity, for example, who were Jews that Jesus had inspired called the Ebionites. These earliest of followers were branded as heretics by the church. We are told that if we want to get to heaven you better believe in the right things instead of what the heretics believed, or else hell waits for you. It was a compelling strategy because with the fires of hell hanging over your head, people wouldn’t want to chance it. There were groups who claimed knowledge about the makeup of the trinity that differs from the one that Christians know today, which involved a feminine aspect involved in Christhood. This was a more egalitarian movement that saw how important women were in the cosmology of the Christian faith. In the earliest churches women were in top leadership roles as bishops, for example. There are letters of Orthodox leaders complaining about women’s prominent roles in the early church, and wall paintings in Italy clearly show a woman installed as a bishop to her congregation.

Bauer’s work sent shock-waves through the Christian community when it was first published. His work was criticized as going too far and making too many assumptions about what the many documents that he examined meant. However, in 1945, a giant discovery was made in Egypt with the unearthing of a treasure trove of early Christian writings, some of which historians had written about in early Christianity and others no one even knew had existed. While some scholars suggested that these books were not part of a significant tradition, a possible “one-off ” a later discovery of a second fragment of one of the books found in 1945 (Thomas) helped to support the contention that the books had been circulated and used by early Christians and lent support to the idea that the books were more widely circulated than thought.

This find came to be known as the Nag Hammadi Library (NHL), and while they were found in Egypt, the chief reason for their discovery was due to how dry the environment has been there for many thousands of years, which helps to preserve documents just like it does with mummies.

Bauer received considerable vindication once the NHL was unearthed because it showed that there were different understandings in circulation about central tenets in Christianity. In the Gospel of Philip, which was included in the find, it clearly points out that many early Christians considered the Holy Ghost to be female. How this could change dogma was significant. In the concept of the “Bridal Chamber” mentioned both in the Gospel of Philip as well as the synoptic gospels, the bridal chamber becomes a sacred act of union that generates the Christ. Philip also points out thatt Jesus wasn’t just the Christ, but thst he was showing people the way to be Christs themselves. The implications for this idea alone are huge.

This line of thinking also links Christian thought to concepts tied to enlightenment that had existed for centuries in the East…not because Christianity borrowed from them, but because the spiritual acumen of the group that produced the books which described or put forward these concepts was so formidable. What’s more, many of the books in the collection claimed ties to Jesus and his teaching in private.

The books which were part of the find were bound in fine kid leather with tooling on them with both Christian and Egyptian symbols. These books showed every sign of having been important to the monks who hid them. While Bart Ehrman suggests that the books were likely buried where they were to free up space in one of several nearby monestaries, there is perhaps a more accurate theory which suggests that by the time of their burial (around 400 A.D.), the writing was on the wall where books like these were concerned: anyone found holding books that were not accepted by the church were to be consigned “to the flames.” It is much more likely, then, that the NHL exists today because a monk could not bear seeing them destroyed and hid them away for later discovery.

One compelling piece of possible proof that may have prompted monks to hide the documents where they were found in 1945 is found in a letter written by Anathanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who was the first to spell out what books were acceptible and which ones were not: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the letters of Paul. Those books would later form the early corpus of Orthodox belief, with others added later. Anyone found to have books other than these would come up on the wrong end of church doctrine and its burgeoning authority as the “right” way to believe.

In the centuries that followed, Christians were anathematized or excommunicated from the church for heresy. In still later years, some heretics would even be executed in horrific ways. See: 39th festal letter of Athanasius written in 367 A.D. and found at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (www.ccel.org)

Instead of being a movement on the very fringes of Christianity, the books in the NHL show how developed and incredibly sophisticated the esoteric wing’s teachings were. The problem is how their meaning escapes most Orthodox Christians and its descendant Protestantism. I will quote one comment made by a reader online who was referring to the gospel of Thomas recently as “gobbledygook.” It is hard to crack the code of these books and theur meaning when you yourself have not entered into the “light” of the knowledge that a state like enlightenment confers.

Today, though, Christians aren’t used to referring to the Gospel of Thomas to glean from it teachings which, the author who wrote the gospel contends, are the private or secret teachings of Jesus. No Christian is used to reading the Gospel of Philip and pointing out how its descriptions of the Christ are incredibly similar to ideas in Hindu, Tibetan, and Chinese writings. That’s not to suggest that the Christians writing these books had been to India, but that they had uncovered the Christ as a potential that exists within every person on the planet, and as such was not subject to belief in the same ways many beliefs put forward by the Orthodoxy depend on those beliefs. Additionally, the Christ was only ever found within, not without, something that Jesus was known to teach even in the Orthodox sanctioned Gospels.

Paul says he was shown the Christ within himself. This is a critically important point. If you are exhorted to seek him, then the seeking must be done within. How many can say that they seek inwardly to find the Christ hidden within themselves? What methods were laid out on how to do this in the mainstream view? It amounts to accepting Jesus as your savior. You must look to and believe in the cross. Did Paul believe? Not at all, not in the beginning. He was busy persecuting Christians. Belief was not what brought Paul into the tent, nor did it bring me either. He was converted when he found the Christ within himself. He said so.

Being able to see how the Nag Hammadi Library offered a substantive and sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms at work in regards to enlightenment was made possible for me because of an awakening process that began in 2006 and “completed” with a full initiatory process that culminated in early 2007 with a full kundalini awakening. With little more than the symptoms and phenomenon in hand in my direct experience, with no teacher or guide to help me, I discovered the NHL and saw that they were describing my condition. You should understand, though, that when I use a word like “kundalini” to describe or to place my experience, I didn’t know about it at the time. Further, kundalini is NOT a spirit or even a religious belief held by the Hindus. Instead, it is an observed phenomenon which experiencers sought to describe and explain. At the time my symptoms were so startling that I considered that it was possible that I could have a brain tumor! I soon realized that whatever had happened to me as the result of a very simple meditation practice, was not only benign, it was transformative. What I did was to inquire within to find the Christ within. I didn’t know that this was what I was doing since much of the effects found in awakening lay buried under layers of beluef and programming.

