Baptism As The Path To Awakening

Jesus’s Baptism by Giotto

While we do not know for certain why, John the Baptist showed signs of being at great odds with the ruling elites of Jerusalem in the Jewish temple. John was himself in the wilderness, we are told, and showed every sign of living the life as an ascetic: he wore simple clothes and subsisted on honey and locusts. A man like this would be freed to some extent from having to work in order to survive. This would have afforded him more time for contemplative prayer and meditation. Ascetics like this often were mystics, people who sought to know the thoughts of God. There is evidence that John was just this, that he became aligned to the divine compass that rests in all of us. How so?

Baptism as it is practiced today was very different in John’s time. Today we sprinkle water on a child’s head and say their sin is forgiven, their path to heaven is promised. But baptism by John was a different affair. We know through the disciples of Jesus, which took up baptism as an important precursor to discovering the kingdom within that it was imperative that the person want to be washed clean with all their heart

And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is the water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? (37) And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest.

Acts 8:36-7

While in Acts the baptism was couched in believing Jesus as the son of God, baptism was developed as a critically important way to free people from the division that previous sin, that which separates our hearts from the heart of God, could serve as a mechanism of release for people. All you had to do was to buy into it (believe). John was doing this in order to remove sin. John was setting souls free.

One important step toward awakening is cleansing the self of those things which divide us from the light that shines upon us, in us. In every way, Jesus explained that all of this was found within. It begins like a smallest of all seeds, the mustard.

Ritual cleansing baths are an important part of Judaism. John, I note, took the idea of cleansing one step further and created a way to free people from the burden of their past. What is remarkable is that John broke with the temple practice of blood sacrifice as the way to remit sin.

By whose authority did John do this? In his day John would have pointed to God. As any prophet, mystic or seer can tell you, this God is found within us. By John’s own perceptiveness and his desire for a better more peaceful way, he invented baptism. His own authority stamped the method with effectiveness. Yes, just saying it could even make it happen. John and Jesus both understood the role that belief or faith had in the work they did. Anyone employing methods like these understands the role belief plays.

People think there is magic in baptism, but it is entirely empty in truth, it is instead entirely filled by ones faith in it. By the same rule, baptism can be a hollow act if you don’t approach it correctly. There is evidence in the scripture to show that the early ones knew how to do it so that achieved its desired impact. One’s own faith is what works the magic. Does God forgive the sin? No, instead we do. God is always ready to forgive, but it is we who must prepare ourselves, to make our minds and hearts right to be forgiven. At any moment this can happen because of the abundant love that God has for all. We must be able to empty ourselves of the coarse stones that hides how ever-present this love is, how all-encompassing it has always been.

This would easily be counted as heresy today, but that is just how far the faithful have wandered from the core of these rituals. We think there is magic in just doing them, but that just isn’t so. If drinking the wine doesn’t make you feel closer to Christ, it’s your fault. You really have to let your imagination take you for a powerful ride. You had to be ready to give everything up to receive the power of baptism.

It’s important to understand how baptism was performed. In the earliest days a person left all of their garments and went into the water naked. This is one reason why there were furors over women in the early church baptising people. It was considered scandalous for a woman to be performing this with people who were naked. Women did, however, perform baptism. Sadly, baptism has been altered from its original form where one strips away the covering, the guile of the self, to come to God utterly naked. This ceremonial stripping away of what protects and hides us was an important ingredient to the process.

Being naked served to do two two things: it helped a person to surrender to the ritual. It is hard to hide your soul and heart when you stand naked in the water. It also emphasizes how the body will be washed clean of sin. If you believe it will happen, then it will. That is the true magic of baptism, which relies on belief. But who really is letting go of the sin, the burden? You, of course. Most people think of baptism as the method that works it magic. Baptism was a mechanism to help bring a person to a state of surrender: the grip on what needs to be let go is softened, and if the heart is ready, it goes. The more you let go, the less you have standing between you and God. We have forgotten these principles today. In fact, every baptism is done fully clothed. Besides, what’s the big deal, really?

Something happens to a soul when it is unburdened by the weight of the inner division that divides us from the divine; we suddenly are relieved of that which had been weighing us down only moments before. This adds buoyancy to the heart, and brings one ever closer to the divine presence. It is a trapdoor into the soul and its connection to divine presence. Release the right block or stone holding up the dam and the whole eddifice can come tumbling down.

Humans are made up of a series of these blocks or “stones” that serve to keep out the light or the water of life. All awakenings proceed in the same manner: surrendering to the powerful force that undoes us, that, like a physician, removes those things that keep us from the divine light. You didn’t have to be a Jew, you could be from any faith, from any walk of life. The church created the impression that you had to become Christian if you were to enjoy the benefits of the true light.

It’s quite possible that John was in the wilderness because he was not accepted by the temple priests as legitimate. While his method of baptism was drawn from tradition, it also departed from it. There is no mention of John taking money for his services, which would have been different from what happened at the temple in Jerusalem. This may be why he was in the wilderness. It may also be that John saw the corruption there and chose not to participate, we don’t really know for sure. What we do know is that John developed this method on his own and was offering it to others, which stood as a method that bypassed the temple methods of tithing and sacrifice that were filling the coffers of the temple.

It is worth mentioning that during this time the temple priest began hoarding the Jewish coin used for tithing to the temple. This was called the half shekle (also shekel), as no coinage from a pagan Rome could be accepted. This created artificial scarcity and drove the value for coin up. People from the region would come for yearly blessings and religious observances, bringing a bushel of grain or chickens, doves, or other valued resources which would get converted to the shekle. Under the hoarding regime, what took a bushel of grain could end up costing two bushels, later. That’s some pretty bad corruption for you. And who of conscience would want to deal with a system like that? This was the world that John and Jesus found themselves in.

Jews weren’t the only tradition to practice a cleansing of self for reaching the divine, however. The Native American sweat lodge or inipi is an important precursor to receiving divine guidance. One had to cleanse ones self in order to be closer to the divine and to be able to receive its guidance. The Hindus describe a process of cleansing energy channels where they knew past emotion can be stored, a process that also achieved a closeness to the creator. Much of yoga is concerned with this process of cleansing.

Now you might look at this and say, “This has no similarities to baptism!” But you would be wrong. What is key here is psychology. All of these methods work as psychological triggers….if you buy into or believe them. Under the skin, they achieve the same thing.

Rumi once wrote that people argue about the light saying one is better than another when all is light and none better than the other. All of these cultures knew and practice a similar method because it works because of how all people universally divide themselves from their heritage of children of the creator.

When I awakened, I clearly had released a long-standing issue that had me at odds with myself and the universe. As soon as I let it go, I began having symptoms tied to awakening. It was as though a path had been cleared for me where my awareness was freed up to know the fundamental truth of my being as tied to the divine. I didn’t reach this because of a belief or any expectation of any return from having done this work. Likewise, the work of John worked just as much for Jew as Gentile in his day. Jesus’s work and message worked for all-comers. Jesus saw the benefit in John’s work and began to employ it because it worked when done correctly.