I did not find a person, I found a level of consciousness that upended my life, began setting it aright, and instituted a regime of inner transformation. I can see, though, how some might attach this to the man Jesus. Jesus himself makes it seem like he is the Way by stating that no one comes to the father but by him. In the esoteric wing of early Christianity this was true because Jesus was the only one who attained to this new level of consciousness, so yes, he was the only game in town. I will also point out that while he was thought to say he was God in the synoptic gospels, what he said in one important case was “Does your scripture not say ‘ye are gods’?” The implication here is that the state Jesus was referring to was one that anyone could attain to. It is also something supported in Philip as well. We can do even greater things than Jesus because each of us can learn how to reach this place within.

The problem, though, is this type if teaching doesn’t appear to be well fleshed out in the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. There are many hints of something deeper but what they are we barely know. Jesus did say that to know you had to inquire within (by “knocking”). While some might want to interpret this differently than I have, I would ask you to consider where else would a Christian inquire? Jesus explained over and over that the kingdom was found within. You don’t knock on a real door, you knock on what seems to be a door within where this new world exists.

It may be that we don’t have the details because Jesus didn’t teach to just anyone. He hid his teachings inside parables so that those who were “without” would not be able to understand. Here we find in Mark and Luke a startling example of a private teaching at work where, teaching by the lake, he explains to his followers how he hides his teachings from all but those who has been “given” to know the secrets (of the kingdom). It’s really quite remarkable.

When I awakened I found myself encountering an intelligence which I knew was the Source of all life and existence. It was only possible with this new level of consciousness, that I could sense directly and vividly an intelligence which was a part of everything and that tied all things together in a way that felt like family. What I found was that what I had experienced was in harmony with what the gospel of Thomas and Philip (as well as others in the NHL) had to say, which was that Jesus was making his followers into Christs. I decided to read further into the NHL and this in turn led to a 15 year research project where I scrutinized the books that were found along with the books that are a part of mainstream Christian thought, mist notably the New Testament. This has led me to letters and accounts going back to the earliest days of the movement.

I came across the NHL for the first time a few months after my awakening and saw for the first time someone describing what had happened to me. These weren’t Sanscrit texts but the Gospel of Thomas, Philip, and many others. Hard to understand without the inner knowing or “gnosis” that awakening brings, I am convinced that the authors deliberately sought to keep hidden the direct meanings contained in the documents in order to protect the uninitiated. Still, their meaning was consistent with awakening in both Thomas and Philip as well as in the other documents which modern Christian scholars have dubbed as Gnostic in character.

The more I looked, the more evidence I tended to uncover that supported my thesis. Yes, this work is hampered by a kind of information black-out in some ways but in other ways there are important clues that I have found that makes a case for not just an alternate or deeper understanding of Christ, but also that it was possible that Jesus did have a private teaching, something that the Gospel of Thomas proclaims at its beginning.

One of the suspected authors of Thomas and Philip according to scholars is Valentinus who lived in the second century. Valentinus wrote how he had a vision of the risen Christ. At that time, he knew about Paul’s own vision of the risen Christ.

Valentinus explains how he had gone to a direct disciple of Paul, a man who had learned directly from Paul who was named Theodas. When Valentinus spoke with this disciple he learned from him that Paul had a private teaching which he reserved for his closest followers. Valentinus goes on to say that he was taught in this private way by the disciple.

The elephant in the room, for me at least, is if Valentinus was the author of Thomas or Philip, was it the result of having received a more esoteric teaching which he himself was ready for? Did Valentinus go on in his own way to produce writings perhaps based partly on the teachings of the disciples and with his own inner knowledge about the “body of Christ”? Did Valentinus have access to other Christians that were sharing privately these teachings? Did he just make them up as some Orthodox apologists contend?

While some might point out that this would amount to forgery, let me put this activity in perspective. At this time in history it was not uncommon at all for books or letters to be forged. Back then, a student or disciple would sometimes write after the teacher had died as though the teacher had written the document. Christianity has many of these forged documents as examples. Many are not included in the New Testament, but there are documents that are known forgeries that are still in the NT today. How do we know this? Because the content in some cases deals with issues that belong to a later date, after the death of the teacher. Take for example some of the letters of Paul. In Timothy and Titus there is content in them that simply did not exist during Paul’s life, so we know that someone else other than Paul wrote them. Someone forged the documents and in the process achieved a way to drive how the church might later be organized, for example. Additionally, in the case of Timothy, the writer makes Paul into a mysogynist, something that does not appear in any other of his other letters (not even once). If keeping women out of the church leadership was so important to Paul, it would have been repeated a number of times to the churches in other areas that he was known to write to. Today scholars tend to agree that five, possibly six, of Paul’s letters were written by someone other than Paul.

To loop back around to heresy once more, an important fact has remained throughout the last two hundred years since new documents from early Christianity have emerged (thanks in part to archeological digs and efforts searching libraries and monestaries). If heresy was the unimportant movement that the orthocentrics would have us believe, why are ALL the newly discovered documents always heretical documents and not Orthodox ones? I contend that the narrative or picture we have been given to believe is in fact not the true one, not completely, not by a long shot.

Additionally, Orthodoxy represents a more literalist and authoritarian take on Christianity. The heretics proposed that you didn’t need a priest to get you there, you need only to discover the Christ which is in you, something that would have eroded the power that the Orthodoxy went on to seek to increase over time. What did the church do in its earliest days? It grew and gained the attention of Emperor Constantine who made it the state religion. The heretics, as they were called, were driven from the stage despite how closely aligned many of their teachings were to the documents the Orthodoxy championed: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” (Matthew 7:7) It has ever been thus!

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The Twins

They have been spoken of down through time, a dual force in awareness that has emerged with many names and have all been tied to awakening, to the manifold process that is enlightenment.

These twins, as I call them,  were written about in early Christian documents. Recent discoveries have unearthed their known and truer nature as part of the trinity (I know the trinity is not two, but the “two” birth the “third” which is Christ Consciousness—more on that later…).

In the Eastern traditions of the Taoists, the Yin and Yang were expressions, understandings, of the vital role these forces played (and not merely as an observation of how our world just has bright and dark, or opposites only).  The Shakti and Shiva were expressions of this understanding, and the kundalini, as expressed as a serpent twining about a central axis, was an expression of the two-in-one force that gave rise to a third awareness that moved along the central axis (the spine where the shushumna channel lies energetically and is the center for cosmic awareness).  This awareness has been in many cultures such as the Polynesians who knew that out of the One life force came two complimentary forces that when joined formed the One again, which is a truly transcendent awareness and state of being.