To me, this method reveals the compassion that John had for the spiritual suffering of people. He went out of his way to do this work. Imagine this man, holding you and pushing you gently into the water and pulling you back out, pronouncing how you had been washed free of your sin. To do this, you had to trust John, you had to bodily place yourself in his hands. You had to be ready to let go.

Something powerful happens when you are with someone who has achieved this same type of release, also, which has been a well-known principle in many traditions. A teacher is more effective when they embody the knowledge of how the method works? You better believe it. Each person whose heart is open and ready can feel it since it is a deep spiritual truth, and that truth actually has a life beyond just the teacher (as long as followers don’t fall away from the core principles of the method). It was so powerful a method that Jesus went to be baptised, and when he did, his own connection to the divine was in that moment realized.

We often want to think that Jesus was different, but what I see is a man who wanted his own inner sin to be washed away. No one bothers to look at this, though, within the church. It’s as if, as how the institution has portayed it, that baptism was somehow different for Jesus. The elephant in the room is that people were finding relief from what had them divided from the divine. It is entirely reasonable to think that Jesus sought out John as the physician of his heart and soul.

Division within the self serves to hide or obfuscate our deeper, truer, nature. A person not burdened by unresolved feelings of anger, frustration, fear, or guilt, is much more able to understand and glimpse their deeper fundamental nature as a spark of the divine. The same appeared to be true for Jesus, since in the moment as he emerged from the water, something powerful had happened. It may have been more effective for Jesus than others, and this may also be why he adopted baptism as one of the ritual practices that now make up the Christian faith.

While my awakening wasn’t initiated with a baptismal event, the event that took place was, I suspect, identical to how baptism worked in the old days, which was that I was given the opportunity to unburden myself of an inner tangle of emotion about a past even that I hadn’t been able to resolve. I had a slow burn of frustration, guilt, and anger that had been burning a hole in the pocket of my soul. This angst was as much directed at myself as it was the universe for having sent a challenge spiritually that I felt I had failed in the face of. What was so interesting was once this initial release and subsequent shift took place, the challenge completely resolved itself. It could be said that this challenge to my system set up the conditions where enough pressure was brought to bear to serve as the force that would break through the wall seperating me from the depths within. Once I was able to just let it all go, everything changed from that moment going forward. For me, this one stone removed from that wall I had built caused the wall itself to weaken, ultimately allowing the water of life to stream into my awareness and initiate the changes to get me to a better place. It resulted in years of removing barriers I had erected to the divine.

These stones, all of them, were knots of emotion that only served to drown out or hide the soft flow of life-giving water/light of spirit. This all began with one initiatory act, and I suspect that this was also what John, Jesus, and many others were doing some two thousand years ago. Baptism washes away the lower so that the higher may be better glimpsed. It’s not a guarantee of awakening, but one in a series of steps that can work to bring a person closer until they can see the Christ or saving grace that is in us all.

Paul, in his letters explains it as not something that came from without, but as the Christ that was within. He said that God showed him this in his road to Damascus moment when he was struck by a bright white light. Paul wasn’t a believer at all, and was actively persecuting Christians. He waa shown this Christ within himself. Only then did he become such a vocal proponent of the movement. It’s kind of beautiful when you think about it. A tent-maker going around persecuting followers being baptised in the spirit of the Holy Ghost. That’s what happened to Paul. It was so sudden a transformation that he was blind for three days. This could easily have been a condition we call hysterical blindness. If true, it was because Paul needed some time to catch up with the new reality he suddenly was facing. Blindness can manifest it times like these when you are still unable to comprehend the about-face that happened. This underscores just how sudden his awakening was. This is not unlike many awakenings today. It’s quick, really in a glimmering of an eye and there it is. Boom. Say goodbye to Kansas.

This kind of experience was often spoken of in terms of dying to the old self in order to realize a new life, which was the Christ. Paul wrote of dying daily as he came nearer to Christ, a process identical to awakening.

This was one reason why the esoteric strand or sect within Christianity which we call Gnostic today took Paul as their hero. It was this esoteric strand that was best positioned to understand and convey the very keys to this kingdom, which rested on inner seeking and then discovery of a spark which could be kindled into a great light and a realization of the divine hidden within us all. These descriptions were incredibly similar to those found in other cultures which describe the process of enlightenment.

The conspiracy to destroy the Gnostic sects, which contained so much understanding of these and other sacred rituals by the Orthodoxy (that came later) was a conspiracy of ignorance. Within several generations this more secretive group of sects were driven from the institutionalization process we call Christianity today.

What John, his disciples, Jesus, and his disciples knew was that one of the most important aspect to the work they were doing rested on belief in an important way.

Today, we refer to belief in scientific terms as the “placebo effect.” While we tend to denigrate the power of belief in our modern culture by renaming it with a “sciency” moniker (placebo) belief, regardless, remains an important power of mind. Sign up for, say, a drug trial, where you are a subject who might get a new type of antihistamine as part of a study, and you can glimpse what this power of mind can do. It is known that a certain percentage of participants who believe they are getting the drug and not the sugar pill (the placebo) but do get the sugar pill, will often exhibit physiological reactions as if they are actually getting the drug.

While the placebo effect has its limits in terms of how it can heal, it is a significant enough of a response to begin turning the tables for many touched by it. It helps to show how belief can drive the power of the mind for positive change.

John and Jesus knew about this and even explained many times (Jesus specifically) that it was a person’s faith or belief that had healed them. In first century Judea where access to medicine was nothing like what we have today, the effect of their belief made a huge difference in how people felt.

The Orthodox sect of Christianity claims that the books of the Nag Hammadi Library are heresy, but what interests me is how sophisticated the teachings are and just how probable it could be that they represent, in part, a private teaching by Jesus and his followers. Scholars seek to attribute some of the writings to a man named Valentinus who had a vision of the risen Christ and lived in the first century. Valentinus wrote about how he had visited a direct disciple of Paul who explained to him that Paul had both a public and private teaching. The disciple, named Theodus, taught Valentinus about this inner or secret teaching. While this itself does not prove that Jesus had an “inner ministry” there are indications in the synoptic gospels that Jesus did not teach openly to Gentiles, preferring to teach in parables in order to veil the meaning of his teachings, which happened in Mark and to a degree again in Luke. Every tradition on Earth that has had an esoteric wing which hides certain teachings in order to protect the uninitiated from what could prove to bring awakening before the student was ready for the experience.

Baptism was the beginning, one step in a series of passages to free the self of the burdens that exist in a person’s heart. This today would be called “release work” and it plays an important role in luving closer to the divine presence and allowing ourselves to be transformed by it.

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Jesus The Occultist

The word “occult” means to hide. When I place my hand in my pocket, it is occulted in the same way that when the moon crosses the path of the sun, it occults the sun in eclipse. Today the term “occult” has been made to refer to witchcraft or black magic. Occult means only to hide.

It is fair to say that Jesus was himself an occultist. I am not saying this in order to stir controversy, but to point out that he did do this in his teaching practice. Absolutely, no doubt about it. If you doubt this is the case you can find the evidence in the synoptic gospels themselves.

And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked him of the parable. And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God, but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables. That seeing that they may see but not perceive, and hearing they may hear but not understand lest at any time they be converted, and their sins be forgiven them.