The experience of this union is so powerful, so incredibly blissful, that it has been likened to sexual union for the fact that the experience created an intense bliss that felt orgasmic.  This was not itself physical orgasm, but is instead the result of the chemical soup in the body which has been instantly changed by the presence of the energy now within awareness.  The body is an amazing servant, a mirror to the soul, and what the soul feels that can be brought into full conscious awareness, the body will share in and will respond to through chemical production of endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin and also even adrenaline.  These compounds, some which are used as neurotransmitters in the brain (yes, can you even imagine?) have a profound effect on how we feel, how we recognize that we feel. And so it is that when one feels this bliss, it is like being bathed by a quiet pulse of orgasmic energy all throughout every part of your being.  it is the presence of this energy and this bliss that begins to purify and cleanse you of a world of hurt, wrongdoing and wrong thinking and feeling in your life, past and present. It is HERE in THIS that we experience the true power of what enlightenment is.

Within each of us, these forces exist all the way down to the atoms that compose our bodies.  One can see and interact with this vital force in this way when your awareness is honed and focused.  The Hindu Vedas describe just such a sensory experience of seeing down into the microscopic level to feel and commune with this energy that is expressed in everything.  Some say, rightly so, I think, that these Twins exist as creators of reality, or supporters of it.  Through them come the birth of all phenomena.  All of it. They are entirely ubiquitous, and awareness of their presence can be seen throughout all writings, especially in the east.

These two forces are likened to a feminine and masculine force.  Complimentary, they merge one into the other upon awakening in such a way that vast sums of energy are created in the body and awareness.  This production of energy brings healing, however difficult for some at first (due to shame surrounding anything that might feel…..gasp….sexual), in a way that is likened to a lightening bolt experience at first (kundalini) and then as a deep stirring effect that stirs out of the subconscious those things which have made us each sick, neurotic, or holding to old traumas.  We enter into a new life through these and the early Christians describe these people who have encountered the flash of white light as being androgenous people of a sort.  They were called this by the so-called Gnostics as Syzgy.  This term was used to describe people who had an encounter with the brilliant white light that marked the beginning of awakening (aka kundalini and divine union experiences).

The result of this encounter was that the two currents of energy which are akin to the two energies surrounding stars and planets ( a torus of negative and positive particles creating a spheroid or torus shaped field of energy–the same torus that surrounds physical bodies as well).  The awareness of this energy, now heightened in awakening, reveals to each of those so awakened to two forces alive in the body.  This brought awareness of both energies, and this leads to the “androgynous” sense of both forces alive in the body of awareness and matter.

This Syzgy was not itself something that changes ones own native sexual orientation, no, but shows every sign of broadening ones awareness of both while it also erases any compunction with feeling so intimately the energy that represents the opposite from your own sexual orientation.

So yes, the early Christians were describing this incredibly blissful experience which they likened to a sexual experience of being in a Bridal Chamber, a union of the soul with its two parts. It is the beginning of all forms of union in life, top to bottom.  It is the very genesis of what divine union is and without it, the idea would not exist, for it rests within this foundation and is fed and nurtured by it.  Simply put, it is an erasure of all elements within the self that serve to limit and to divide you against others….be they people, or experiences.

Link that describes this term in more detail: http://www.gnosis.org/library/valentinus/Syzygy_Valentinian.htm

To help to explain this state of inner union, the Gospel of Thomas says it very clearly by letting Jesus speak for himself to a woman named Salome (not the princess Salome who demanded the head of John the Baptist, but was rather much more like a disciple).

In the Gospel of Thomas ( Saying 61b) Salome says to Jesus that he had come up on her couch (presumably referring to reclining at meals) and eaten from her table. “Who are you, man,” she asks. Jesus replies, “I am he who exists from the undivided.” He goes on to say that someone who is divided will be filled with darkness, but someone [presumably “undivided”: translators point out that there is a gap in the text] will be filled with light. This is one of the notable sayings on the theme of Oneness.

Source: www.gnosis.org/thomasbook/ch24

In numerous places throughout these gnostic gospels, you have Jesus saying over and over how when one removes the division, within that the kingdom comes, that one is “resurrected” that the flesh “rises” or awakens into what seems to be like the difference of being dead and then coming into life.  I observed early in my awakening that what had sparked my awakening was the removal or healing of a long-standing issue that I had which had kept me divided.  When I removed that, awakening began. it is an account that I describe in the book I am working on that involved a discussion with an Oglala Lakota medicine man named Sydney Has No Horses.

It is important to remember that these things are themselves mysteries that cannot be fully explained in a literal linear mode, and are instead  expressed or conveyed through more poetic and less “exact” language.  To know what they are saying, it helps to already be awakened…..which does not help those who seek, but merely points in the general direction. This is not a factual conceptual framework being created, but is instead a description of a state of being.  And how can we really explain such a thing? Most often, poetry does it better than more materialistic means.  That means not being literal. Sadly, the early Christian church was gripped by a wave of literalism that was called orthodoxy, and a whole host of teachings within the church were cast aside, deemed heretical, or were simply not understood for what they were. If you read the Nag Hammadi texts such as Thomas and Philip and Mary, you see that the language used is…..more like poetry and is inexact.  It is this way for a purpose.  It is less that this was a different church, but that it was a different depth of understanding that had taken place.

My experience in this nonduality, of these twin energies, is that they open your awareness to the entirety, potentially at least, of the universe and everything within it. A boast?  In nearly every reference to this experience there is much talk about “secret knowledge” when one awakens.  This is what is being pointed to, which is a new or renewed ability or awareness within consciousness to join to everything.  This, not coincidentally, is the very essence of what nonduality is all about.  It means “no other” and it means, literally, that one may feel what another feels, to know it so intimately that there is no distinction at a deeper level of the experience between the observer and the observed. It is why I can feel what another feels over vast distances.  We are not divided by space or even time.