Mark 4:10-12

It may be a bit much to take, realizing that Jesus was only speaking openly to a Jewish audience and with those who had already been prepared to understand his teaching and not others (Gentiles). This situation is communicated in Luke 12:41 with Peter asking about whether Jesus will teach to all (openly and not in parable so as to hide the meaning of his teaching). Jesus only explains or decodes his parables when he is with an elect or prepared group of people (and as we see in Mark, this means not Gentiles).

A lot is said about this by Christian apologists who try to explain why this might have been done. An early writer and bishop of Alexandria writing under the name of Dionysius (see: Salmond, S. D. F, et al. The Works of Gregory Thaumaturgus, Dionysius of Alexandria and Archelaus. T. & T. Clark, 1882.), explains that the church regularly seeks to keep its teachings secret, even from those within the church who are members when they do not themselves fully understand the mysteries. This is done so as not to “blind” those who are “lost” or without the full knowledge or understanding (referred to as gnosis). Jesus uses the word “maturity” to signify this level of comprehension as does Paul in some of his letters, too. This maturity involves a capacity to understand what is being said in a deeper more full way. It is not uncommon for the deeper teachings, the more mystical ones, the mysteries as they are called, to be hidden from view.

Every single tradition, Christian or not, does this in order to protect people from gaining something for which they are not yet prepared. Traditions with an esoteric wing (in essence nearly every tradition that I can think of) have this as a feature because of the power associated with these “innermost” teachings (they are more than simple rule-following and may include how to cultivate new states of awareness). For example, for a very long time certain methods for reaching enlightenment were shrouded in mystery and kept from public view in India because it was known that prematurely exposing a person to these powerful methods could bring a person prematurely to enlightenment before the person was ready for it. I have personally observed a case of an individual who “forced” awakening and it did not go well for her…at all. It is not out of the realm of possibility that Jesus recognized this and operated in the same way. You mean Jesus resisted saving people? Absolutely. But wait, doesn’t that go against most of what we were taught since the beginning of time (or at least the way we now count time)?

There is a disconnect between what many are told about their faith (Christianity in particular) and what actually happened. Most Christians I have spoken to have ben of the opinion that Jesus taught and spoke openly to the multitudes, but the evidence shows differently. While Jesus spoke openly, yes, he did not speak openly in such a way that those “without” the additional teaching and inner initiation could understand. Technically he taught to all, but his purpose was not for everyone to understand or to become saved. This is to my mind an important factor when we reassess Christianity at its very roots because of the existence of documents that date back to earliest Christianity that speak of a private teaching and how important it was to teach privately. This would be documents which the church itself disputes as being tied to Jesus’s real teachings, the Nag Hammadi Library.

One possibility, which I explore in the manuscript I am currently researching on Jesus and the Gnostic texts, is the theory that Jesus taught this way as a recruitment tool. You teach by parables because there are “dogs” (see Dionysius) or swine amongst you. However, you might also get people who come up to you to say how they enjoyed the teaching but what did you mean by the parable of the candle? What was that all about? What I contend is that the quality necessary for maturity and being prepared to know the truth is a deep sense of curiosity. For most who hear the parable, they might get some comfort from it, but not everyone would want to know more. Clearly people were not pressing Jesus to just go ahead and explain himself plainly, nowhere do people do this except in a more private way.

When you are dealing in mysteries the reality is there is a very small number of people who are going to actually pursue understanding the teachings at a deeper level. it seems a little silly for the church to say Jesus didn’t teach in private when he certainly did so, and it also isn’t that much of a stretch that he might have had more teachings which were hidden from view even from those who would form the basis of the orthodox strand within Christianity who did not themselves understand them (as in the gospel of Thomas or Philip for example). They seem to be so far removed from the kinds of things that the orthodoxy is used to hearing Jesus say that they tend to reject the teachings out of hand even as there is evidence that such teachings may have in fact existed. A number of the gospel writers said that there was a lot that Jesus did and spoke about that weren’t being included in the gospel accounts, and the gospels themselves really aren’t that large in size for a person who was considered to be so important. Its curious, isn’t it? You would think there would be many more writings about him than they are. In 1945 with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library documents, we may well have gotten some of them, even if the Church was unable to accept them at such a late date. That said, these documents are from very early Christianity, so it wasn’t like they were created centuries after Jesus was off the scene.

I am surprised to learn just how many people who consider themselves Christians actually think that Jesus taught openly to all people. He didn’t do that in fact. He hid his teachings from Gentiles. Only later was the Word taken to the Gentiles through the efforts that Paul made to export Christianity beyond Judea.

The idea then of Jesus having a private teaching is not so hard to understand, and yet the church railed mightily against gospels which purported to have been collections of Jesus’s private teachings (the Nag Hammadi Library is a trove of this “secret” or private teaching). Additionally, one of the foremost purveyors of these secret teachings, according to scholars, was a man named Valentinus who lived at a time when he was able to speak directly to a disciple of Paul, and he was a disciple who had learned directly from Paul while he was still alive. What Valentinus wrote in a letter was that he went to this disciple because, I presume, he had a vision of the risen Christ (much as had Paul). When he spoke to this disciple of Paul we was told that Paul had a private or secret teaching only given to his innermost circle of disciples and he says further that he was then schooled in this teaching. Now bear in mind, Valentinus was not a fly-by-night person. He was highly respected and was a devout Christian. He even was in the running for being chosen for the position of bishop of Rome back in a time when Christianity was still an underground movement and either frowned upon by Rome or outright prosecuted for being an illegal religion (depending on which emperor was in power at the time).

While many want to say that there was no secret teaching, there remains some evidence that this was in fact the case both with Jesus as well as Paul. No controversy, only understanding why this was done the way that it was. It makes for a lot of conjecture alla Dan Brown style writing, but it seems that this was done for very good reasons.

It is worth considering in order to get a better understanding of the history of Christianity and how some of the leaders of the Church conducted themselves.

Focus On The Third Eye

©Parker Stafford

I remember feeling that dot activate in the center of my brow even when I was little. It was maybe the size of a pea. Okay, maybe half the diameter of a dime, a little bigger than a pea. It always came with this curious sense of pressure there. Like something was just…resting there….a dime, a pea, really it could have been anything. I would wonder if my third eye was activating.

But then I was jettisoned into an awakening, and it began, in part, when this voice in my head told me to close my eyes and focus my eyes along the center-point of my brow line. That changed it for me. It sounds impossibly simple, right? This has been one method used by many people across time and cultures to activate life force so that it flows at a higher level (Egyptian Mystery Schools, early Christians, Hindu, Taoists, and more). I slipped past the mirror and began a journey into a world within that was expressing itself through myriad lives here on earth….atoms, trees, fish, stars, and the ten thousand things.

That dot transformed. I felt it as it changed, grew, then spread across my forehead. I didn’t know that this would lead to awakening, I was trusting in the inner voice that was urging me along. I drew a picture of it as it felt on my head. It was just that vivid. It was no longer a dot, but a double channel of yin and yang energies fueling my inner sight. 