This also opens one up to an understanding of all others, including the opposite within you, which for many, is not just the dark or the light, but the feminine and the masculine. Whether these twins are literal male and female counterparts is not the point, but their complimentary forces can open the doorway to understanding all others. It means that as a male you can feel deeply the experience of the feminine, and as a woman you can commune with and feel deeply the experience of the masculine both within yourself and through the beloved, be they male or female. For anyone thinking that this becomes a non-homosexual experience, think again. There is nothing about these two that in any way limits or biases against same sex experience.  The joining of these two twins is simply the result of incredible vastness, a “waking the infinite” within each of us. One enters into the mysteries of this type of awareness and knowing, and part of it also is that one can relate to others in ways you have never been able to do.

It is not surprising to me that the kundalini is called “shakti” in the Hindu tradition.  The reason for this is because up until awakening is sparked, there is only one primary current in awareness, which for us is the yang energy.  I know you wont always agree with me, but the whole of humankind has for many thousands of years been focused primarily in the left-brained mind which is also considered to be the yang energy. I write a lot about this and how it ties into brain function and cognition, so if you want more on this simply search using left or right brain in the search function on the site and you should find a good deal of writing on this topic as it relates to current brain science.  I also say this as a very right-brained artist, and I can tell you that in a relative way, we do not know just how we have limited our right brained functions and the function of the “feminine” or yin sides of our energy and our consciousness. As a result, the discovery one find, whether you are male OR female, awaits you as a great discovery about the greater depth available to your sexual and spiritual self!  A man is greatly informed by what it is like to be a woman and a woman is greatly informed about a level of feminine experience that she may have never known (the same is true for men in the reverse, of course) as a result of these energies now fully awakened and interacting in this “new” way within consciousness and in the body.

When kundalini comes, it isn’t that a yin presence comes as the substance of the energy, but that in your awareness you become aware that you are now both.  It is in this awareness that the two forces are joined or unified in your consciousness and this is where the electric lightening bolt realization takes place that is so often a common experience in awakening (you do not need to have a lightening bolt experience, and it is better that you do not do so if you can help it since it makes for a more peaceful progression with the energy).  Less that shakti comes AS the kundalini, but more that she has simply been missing in our awareness.  As a result, when most awaken, you can begin to feel a fluidity and sensuality that is conferred as a result of the two now in union and it is this added compliment, the feminine force of yin, that now makes for an incredible chemical reaction in the body…which is not just chemical, but energetic from top to bottom. You can see how this is through simple observation in how your thoughts change and how more feminine you can become.  The feminine force of yin gives a great deal of receptivity, fluidity, and less of a literal approach to understanding and cognition (and this is not limited to men or women only!)

The advantages of this new arrangement are incredibly unifying and healing for the self.  These twins birth a third energy as a result of their union, something that I described in the first few months of my awakening as the union of the man and woman who birth the cosmic child.  At the time that I was writing this, I had no idea what had happened to me.  I didn’t know yet that this experience had a name.  I knew about kundalini years before this, but when it happened to me it was such a novel and different experience that any description of it went entirely over my head….at least at first.  But the description that I made based on my early meditations and communion within the energy, was no different from what I would find scattered throughout all cultures of the two who birth the third.

If you are of the Christian persuasion, you might find yourself upset over the idea of the trinity being treated in such a way, but I caution you that it is quite clear that the trinity and its deeper reality was hidden or obscured by the rising tide of orthodoxy that gripped the early church and it cuased, I observe, a kind of dumbing down of what the trinity was originally to Jesus and his followers.  When we look at the documents that had lain in the desert for so long and which had not been subject to the biasing effects of the orthodoxy church, you can find the trinity as a resounding bulwark of the masculine and feminine in one deity and that the Christ was born from them both.  This was why Philip said in his gospel, “Those who say that Mary begat with the Holy Ghost are in error.  They do not know what they say.  For when has a woman begotten with a woman?”

This quote reveals quite clearly that the Holy Ghost was the feminine aspect of the deity, and that it made no sense for the story of Jesus’s conception to have been described in this way.  For Philip, who was described as heir to the deeper teachings of Jesus (even within the orthodox church), he would have understood the subtle differences involved. It is in his and other books that he describes the union of these two forces as a Bridal Chamber.  It was out of this chamber that Christ emerged.  Many scholars are trying to make this Bridal Chamber experience into a ritual that the early Christians engaged in, but this is not so (they are in error).  Instead, it is an experience that one has that is initiatory, but instantaneous when one removes what divides you.  Less a rite, it is mystic experience that we each have.  As a result, this also meant that everyone one of us can experience this, that this was what Jesus had also taught to his students, his disciples.  Not all of them got it, or understood what was being said, however. It may be possible that gospels were favored over others that did not include these sayings, so that the orthodox church only had those which it favored (lacking the feminine aspect of the deeper mysteries of spiritual attainment).

This is one reason why I have long felt that Christianity was missing something terribly important, and that the early church had hidden something.  At age nine, when I felt this sense for the first time, I had no way of knowing what this thing was, I merely knew deep in my bones that this was so.  It was, I would later find, something that my soul knew without question, but that my inexperienced 9 year old mind had no way of knowing why it knew.  It is by joining this missing part that you can know the kingdom.  Right now. Right here.  And while the dried and limited orthodox minds will reject it, it is rather that orthodoxy is showing itself to be the real heresy and the heresies of the past, so much more closer to the truth.

There is nothing as life-changing as this awareness of the twin within.

नमस्ते

P.

 

Kunda-what?

The more I move along in this, the more I come to the powerful conclusion that what we call awakening or kundalini (that’s a verb, you know) is in fact what we are wired for. See, in the not-so far-past, this “thing” which someone like U.G. Krishnamurti had, or that Gopi Krishna experienced while seeking to raise it at home, was once a very rare event or phenomenon.  There were very few people on the planet who “had” this elusive, perhaps esoteric thing going on.  Now, we are absolutely in a new day.  People by the thousands, literally, are awakening in what I determine is nothing short of a watershed event.  And it is none too soon!  What is happening, though, is what I observe to be what the ancients talked about with a good degree of aplomb using their vocabulary-set of the times.  Jesus and his disciples spoke of “the left and the right” in context to the trinity, the force of the two who joined to create the third.  While mainline Christianity deemed these texts that spoke so clearly of the awakening experience heretical, they persist as excellent examples of what Jesus spoke of as being The Kingdom.  And I don’t mean to suggest something tentative or thinly laid, but rather a whole series of documents, most of them lost for centuries and recently rediscovered by scholars.  The Taoists, the Hindus as well as the Mystery School initiates were all on to the same thing.  And what was this?  With my own voice added to the mix, it was nothing short of a top to bottom merging of both consciousness and physiology, all of which serve to support awakening.

The secret is dissolving what divides you.  Its less a science as poetry and art.  Art is not easy, but does bring grace, and this makes it all effortless.  So a little backstory, explanation, of what I now call an “epiphany talk” I had with the force that was is in me and “talks” to me since my awakening.  It is more that I merge deeply into its presence, deep into the energy, and find that anything I am interested in arises into my awareness with an amazing vividness, much like a movie or dream- while awake.  In an odd sort of twist, I came across the words of Edgar Cayce who described how he “did” what he did, and while he went into trance, I found that my perhaps-lighter trance state was similar in how he described it.  It was, in fact, what I had been doing whenever I found myself in the grip of a great inspired moment when making art. Okay….

When I sat on that late August night two years ago on my porch, I felt the presence of this familiar force alive in me, a force that has what I often feel is a consciousness all its own but that I know is an extension of myself, the higher self.  And on that night it wanted to show me something because I had been puzzling over the linkage between body and cosmic consciousness.  What it showed me was that the force of energy that is beyond the body yet also within it coheres to the electromagnetic field in the body.  Think of this as like how we beam signals and information using radio waves.  Talk and text and images, all travel astride this energy which our devices then decode.  Our bodies, our nervous system and brain as well as our bodies are amazing devices of a soft sort that are expertly capable of decoding information that travels within our bodies and even beyond it.  Our heart, which pumps iron rich blood, is creating electricity through this activity in the same way the earth generates electricity when the molten iron rich core moves within it.  In fact, physicists have discovered that we can generate massive amounts of electricity by circulating molten metal within a cavity.  So it is not so strange to see how the body is creating a much lower level of energy which is expressed as electricity that the nervous system uses to convey information throughout the body as nerve signals.  It’s all electricity and it is all being expertly decoded by our brains and felt by our bodies.  Electromagnetic fields are the result of this electricity as electricity and electromagnetism are two sides of the same coin!  Cool, right?  But hang on!  These fields also have a polarity.  Our bodies also have a polarity.  Even the Chinese observed this and called it Yin and Yang.  Just like a magnet, just like the sun and earth.  For us, this field shields us from life killing plasma from the sun.  We would be dead within weeks without it.  It is also why Mars is a dead planet; no more molten activity in its core (although it has the largest volcano yet found in our solar system!).  So I was pondering all of this and I was shown in the usual fashion what this force in me wanted to show me or reveal, which is how in our bodies RIGHT NOW there is a current of energy moving in us that moves from one polarity to another.  Where this energy merges is where the Hindu describe as being the crown chakra, the placed that is supposedly where cosmic consciousness flowers (so they say; I have a different opinion and experience….but for now, its good enough for what I am trying to get across).  In the body, there is this flip that happens, where one energy pole merges into the other.  This is union.  It is also, this presence said, what explains why one hemisphere controls the other side of the body.  It was, it said, this way to ensure that the two merged.  The left and right brains are mirrors of the yin and yang energies.  They cohere closely to aspects present within both.  Some call this the divine masculine and feminine, but in a larger scope, these are aspects that are within each person and is not in any real way aligned to our sexuality or sexual orientation. In fact, the idea that there is a man and a woman within us might seem a little silly.  This is simply that there is a higher order energy that is not so focused in our physical operations that is focused at this slightly higher dimension.  It carries qualities that COULD be called masculine and feminine and DO most certainly connect into those archetypes for people so focused, but it’s not a rule as far as I can tell. It just can help you to relate to these opposite ends of yourself……which is itself a mirror of all the things that are in the universe.  The yin and yang are themselves a reflection, I say, of the Tao, that formless thing that is within everything. It is in the atoms (neg and positive) it is in energy (neg and pos. poles) and it is in us….in the atoms in our bodies, and in our electrical field you can also call the aura.  This energy can be seen or perceived even by those who have caught on to how to do it.  I have been reading fields since I was 18 and there is simply no doubt that our consciousness rides upon a very real and perceptible field of energy.  In fact, it really isn’t so hard to learn to see auras.  You can find the simple exercises all over the net and they are all about the same.    I first saw them when my mind was emptied….which led me to being open to my natural present ability to pick them up.  Seeing this field before you can be life changing in the sense that it creates a tangible sense of awareness that we are more than just bodies, atoms, and mere electrical activity.

This energy does this flip, and this is where union takes place, so they say.  What I experienced was that this union takes place at the atomic level and happens the moment awakening takes place.  SOme will say they did not “raise” their kundalini correctly, but my experience was that the very force OF kundalini WAS defacto union.  It is like trying to raise only positive energetic force; the positive does not exist without the negative as its counterbalance.  They are, like electrical fields and magnetic fields, two sides of the same coin. So knowing all of this, what is the difference between one who is awakened and one who is not?  Simple; division cognitively and emotionally.  When you can remove enough competing material within you, you literally remove the blocks in your field of awareness and your field of energy that allows for  a greater flow of energy to happen.  Question is, where is the tipping point where awakening will happen?  It could be that childbirth could spark it, with its rich bed of hormones helping to mirror many of the cosmic elements that take place in awakening.  That could help support awakening, and this has been known to happen.  Sometimes a stressor happens that can stir it.  Sometimes a simple meditation, or a series of meditations can do it.  For me, I triggered awakening by simply resolving a long-standing issue that had me tied up in knots.  By letting it go, releasing it, awakening began to gather force.  How my awakening unfurled, though, was by no means text book.  it is why I write; there are many ways we can awaken and you ought not be put off by what others have to say about it.  You KNOW something has been triggered and is a horse of an entirely different color!  For me, I was able to observe this force in me without knowing it was kundalini.  I was able to see it for what it was before doing reading on it.

What I know now is that our bodies and our consciousness itself coheres to a model of energetic polarities that will take me beyond the body and into the body of the universe, into cosmic consciousness, a kind of vast network so unbelievably complex that it boggles the mind, but delights the soul.  By moving beyond concepts of the self as separate, we can begin to glimpse and then embody greater volumes of awareness here and now.  It is nothing less than knowing heaven on earth.  And for an earthling like me, that is a pretty huge inspirational experience!