Bands of energy radiated outward horizontally and wrapped all the way around my head. The pressure was intense, but it never hurt. It was an ethereal energetic pressure, and it felt like it was cracking my head open like a nut.

The dot, a seed, really, had sprouted and grew each night as I sat down in bed to meditate before going to sleep. I watered the seed with my attention. You don’t have to think magic thoughts, you don’t have to do anything when you turn your awareness to it. In fact, it seems like you are doing precious little. It is like flipping a switch. But be aware what you are in for. Are you ready for a relentless process of realignment, cleansing and release? Are you ready to go forward one step, crossing a threshold from which there is no return? “Buckle up because Kansas is getting ready to go bye-bye.” There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. But when you are ready, you are ready.

“Please come take me,”  I wrote in my journal that night. “I am not afraid of you, I know you do not mean any harm. I know you want to open me like a lover opens his beloved.” Unashamed, unafraid, I knew that this was how this had to go. I was to be lit on fire by the Holy Ghost, the Cosmic Fire, the Kundalini. One part of me was the initiator and another was being initiated by this new fire of life. And it happened so effortlessly, like I had come here for this. My ticket had been reserved aeons ago. It was going to happen. 

This is a full third eye awakening, my friends. I thought I knew, but I knew only the tip of its tail, that pea-sized dot. The dot is the seed. Nascent, full of promise, but not fully activated. Maybe that’s why they paint the bindi on their foreheads I thought. They do it because that’s how it feels to them.

When the third eye blossomed in me, it was so radically different, you see, that I had to draw it, recording it both so others could see it and so I could look at it with my  physical eyes, too.

It led me into undescribable bliss. Like a rocket, it took me there until I learned how to reach that pearlesent bliss on my own. It taught me that I had to work to clear my baggage. This took years. I wish I could say it was easy, but it wasn’t. But the inner presence that woke up within me didn’t care; it offered me endless chances with no judgement. While I would feel defeated by my stumbled, it seemed to smile as if to say, “This is how you learn. You stumble, you fall; you get back up and go farther each and every time.”

Some refer to it as “the helmet” some as “a vice.”  I wanted to study it. My little secret is that if you bring your fiery love of awakening with you, unashamed, into the moment and come to your wanting to know more about something, something in the universe opens inside of you, like a blossom, a riotously wild but free blossom that contains just what you want to know. The universe opens its “secrets” to you. I don’t know who is being seduced more, me or God. But it works so beautifully. Just silence your mind and be ready to let your imagination build the images or words or smells to give you it’s truth and meaning….because when you do, you naturally can become the thing you are after to know. What better way to know something than to become it in your heart.

How do I explain to you that you fall in love with the Universe? How do I explain that while this intense live flows, it just gives all of itself to you in the process? It responds to the seductive power that is the human spirit. This spirit, gifted through God, is a spark or piece of God and thus our own desire is God’s desire. How do I explain how when you feel this love you lose who is you and who is God? The gift is that in this live beyond all our loves, all secret hidden things become plain as the scales of our earthly condition fall away…or can…if you can give yourself completely to this love. 

It is this way that I have learned so much. No teacher, no guru, and no need to wade through what parrots have to say. But this was how I began to learn and how I use my third eye as a sacred instrument of knowing. It is. It is part of my inner temple. And we all have that temple in us, that place where we meet the divine. My third eye let’s me see what is important or most immediate in my life. It’s force spreads across my head, a reminder that it’s there. The secret is to keep it simple. Our rational minds stumble and fall in its advancing presence. No, you have to be able to let yourself think and feel in an impossibly big way.Are you ready? It is like an amazing dream, impossible for it to be real, but is. 

I was pleased to see that what I had drawn matched perfectly the Tilak that yogis paint on their foreheads. They too were just drawing what they had felt. Maybe some were just parroting what others had done, not realizing that this was how a fully awakened third eye felt like. Shiva has it always painted on his head. The yogis sometimes don’t have the horizontal bands on their Tilak. Some do. Some have a series of dots with those horizontal pressure bands. It’s all the same, I know, different versions, varieties of the same experience. Below are some images of the Tilak, so you know, so you can see that it isnt just decoration, not merely a ritualized marking; it is an illustration. It describes something. Something real in us…

Look at my drawing again….

So look for this, but do so carefully because if you are feverishly seeking awakening, no one will keep you from it, but it’s good to prepare. It makes things easier. But if you are going to be taken by God, it’s just going to be. This third eye is how they got there. The yogis describe it, Jesus even taught about how to activate it (few even realize that he was teaching about something so esoteric), and anyone who knows where it is that his teaching on the third eye shows up wins a prize! I will give you a hint; it is in one of the canonical Gospels! Verily I say to you, it is true! Let me know if you can find it…

You can travel with the third eye, you can. I was taught by “it” this broad inexhaustible divinity in all things, how it’s to be used (or how I would use it). You can step into worlds through it and glimpse wonders. If that sounds too impossible to you, just remember; it’s already been done, and I do it whenever there is enough of a need. It’s always about something I either need to know or would love to know. Either way, it’s always juicy and perfect. It’s also teaching me how to live my life on the narrow path….which is in truth how to balance between shadow and light so that I might know the depth of love and bliss right here and now. That of course freaks out the fundamentalists, but is understood by the esoteric, the mystics: the shadow we create through our actions does not dissolve until we recognize and heal it (“repent and sin no more”). Until then, it haunts us, taunts us, until we can call on the grace that we are that is God-given, a lifesaving, soul-saving gift. We can be saved, but not until we repent…or recognize that we were doing shadow work to begin with. 

I Ask You….

So how does the third eye feel to you? Has it given you wonders, has it been a curious thing, a mystery? Have felt pressure there? Does it seem inconsequential to you?  Is it a mystery? Do my words seem impossible?

 Know the mysteries. Like stars, they beckon us to adventure. How does it feel, this awakened third eye? Is it a dot? Does it spread across your forehead? Where has it gone? Did it open to you, was your life changed? Has it been hard? Did the hardness show you the way into supreme bliss?

I’d love to know your story…

Sorry to be away so long; so much is afoot right now for me. I’ll write about it later. Meanwhile, how does the third eye treat you? I would love to know.

Swimming in bliss…

More

I was not satisfied with the teaching in church….I knew there was more. I didn’t know what it was, only that it was wanting. I knew this above all else, beyond the explanations of others that I was merely “prideful” or unable to take the teaching as truth. No, there was more, I knew it beyond all else.
When I awakened I was lucky to have seen how there WERE teachings by Jesus himself which he passed on to his disciples in books that spoke directly about a process whereby one entered the kingdom. These were central teaching that acted like a key to understanding everything else Jesus was teaching in his ministry. The problem was that these teaching were demonized and anathematized by the church. These were part of this something “more.” I knew that in fact Jesus was teaching his followers about awakening and that the truth was hidden or obfuscated in numerous ways. History offered up her secrets and laid bare the many ways that contributed to our losing these central teachings. What is so amazing to me is that these teachings are actually the lynch pins in understanding all that Jesus taught about. It’s pretty incredible to look at all of this and know that this went down in the way that it did.
I once wrote about this issue and had some of my friends asking me why I was so critical about Christianity, or why I hated the church. It’s too easy to feel that way when dealing with this issue and to me, it is an easy way out of actually examining things closely and asking some very fair questions. But it’s not out of a deep hate or any of that. In fact, it is quite the opposite. I want a religion that offers the keys to self realization, of actually knowing what this kingdom is. Truth is a curious thing; we can have all levels of it and still be missing key points.

I have done the hard work of inquiring and looking. I have poured through the texts of the New Testament as well as those that were not included, from apocrypha to the Nag Hammadi. I have studied issues surrounding translation, how the contextual nature of Aramaic actually does matter when translating to any language, as well as what biblical scholars are saying that pastors dare not touch. More than this, I awakened and saw that the only books that helped describe my new state of being were the words of Jesus teaching his followers about the kingdom, which fit my experience perfectly….but also happened to have been deemed heresy. They had been cast aside and had never made it into canon.  The more that I read, the more it became clear that what we got was a version of the truth, but not the full truth.  I’m not even suggesting that this was some sort of conspiracy.  It may have been simply a conspiracy of ignorance acted upon by those who had less than the full story.  But even half the story is better than no story, and it wasn’t as if we weren’t getting truths.  We just didn’t get its heart, and this, dear readers, is the hardest one to swallow for some of us today.  It is covered over first by some 1700 years of tradition and then it includes a whole new dimension of thinking added, a great mystery that has been hidden from all of us (for whatever reason).

Since my experience in awakening is the same exact phenomenon as others who have awakened, and it’s all described in the same way by nearly everyone, and is being described in these cast-away texts, it begs the question; isn’t it possible that something very important was missed? And perhaps, then, might this missing piece be important to know the fullness of this man’s great insight and teaching? If you found out that the teaching of Jesus was incomplete, wouldn’t you, as a follower of Christ, want to know? I’m asking you to put your pride aside and get curious and be simple like children, ripe for hearing what might just be really big news.

Awakening, which is the kingdom, brings a renewed way of using the mind. If you can teach yourself to forgo mere rational thought, you can activate more and more of your capacity for understanding, which is truly liberating. It requires humility because there is so much to give up in order to see in this way. There is a blizzard of biases and beliefs that rage in such places, and the very religion that was created to support these teachings has essentially continued to demonize the concept of awakening in some quarters. Once these biases have been cleared, though, the mind becomes a luminous field of awareness in direct proportion to how much bias has been released. But it isn’t just that, it’s letting yourself be shown, led, taken by the presence of the indwelling divine and it’s child which is the Christ consciousness. Others call it Cosmic Consciousness, or Cosmic Mind. It is all the same and emerges in the same way in each tradition because this is what we ALL are, rather than the beliefs we hold. Remember how Jesus said the kingdom is within you? That might just be an important clue to all of us. It’s what’s inside-this does not happen outside of any of us. Where, then, do you think you will meet God?

This more asks me to continually to let go of my familiar moorings to here and as I do, new understanding floods in, mysteries become knowns, and the universe resolves into a greater and greater miracle. But no words can contain this more…you just have to go and see for yourself.

All of this is like a seed that grows into a sprout, then a plant, and then a flower. The flower opens more and more and this flower is awareness. This is how awakening proceeds; it is the smallest of seeds that grows in stages. More and more, it opens, revealing still-deeper layers of comprehension. To get there, I lay aside all rational thought and allow my mind to go blank. Yes, blank. It is here that absent thought a great and ineffable presence grows that is a love unlike any other. Everything I could ever wish to know becomes available in that “space.” If you believe you can’t, you probably won’t….but if you consider it possible, then it becomes possible. I wish this for everyone because it reveals our own foolishness and opens us to wonder and awe. The world so needs this right now.

Until next time….

Greek VS Aramaic Bible Versions -The First Impediment

Recently I shared with you a project I undertook as the result of a realization I had during the course of my early awakening related to early Christian texts and how it was that I saw a big elephant in the room that had managed not to make its way to the canonical Gospels. 

My first big question as I made this realization was “why?” The answer has pulled in a number of reasons, not just one, which is one reason why I have been moved to undertake this project. It is a fascinating story, and it helps to bring early Christian thought back to where it needs to be, in my estimation, which is a complete system not only for being, but for becoming more than we thought possible. 

The first, and perhaps most important layer or impediment to deeper realization of what Christ was teaching is the barrier of language and culture. The original teachings were conveyed in Aramaic while the Gospels that we now know were written in Greek. To understand how different the languages are, it helps to study both, which I am doing. The problem as it exists is that Aramaic is a language that is highly contextual and it does not have all the same words that Greek has. Greek, on the other hand is less context driven and is more precise in some ways, but it’s precision comes at a cost when translating the Aramaic Jesus spoke. 

To understand what I mean, I will provide you with an example. Greek often will identify concepts in great detail, resulting in a sense, for example, that the heart, mind, soul, higher self, and heaven, are separate things. In Aramaic, the sense of division is not so precise and since that is so, how ideas are conveyed are done so in a different way. Instead of the kingdom being in you, the term also means that it is among you, a delineation that it does not create while the Greek can, or does. Further, the concept of God in Greek is a masculine usage while the Aramaic includes aspects of both male and female. You might wonder how this impacts our understanding of the Greek compared to how we might understand the Aramaic. The answer is “plenty.”

In the Greek we have Jesus saying, “I am one with the father.” However, in early documents such as the Nag Hammadi, he is clearly referring to a masculine AND feminine deity when he says “father and mother.” 
While these are strange ideas to most within Christianity, when tracing the message back before the Greek into Aramaic, the use of the feminine in Aramaic actually is consistent with a deity as described originally.

Maybe you are wondering what difference any of this makes. Regardless of the tradition, anyone, and I mean EVERYONE who seeks to describe something that is part of the “higher” realms in spirit, the way that it is done is never to describe it directly. Take your pick: Jesus, Buddha, or anyone else. It has to be described by way of metaphor or parable because there really is no frame of reference except our experience here in the physical. The problem is that all of these weighty things are not physical, so how do we even explain them?

What I mean is that nothing is completely literal in anyone’s descriptions. When Jesus describes the kingdom, there is one word he always uses which is the key to what I mean here. Do you know what this word is? It’s in every parable. This word is “like.” He says, “The kingdom is like….” He doesn’t say that the kingdom is a mustard seed, or a treasure buried in a field. He does this because there is no way to use physical words to describe a nonphysical and multidimensional experience. The same is true for anyone trying to describe spiritual experience. Why any of this matters is that when you change the meaning of a word, you can change the meaning and thus the understanding of important aspects of the teachings as told originally. In many ways the teaching is already handicapped by virtue of its inability to adequately describe what’s in the next world. All of this goes over people’s heads as they envision angels with trumpets perched on fluffy white clouds in a heaven that must certainly be up in the sky.  The kingdom comes, but it comes within and among you. Now think about how the people of the time were expecting a leader to come that would be the king of the Jews. They thought it was coming as a material thing, but Jesus was describing an inner event. 