So dissolve division.  What divides you is what keeps your awareness from settling into the natural pattern of the left and the right, the yin and the yang…..the left side of the body carries the yin and the right carries the yang.  They are constantly merging and commingling all throughout their current-journey through your body.  And they move with the speed of light, so the idea that kundalini “rises” is itself merely an effect the body registers as a result of this realization, most likely the potentiating of the energy in the body so that more cosmic juice can now flow.  And how it feels?  If you surrender to it, it is pure bliss.  This very fine energy called Qi (Chi) or Prana is bliss when we strip ourselves of notions and beliefs that do not serve a direct approach to it.  In fact, beliefs can serve to distort it, and over time, the energy will tend to show you a better way (to the degree that you make yourself available—note: some of us are notoriously hard-headed!).  I do know that the action, the verb that is kundalini, is itself a churning effect in my being and it shakes out the chaff.  Bit by bit emotional blocks are dissolved that have impeded the flow of energy.  The less I have in the way, the more it flows.  Perfect.  And if you are blocked and kundalini rises, the force will help to clear you (again, to the degree that you make yourself available!).

So what stands in your way?  What bothers you?  What irks you?  Realize that something in the world is just what it is; what bothers you is not because of the thing you see, it is because of YOU.  I know, great injustice bothers us, as it rightly ought to do, but what I mean is that too often, what gets at us is less about another as what is in us.  You may not realize this at first, but in each instance where something bothered me, it ALWAYS led right back to….you guessed it; me.   And it is up to me to simply see the thing AS IT IS.  When I do that, I realize that it is because I expect it to be different than what it is.  Someone who has a crazy outlook about the world is simply working their life where they are.  They are a work in progress, and why should I make an argument about that.  Wasn’t I at a place similar to that at one time, too?  So then I am free to be more neutral and realize that this is how the world is.  Otherwise, its just a bunch of energy wastage.  Let it go.  Find your peace.  If you have guilt, resolving that guilt or that shame is a huge issue.  In one of the lesser known early Christian books that didn’t make it into the mainstream Bible, Jesus was asked how one is able to know this kingdom.  He explained that when you can trample the cloak of your shame like a child naked, then you can see the kingdom.  ANd this is perfect, really, because shame and guilt all serve as anchors that weigh our souls down and keep us from being able to embody the incredible lightness of being that is part of this experience.  One very good way of coming face to face with your energy is through stillness of mind, turning inward (not looking outward) and concentrating on your breath.  Prana is coincident with your breath, and when you focus on breath, you are also focusing coincidentally on your energy.  If you stay with your slow and steady breath, you will find yourself feeling very different.  This is the leading edge of something really quite big.

While some will caution about awakening, as if it is some dangerous thing, I take a different view; this is our native state which we have fallen away from.  What gets in the way of our awakening is NOT kundalini but ourselves.  Us!  When you learn the art of surrender, it becomes much easier.  When I was ready for more, kundalini obliged and poured it on….so strong in fact, that I went into a kind of spiral that was very difficult for me, but ultimately led to a place where I felt something crushed in me.  Once this took place, a kind of cognitive collapse, I realized I had experienced what was described (very poorly I must admit) as the much-feared “ego death.”  It is a real misnomer, because what took place was more a rearranging of my inner landscape so ego was not front and center.  Also, while I know that the psychological community has their own ideas about it, I have observed that ego corresponds to that part of ourselves that observe objects as separate within space.  This level of cognition corresponds, I will point out, to the left brain.  I have reached a place where I have observed that when I am most creative and working in my right brain (being an artist, this has not been hard to observe many many times!), that I have a corresponding suspension of ego as I feel myself move into this large  space where what I am is…different.  I am more fluid and the idea of ego is less important.  Ego is still there, it is always there, but its just not rigidly held within awareness.  Anyone who claims to have killed ego is just kidding themselves.  Even the most known of people who have gone through this all have ego after. In the Gospel of Phillip Jesus even describes this collapse of the self, a kind of “destruction” after which the self achieves an uncanny power to make mountains move.  And of course, this all makes sense, because by letting the ego step aside, we are embracing the waveform, not the particle side of our awareness.  The left brain is focused on individual things, like particles, while the right brain can focus on the wave.  The left brain is a linear processor of information, which makes it limited, while the right brain, we now know, can process vast amounts of information in nano-seconds!  People who have had their left brains impaired have discovered savant-like abilities.  And this all makes perfect sense, because the right brain can take billions of particles, ideas, or visual information and process it very quickly.  We have needed both sides of this coin in ourselves in order to deal with reality.  The problem for us is that we have tended to be very left-brained as a species.  This, though, is changing, and as this changes more, the merging of the left with the right will result in more awakenings.  This is what we call divine union.  It exists within yourself!  Here!  Now!

So.  As I said in the last post, I do not get to write much lately.  I am getting this off just so you know I am still active, I simply am doing other things and concentrating on myself. It is so easy to get caught up in what is “out there” and forget the work that one needs to do…..and you would be surprised how much more clearly the picture resolves when you do that!  The compass is within each of us.  Each of us must find it ourselves.  But it IS within you.  And while kundalini yoga might seem the way to go, the way is far more simple than all of that.  Your belief, which will govern and control your actions and what you choose to do, can keep you from discovering just how simple, how foundational, actually, this experience is.  Perhaps it is because it is so simple that it has evaded our notice.  That, though, is changing fast!

So you made it this far; one word that needs to be kept in mind because without it, this can be empty words: LOVE.  Seeking the highest, you will tend to find it.  Love to you.

Pranamayakosha The Light Body

In my awakening,  I observed that after I had removed a good deal of material from my light body, things that are old blocks or unresolved emotional issues, I found that the energy which had gone from root to crown was going other places, was starting back at the root or near it only to go back up again. I wondered – what gives?  What little I DID read from the eastern information about kundalini all said the energy rises from root to crown and once there you have had the system swept clean.

Well hang on a moment. Not really. For me, it went up down and all around.  What is up with that?

If you know about awakenings and how entirely miraculous events wind up being, then you can very likely guess how easy it was for me to ask that question in my mind only to get an answer in short order without even going looking for it.  It is how these things go.