To help to explain this issue with language a little more it’s good to know more about the language as used. Did you know that Jesus didn’t use the term “hell” in the Bible? “Preposterous! It plainly says so in the Bible!” my friends have said when we discuss this issue. Actually, it says hell in the Bible, but in the koine Greek, he uses the word Gahena. Gahena was a place just outside the city walls and was home to a trash heap. Instead of a place in the afterlife, he was describing something that exists here and now. This Gahena people find themselves in has important ramifications for the teaching, which is that hell is here and now. This Gahena is spiritual poverty of a sort that is right here and right now. If you took the “hell” of the Bible, I bet you were thinking of a place you go when you die if you were bad enough.

To understand how words, even just a few, can change the meaning of a passage in the Bible,  let’s look at a passage in Luke where Jesus is, we assume, talking to Peter after the crucifixion. In the passage, Jesus asks Peter if he loves him. In fact, Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter loves him. Now most Christians explain the purpose of Jesus repeating himself as a reminder to Peter of how he denied knowing Jesus three times when the Romans came for him. 

Except that isn’t what happened at all.

In the Greek Jesus asks Peter if he loves him using three different words for love, all with very different implications. He asks Peter if he loves him “agape” which is divine love. He also uses the term for familial or brotherly love. Lastly, he uses the word “eros.” In each case, Peter answers in the affirmative. Here Jesus is asking Peter if he loves him erotically, like a lover. The breadth of this love is no small love and this is no ordinary person, this Jesus. Normally, we just shrink back in either shame, denial, or disgust, but this passage demands to be understood if we are ever to know the love that is the Christ. Without that understanding, we don’t get the depth of the man nor his teachings. Without this understanding, we are left unable to reach what the Christ is. We fall instead for “Jesus Light” instead of “Jesus the deep.” As my friends would say, we were handed these books by the early church and surely it is the unerring word of God, so there’s nothing more to learn. The truth is, this isn’t true. Hard as it may be to admit to, recent discoveries have led scholars to a radical rethinking of Christology and what was and wasn’t told.

In 1945 the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered, which once translated, represented a radical rethinking of Christianity. Linguist studies have shown that what Orthodoxy called heresy was in fact the earliest teachings, not the Orthodox ones. This of course is scandalous, but points to orthodoxy as an offshoot or interpretation of the original teachings. It also helps to explain why, upon reading these codices, I found that the words written spoke perfectly of my own experience in my awakening. I am not a scholar of the Bible, but an expert in this area is and he claims the codices are describing awakening, or, as the Hindus call it; kundalini. No slouch these texts; they take you right to the garden gate, pulls out the key, and bids you enter. The difference is the cannon doesn’t do that at all. It’s inspiring, but it doesn’t show you what awakening is, which these books do. 
It was this contrast between the books as translated along with my own discovery of the Nag Hammadi that set me on the journey to understanding why a “heresy” just so happened to be describing my deep mystic union with God-dess  perfectly, and poetically. It wasn’t just a matter of style, it was content too.

For these reasons, words are important if we are to hope to capture the depths of what Jesus was teaching. Perhaps more fundamentally, the language used is incredibly important if we are to hope to capture the range of subtlety that is present in these teachings, which gets lost or mangled once we are presented with the translations into Greek.

There is much more to all of this, and in time I will be getting through it. I will show that the Jesus of the Orthodox tradition was stripped of important teachings that would have given new weight and expanded meaning to the reality in which this man dwelled. Now, more than at any time in history, we have more evidence and many more resources than we have ever had.  The result is that there is more to know, and these will be like keys to a gate that we have all been longingly looking at but not fully understanding the implications of. We were meant to open the lock!
Until then, the work continues.

Early Christianity And The Wild One

 

I started a project yesterday that has been nagging at me for years that involves my encounter with early Christian texts and what I have found was an effort to change the teachings of Jesus in order to appeal to a specific group of believers.  While I’d love nothing more than to have a real cloak and dagger story for the sake of excitement, what we have as historical documents is scant.  But the fix was in even during the life of Jesus in terms of who would tell the story of this man’s teachings and what that story was going to look like.  
I know I am going against 1600 years of ingrained belief and programming, but it is a story that deserves to be told.  Jesus was deep into the forces of awakening and taught about them, but either those in power wanted to hide them away, or they simply could not understand what a certain strand of his teachings even meant.  Having said this, those who had these deeper teachings were hunted relentlessly in an effort to not allow these most important of his teachings to see the light of day.  Whether by design or by ignorance, this was the result.  And this, I now know, is a fact.

 

For me, the story begins when I was young and had trouble with the church and its teachings.  For me, my trouble wasn’t as vague as some people’s problems with the church often tend to be.  In my experience, I had this very strange and unexplainable sense that the church had hidden something of great importance from the public. It is this hidden element within Christianity that made all the difference in knowing God intimately, directly. The only problem was I didn’t know why I had this sense growing up.  But like so many people I knew who were church goers or grew up in a family who went to church, something just didn’t add up. 
The story gets interesting when I began looking at early Christian documents that had not been a part of the canon of the church. I did this after a friend  saw a piece of my writing and suggested I look at a certain book because, as he explained, what I had written bore similarities to this early book.  
I was at this time going through a six month period that was for me, the time that I was waking up.  For me, it was a gradual process with a number of steps.  Clearly, I knew something was up and that I was somehow being prepared for something.  What it was, I didn’t really have a clue.  
When I first read those passages in a book that stretched back into antiquity two thousand years, I felt a familiar stirring inside of me and wanted to know more.  It would take going through a full awakening, though, for me to be able to pick out the passages that were clearly talking about awakening.  Scholars, though, described these passages as “strange teachings” and this showed clearly to me that even they didn’t understand what Jesus was getting at.  How could it be, I wondered, that I could see these for what they were and no one else could?  
In writings by a follower of Jesus, a church developed in the second century called the Valentinian church or school. They explained that only those who had attained the light would be able to understand the teachings.  Otherwise, they would seem like strange incomprehensible teachings.  Could it be, I wondered?  How could someone without a deep background in scholarly study of the Bible like me identify what they were talking about was related directly to awakening?  
Because of how the church and our world has evolved, we tend to look to learned authorities for confirmation about what is true or not true.  But these authorities are part of a system of being and thought that is part of the problem, which is of course the same problem that the early church had to begin with when they suppressed the teachings to begin with.

 

At the center of this story is a Wild spirit that if known, brings about revelation, self knowing, secret knowledge, and healing.  This is the story that should have been told.Now that the beginning work has been done, the rest is going to be more scholarly work with research and historical accounts.  Dry stuff for me, but the story is so compelling and so interesting that I think that it will turn into an interesting read once I am done with it.  Finger crossed!
This is ultimately a work of devotion in the hopes that it can help bring a paradigm shift in thinking by placing something wonderful and wild back in a central role in an understanding of the forces of awakening that are  redemptive in nature.

Awakening & The Gospel Of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas, along with the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip,  were key books that I discovered early in my awakening that related to me the body of esoteric knowledge that Jesus taught to his disciples.

These books are so new to modern Christianity that their effects on our thinking are only recently being felt. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices happened in 1945 by a local man living near the town that the codices were named after. The same year the Dead Sea Scrolls were also discovered. The codices, though, were not fully translated and published until the early ’70’s. The differences between these two finds, though could not be greater: the Dead Sea Scrolls were written very much in the Judaic tradition as mystical treatises from a group of people who were the Essenes, while the Nag Hammadi was mystical thought based on what would become a break from the Judaic tradition into new realms of experience.

Reading them for the first time in 2006 was an epiphany for me. Growing up, I always felt that there was more, and that something more was missing from Christianity. I didn’t know what this something more even was, nor did I know why growing up that I had this deeply held sense about how Christianity had been hiding something. Sounds a little crazy, right? As I have read this collection of books that began with Thomas, I felt immediately as though I had found it. Just like any book I could feel where it was “off” or when a distortion was creeping in. When the writing was hitting the bullseye, it felt as though I was reading a buried truth inside of me. I saw how, for as useful as science has been, it had done the exact same thing religion had done; it taught us to pay no heed to our own experience (in this case, an inner reality was reduced to mere chemical signals and with religion, our broken state could not hope to allow us a clear view to divine reality).

The Gospel of Thomas was the first book that began to illuminate as well as unravel both what I was taught and what I suspected deep down was a different story about Christianity. Maybe you, too, have had similar misgivings-like something just doesn’t seem quite right about it? I guess I grew up questioning and found it odd that there was invariably that moment in conversation where the other person would say, “You just have to believe!” I never outgrew that need to question, and consequentially never became a follower of anything…..not a religion or philosophy or “ism.” But as time would tell, it stood me in good stead.

Being introduced to these books was like putting a puzzle piece into place that had long been missing. It came to me by way of a friend who read something I wrote while I was in the “thrall” of the energy I had been feeling in bursts early on before the full-on “rise” of awakening.

I published the writing on a forum in 2006 just months before kundalini rose. The writing was an innocent appraisal of what I was going through and how it was affecting my inner perception and experience at the time. It was written as prose, but it was poetry at its heart. The discovery that I made was when my friend suggested I read the gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammad. I had no familiarity with these books, but found certain passages in Thomas to be identical in content to what I had just written. My friend had said as much, which piqued my curiosity.

The piece I wrote was about how all of nature was suffused with the energy of life force and that this force existed for plants just as it existed for humans; that sexual energy is the interconnecting principle behind all energy, which is creative and connective. Most people never feel this in their baseline experience because the energy is narrowed down so much that they only get a trickle. By sexual energy, I am not talking about sex or active arousal, but rather a steady continuou experience of sexual/sensual energy as a kind of energetic baseline —or bliss, if you prefer.  What I had unknowingly stumbled onto was this baseline experience instead of mere arousal. How can anyone know the creative power inherent in the emanations of spirit and the universe who does not experience it first hand? 

The energy that I felt was sexual, yes, but it was also different in that I noticed that it was opening my mind in a way that I was familiar with as an artist and seeker, but in a different way. It was like a rarefied form of inspiration, maybe like inspiration on steroids. It brought the awareness that I was opening up to a reality that existed in all things and that this was more than mere imagination. I was at work as this experience first poured through me so powerfully, and was like a narrative that hung in the air, waiting for me as I turned my mind back to it through the course of the day. It was almost exactly like putting a book down and picking it back up at the same place later. The sense that “I” alone was creating this had vanished.

Rather than feeling like I was creating this experience, it had an objective quality to it that was co-creative; as if it waited for me to find my own unique way to give it voice. This was a very different kind of experience, and I have written about it before. On that day it was as though I stepped past mere imagination to find that imagination, if you go deep enough into it, becomes a sensory portal where we form images to describe the reality we are experiencing when we are not using our physical senses. It allows you to see beyond yourself (as long as you aren’t wearing  blinders). 

The sense I had was extremely vivid and a little more than “trippy.” It has now become a fixture of my experience, but back then this was a horse of a different color. It was akin to how you awaken from a dream and are able to go back to sleep to finish the dream….except I was awake.

 It was like a truth living in the light. I came upon the first realization that sexuality was an integral part of spiritual energy in an undivided way. I knew, had known, that our sexuality had the capability to allow us deep communion with ourselves and one another, but I simply had not experienced it in the way I was doing so on that crisp October day in 2006. I was moved by sexual energy to see and to feel into a world that seemed like it was a product of imagination only to find that it was a channel, along with imagination, for apprehending the world and reality in a nonphysical, nonsensory way. I was not experiencing this with a person, it was with a matrix or field of energy that interpenetrated everything. It was through the energy that I first began to relate and see in this new way.

I realized that our shame about sexuality was, at least in part, blocking all of us from knowing the light of this knowing. I knew on that day that what made sexual energy dirty was the shame we brought to it. Sexual energy had been poorly understood as a result. 

When I finally sat down to write out the material that had played through my mind that day, I felt a need to note the time. I put it down on the page and began to type. The material poured through me. It was so fast, a part of me was surprised. I noted the time that I ended and put it at the end of the page. Years later, I went back and tried to type the piece again and found that I couldn’t match the speed that it came through. It was entitled The Yearning. 

After having written the piece, I had the first synchronicity occur that was uncanny right after leaving work. I went into town and wound up buying a science magazine that had a story in it that carried the same message in it as my writing. Out of all the magazine’s I could have bought, this one was the most different of all of them, and I had to work to find it because it was hidden behind a card rack in the store. When I looked at its cover, there was no mention of the story that was in it. These personally relevant coincidences would begin to form the basis of so many events in my life once awakening came in full force. Synchronicity happens when we step into the flow of this energy in consciousness, you see. It is part of this new landscape.

The writings of Thomas, which are a collection of quotes that Jesus said, carries no story-line like the mainstream Gospels do, but instead is a collection of sayings with no apparent personal commentary by Thomas. The book is laden with an understanding of awakening and relays this in the same way Jesus taught the masses, which was through a nonliteral language of parable and analogy. The reason for this is because Jesus was seeking to relay a nonphysical reality to minds who knew nothing but physical reality.  You can’t do this in a literal way and expect anyone to understand you.

Photograph of a page from The Gospel Of Thomas

The key here in ALL of his teachings is his use of the word “like” which is in nearly every parable: he does not say the kingdom is a mustard seed, he says it is like a mustard seed. This type of discourse assumes that you will look inward for the details, for the truth. It is a means of getting us to look inward to find our own inner mustard seed, to understand how something so small and so hidden can grow and unfold into something so large.

(17) “I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched and what has never occurred to the human mind.”

This quote lies at the heart of the deeper esoteric teachings of Jesus, which was that this information could not be properly known through physical means or the senses. It was a reality that Jesus knew and sought to convey. More than just a structure for doing good, it was the essence of spiritual knowledge, of inner discovery. 

“Jesus said to them, “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 the female, 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 the place of a likeness; then you will enter the kingdom.”