What I discovered was the concept in the Hindu tradition of something called the Light Body or the energy body, which was described as having etheric sheaths. It is called the Pranamayakosha  and was mentioned in the previous post.  This body is made up of five layers of nonphysical material and one layer of physical matter (which is the physical body).  These layers  are like layers of an onion. Nested into one another.  This explained a lot about what I was experiencing!  Being able to be present but not standing in the way of this energy and what it is doing has been the hallmark of my work in many ways. I might try to focus on some problem areas and I might congratulate myself on my progress, the truth is that an agency more than I was doing this. And good thing, too, because what comes after these clearings has been extremely helpful to me.  The notion or idea that the guru is inside of you has been literally true for me as there is a self that exists here that is me but seems to have a life beyond just this one focus.  Call it a cosmic parent, a higher self. from it, I can actually learn how to be, to grow, to become.  This is helpful to know how to be when there may not be good mentors available.

Learning to trust this force alive in you, which is you and is the universe, will go a long way in bringing you peace and contentment.  You are in good hands. That kind of perspective is very good to feel wrapped all around you. Now, the universe is free to conspire to help you the most and in the best of ways.

Kundalini (Rising)

So let me just put this out there for you to consider….

The moment where the energy was unleashed in me, it was after a phone call to an Oglala elder who didn’t realize it, but acted as a confessional agent in my trying to untangle some spiritual issues from my early adulthood (I wrote about these in the first few blog entries so I will save you…) After that I was walking on clouds with the most brilliant sense of relief I had felt in years. It then came as a distant sense of something on the wind, all around me. It was a grave-filled moment of remembering something, that I was part of something, a family of consciousness that had no end.  It was a singular moment, a return to the garden.  Three days later, it went away.  Then after this I had six months of widely dispersed symptoms, all attributable to kundalini, but only in the rearview.  Then, after a most unusual dream, I was driving down the highway when it came on.  It would go away, then it would come back if I focused on it.  Each time I focused on it, it got STRONGER.  Then, a few days later, I felt something moving up the core of my body in whip-like fashion as if there was a current that was pushing hard against something (perhaps my own unrealized mental resistance).

When this happened, it went straight up. All the way up.  It had dove into me, had taken me as its own. 24/7 I lived this, on fire, in heat, wondering how on earth I was going to manage this ongoing.

Then, I noticed that one feature of this energy was that it was going around clearing things in my energy. It seemed to begin down low and move upward. Piece by piece, this force went about its way cleaning up the wreckage of the past and making room for something to flow even more clearly through me.  Each time, I felt a bust of energy, a feeling of victory, joy, bliss, and then back to business by the next day.  It was business.  Kundalini was not to sit back and take a breather.  It was silent and uncompromising.  This has been going on for years and what I have now observed is that it has swept from root to crown only to go back through the same path but at a different vibration, at a different “depth” or layer.  It goes through and cleans each layer, moving in the way it wants to move (not always in a straight line, though, you see….it just seems to know what needs it next), and then will wind up in the same center, say the heart, only to remove another layer of material.  Different material. At each layer, I feel a sense of clearing.  In one such clearing, my heart center felt like it was the size of a basketball court. About that size.  Seriously.  And it felt empty. But a year later, I would find at another layer yet more material in the heart center that had brought so much pain earlier in the pain body episodes that were epic and most difficult.

So I think that the idea that kundalini rises to the crown as being the end-all is perhaps not entirely correct.  It can rise to the crown at one dimensional layer, only to make an an entirely new pathway to the crown through yet another layer.  This isn’t a race, we have the infinite before us, and as many lives as we need. If this world poisons the well, we will wind up somewhere near Arcturus or something taking up a comparable body or something.  Or wait outside of time for a new venue to develop. Wait a billion years if need be, it is all a subset of the infinite present, right?  I think so. So there is more than enough, no limit.  Endless realities and worlds and spirit travels to them in an instant. So as each rising takes place, it leads to still more risings.  Maybe, as my intuition is showing me just as I write this that the chakra chain is more like a series of layers somehow….with their own vibration and the energy rises to a point of realization in us and pitch and then begins again on another key or tone along the scale.  And up and up it goes through all the qualities of our being, through each layer.

I think that most important thing is to simply take the position that this thing is in charge.  It knows the drill, and has all the right connections to the universe.  We just need to follow, get out of the way as we can, and allow this miracle to take place.  Part of that, at least for me, is not to enshrine any knowledge as absolute.  What we think we know today can be changed by the little bit we learn tomorrow, which alters the landscape of today perhaps forever. What we think we know, which may actually be built on thousands of years old information could all be changed or seen to resolve into a different view by what we learn today. There is this odd sense in many minds that the really old stuff, its around because it has stood the test of time, so it MUST be on the mark.  And I think in many ways, yes, that is spot on. In other ways, I think it is NOT.  Jesus said we would do even greater things than he, and I like this because it feels realistic.  We will all help add to this bank of knowledge, and it will continue to evolve as out understanding of reality evolves. ALL reality.  The pulse that forms creation from the very start, not just the rolling out of worlds, but the seed within the seed that births worlds.  I know; sounds like I am on some serious drugs.  But I am not.  It just may seem out there, but its in HERE.  Here. In me. And if you don’t get it, don’t worry, you will have your turn.  When I was a teen I though my parents so didn’t know anything. There are higher mountains we will each climb, so why put a limit on knowledge by creating some kind of box for it.

The ancients say you cannot will not awaken kundalini unless you go through and cleanse the nadis in the body, the carries for the subtle energy that is kundalini. Right now there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people who are all experiencing spontaneous awakenings who have done little if any kundalini yoga, the method described as the way to instigate the energy to unwind and flow upwards.  I think if we simply observe how it works for us, keep records, we will have a body of knowledge that will help us to understand what may well become a process that happens to all humans on the planet.  Used to be awakenings happened to people in mid life.  That was the norm. Now there are 19 and 20 year olds who are grappling with this now.  It has been said it happens in mid life because you can’t deal with it so young. Well….I don’t think even that is so.  This is very much a human experience and does NOT belong only to the adults. Maybe we need people on the planet who awaken more early so they can have more years of useful service in this new way of being.   Might be this method of awakening young is how it is SUPPOSED to happen, a right of passage perhaps.  I think that is just as probable as the maturity idea. Or during puberty.  Or even sooner. Imagine a life shaped by this force….a brain whose synaptic connections are influenced by this nonlocal cosmic force….what kind of person emerges from the other side of that?

So up to the crown?  Probably many times.  My guess it could be seven layers.  It could be each layer has seven layers within it.   And each of those layers with seven even more subtle layers. there are said to be millions of chakras in the body, small ones all throughout the body.  When I read that a year ago it fit what I had observed about energy in reading auras.  We are a network of lines and vortices.  So they are like creeks that lead to rivers, and rivers that lead to a great ocean.  Seems reasonable to me.  I think, at least for me, I prefer not to make up my mind about all of this but remain on the edge of my seat and simply take notes and learn without prejudicing the outcome.  I think it is going to be great.

Curious what those who have had this think.  Or just think about it.  Me, I gotta go wire my studio for sound and I am wanting to hear how it all turns out….so I have to run.

High Priestess and Priest of the Mysteries?

Is it possible that the virgin Mary was schooled in Egypt or in the manner of the mystic traditions of Kabbala or the Mystery schools in Egypt?  It is described that Mary, as a small child, was allowed into the Holy of the Holies, a place that ONLY the priest was allowed into and only once a year.  While people say that this was because Mary was to be the mother of the incarnation of God on earth, I wonder whether they knew that Mary was going to be the one at such an early age?  Could it be that Mary was herself blessed with an openness to the mysteries of awakening herself?

Link to Mary in the Holy of Holies

It is curious to find that St Austin (c. 380) asserted that it was generally known in church circles that Rabbi Jesus had been initiated in Egypt, and that “he wrote books concerning magic.”  This was at the earliest period of the forming of the Church by Emperor Constantine.  Curious, also, is how Jesus’s uncle also named Joseph (or Arimathea) was a wealthy tin merchant.  The center of the tin trade were tin mines in Cornwall, a stones throw from The center of the Druid universe, now known as Glastonbury, but which sports an ancient site called the Tor, a seven-ringed hill with a phallic stone sitting atop it.  Curious, because Jesus may well have been taken to this area of the country after the death of his father , Joseph, and could well have had contact with the Druids.  Sound far-fetched?   Curious that the Druids have a word in their language which is most amazingly, Yeshua, which is one of the names used for Jesus.

Before this, however, Jesus was taken as a small child to Egypt to flee from Herod’s desire to stamp out what he may have perceived as an heir to his throne when he ordered all male children two years and under to be killed.  Egypt.  Home to the Mystery schools.  In one Gnostic text it describes Jesus as having been back in Israel by age 12 or so, with people in his family wanting to marry him off.  It describes how Jesus then took off, following the spice routes toward India because he would have none of this.

Curiouser, still, are scrolls in Tibet that describe a man who had come from the middle east whose name was Issa.  This Issa had been crucified and had a wife named Mary. A book was written about these scrolls, which the author was allowed to view.  In them, many of the same things that Jesus had espoused this Issa espoused.  It is interesting to note that the name for Jesus in the Muslim world is Issa.  The Russian scholar, Nicolai Notovich, was the first to bring forth compelling evidence that Christ may have gone to India. In 1887, Notovich, was a Russian scholar and Orientalist and spent time in Kashmir during which he made his discovery of the scrolls about Issa. It was at the Zoji-la pass that Notovich was a guest at a  monastery  where a monk told him of the bodhisattva named  “Issa”. Notovitch was amazed at the similarities of this bodhisattva and Jesus.

It may well be that the history of the earliest Christians was different from the history that we know.  Some of the facts may not be absolutely confirmed, but there are some very tantalizing clues that have managed to escape the censorship that took place all across Europe and all of Christendom.  This censorship involves the burning of Torahs and the destruction of many books which were said to have contained stories about Jesus which were not part of the then-mainstream offerings of what was accepted.  There is a lot of interesting deviations that occur that lend credence to the Gnostic texts as being attributed to Jesus, for example. At the  Fatehpur Sikri, which is near the Taj Mahal, there are stones that have inscriptions on them called ‘Agrapha’ that are the words of Jesus and which are most like the words written in the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic text discovered in Nag Hammadi in 1945.  It is also known that reincarnation was known in the early Christian circles, that it was edited out of the Bible at the behest of Constantine’s wife, we are told, because she did not like the idea of having to come back again.  Many of Jesus’s teachings parallel the Hindu tradition quite closely, and yet through all of the efforts of suppressing only the “right” version, much of this information has been hard to get at, but it does exist.

When you consider that the Church came forward and formally announced that Mary Magdalene was herself NOT a prostitute, but had been so labelled in order to downplay her role or influence in Jesus’s life, you have to wonder what else there is that remains not entirely true?  And if truth is truth, then this truth is not the domain of any one religion or school of thought.  Some things can exist in the same way as gravity; entirely free from any need to build a dogma around them.  Even the subject of resurrection, I suspect, was not well understood.  Yes, it is entirely possible that Jesus WAS crucified, but there is also evidence that suggests that Jesus was involved in an initiation process that involved fasting in order to attain a type of resurrection of the spirit which was called “twice born,”  The Gnostics describe this very well by explaining that its as THOUGH you are alive but not fully living, as if you are dead, and then the next moment, your body becomes more alive than it had ever been, making your old life seem more like a death than any kind of life that you know now.

This explains how awakening is quite well.  The Hindus call it kundalini.  it is not the province of any discipline or religion, but is a very human experience.  However you seek to explain it, capture it, parse or describe it, it is a wondrous experience which opens the doors to a form of salvation of the spirit in that it gives you a powerful opportunity to make substantive change that may have eluded you. It does this by rewarding you when you remain aligned and “punishing” you when you are not.  As you learn how to remain aligned, bliss pours through you in a way that quite simply is like liquid fire.  This is not for the feint of heart, for this path is that of riding a powerful wave that can lead you into the dark or into the light.  After all, this is all of what we are, and it is up to us what we choose.  We are human, but we are seeking to be more than that.  Awakening is the ticket that begins the journey into what is called the bridal chamber, the Holy of Holies.  It is not a place save that it dwells within you…