What Jesus is saying is that when the opposites within our nature are brought into unity, awakening comes. For Jesus, the kingdom was the word he used to describe this state of being. 
If this sounds the least bit familiar to those who know and experience kundalini, it is because it is. Some suggest that these teaching borrow from other esoteric traditions. Anyone who has experienced kundalini can likely tell you that when it happens to you, you don’t need a tradition to explain it. You know. So it is natural for anyone who caught on and achieved awakening to describe it in roughly similar ways as another culture or tradition did is because it’s the same experience being described. You will never get awakening through a description, you will get it because you found it inside of you. 

The awakening of kundalini is a merging of the seeming opposite forces in awareness, symbolized in the Hindu tradition as the two serpents that rise up through the body and awareness to merge into one another in an experience of blissful union that awakens, redeems, and saves us from being, as the Gnostic texts convey, “dead.” And life before awakening is like this-we thought we lived until we awoke and then REALLY knew what being alive was all about!

The idea of this fusion of opposites shows up throughout the teachings of Jesus in the Nag Hammadi. It is told in different ways, but it’s the nonliteral language Jesus is using that urges us to look within ourselves for the answer.

(48) “Jesus said, “If two make peace with each other in this one house, they will say to the mountain, “Move away,” and it will move away.”

The clue is in both context and the use of “two” in his teaching. The two are not two physical people. If you take it literally, you lose what he is trying to teach, which is much deeper. He is saying that when you make peace with the two forces in your awareness, the male and female, or in the Hindu tradition, the Shakti and Shiva, in your body (or house), you will attain the powers that come because of it. 
Jesus is not being literal; the two are living in the house that is the body. When they make peace, or move into union with one another, you can think of something and it happens. The mountain does not literally move, he is just saying that the seemingly impossible now becomes possible. For anyone who has experienced awakening, you know just what I mean. Again, synchronicity lies at the heart of this. 

Another key to this is also how Jesus uses the concept of being divided. When you are divided enough within, awakening is not possible. But when you are no longer divided, a process takes hold that is the very essence of what we talk about and experience in awakening. One of these keywords experiences is that of feeling as though we are being taken apart by this force, that it leaves us irretrievably changed. The accounts of this are too numerous to mention in the Nag Hammadi Library (where Thomas is found). So we have Jesus speaking directly to this experience again in Thomas where he states that, “Therefore I say, if he is destroyed he will be filled with light, but if he is divided, he will be filled with darkness.” 

Most every awakening is accompanied by a brilliant flash of light. The encounter of this light is the same light experienced upon bodily death, but those who were on to the esoteric teachings of Jesus could experience this light while still alive, an encounter that always leaves the person forever changed.
If you see what happens to people who have had near death experiences, they are all similarly changed by it; accounts almost always involve the person feeling as though they have to live their lives in a more purposeful and compassionate way than before. Additionally, people who have had a NDE will often have kundalini awakening and if not a rise of the energy, return with similar abilities as those who have awakened without an NDE. This is due to what the encounter with the light does, or initiates in us as real soulful change. It was so important that Jesus taught almost exclusively about it. What these teachings share with other traditions is the concept of a unified self as the means to know God, Cosmic Consciousness. I will remind my readers that the whole purpose of yoga is to bring body and mind into unity in order to prepare for awakening. The word yoga means union.

The question at the forefront of your mind might be, “If this is true, why doesn’t it come through more clearly in the canonical Gospels?” It is a fair question, and it’s due in part, I observe, as a result of the early versions of the  Gospels that were making their first rounds during the third century AD. These books have many of the same words in them, but a  different understanding was now in place. For example, when Jesus mentions adultery, people think he is talking against cheating on your spouse. But clearly in the Gospel of Mary our adultery is sinning against out own nature; we turn away from that part in ourselves that could save us. This is but one example of the differences in understanding that took place at the time. The documents, as written, reflect that level of understanding as a result.

These were books selected by a group of people who all thought the same way. That is, they were literalists, and the nuances of Jesus’s spoken word was lost on them. They thus favored books that conveyed a certain literalist depth to them. Everything else sounded like nonsensical gobbledygook to them. So naturally, anything that bid them to dig deep within was quickly rejected, and Thomas, along with a lot of the Nag Hammadi Library, is deep. They labelled it heresy because it did not agree with the collection of books that conveyed what I call Christianity Lite. 

I know this sounds dismissive, but it isn’t. It’s what my journey has shown me is true. If you like this form of Christianity, I think it’s fine, but don’t expect it to be a means to bring you to a full-on transcendent encounter with the cosmic  It simply lacks the important central teachings for sparking the requisite awareness and willingness to approach it differently for that to happen. Too much is missing from the road map! Besides, there are passages in the Bible that exhort followers not to fall prey to conjurer’s and magicians. They effectively sealed the library shut, denying anyone the hope of finding the keys to awaken. If this sounds bad, bear in mind that this was the exact same observation Jesus was making about the Pharisees when he was alive. The key unlocks all of us regardless of religion, but the key has been surrounded by fear of losing ones eternal soul. What a fine state! But the story has stuck along with a particilar understanding of the teachings, and the victor was Rome, so the church in Rome set the pace and the kind of story that would be told.

The history is not ambiguous on this. Rome became the center for Christianity based on the superior resources found there. But Rome was not the defacto center in the beginning. In fact, there was a very real vying for this designation in the beginning. Constantinople was one such early center, and there were also ministries that sprang up in the wake of the work that the disciples did early on in those areas. The gift of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi was a result, most likely, of a church that was nearby.   It is likely that there was ongoing activity long before the structure was even built. 

Rome became the center because of power, influence, money, scribal resources, and the will to become that center. The church also had the support of the Roman empire behind it. The church could decree any teachings it believed stood outside what they believed was the core messages as anathema, which they did, landing any heretic in jail or losing his or her life. The church could simply remand a person to the Roman authorities for punishment in much the same way certain Jews were said to have demanded punishment of Jesus before Pilate.

This is not the only force that served to so change the story of Jesus’s teachings. 
There are scribal errors. Some, most in fact, are so mild that they don’t change the meaning of what is being conveyed. There are tens of thousands of these types of errors that are found in the books, and they are easy to find by simply comparing all of the oldest copies of the same books with others of its kind. But there are more substantive errors that take place, and they are less numerous but they tend to be far more significant. These often take the form of translational errors. 

The Gospels were written mostly in Greek and later translated to Latin. This is how a passage in Luke has Jesus asking Peter three times if he loves him, totally missing the mark meaning-wise from what was said in the Greek version.

Jesus has Peter over to his house for breakfast and he turns to Peter asking him three times if Peter loves him. Peter says that he does love Jesus each time he is asked. 
On the face of it, it doesn’t make sense why Jesus would do this. He just keeps repeating himself. This encounter happened we think after the crucifixion, so Christians have explained this by saying that Jesus was doing this to remind Peter that he had denied knowing Jesus three times when Jesus was arrested and later crucified. And it all makes a kind of sense, except that isn’t what Jesus was asking Peter at all.

Instead, in the Greek, Jesus asks Peter if he loves him agape, which is the form of love one has for, and with, God. Then Jesus uses the word philos, which is the familial form of love one has. Think of it as brotherly love. Jesus then asks him if he feels eros, which is erotic, sexual love. Peter answers in the affirmative each time. 

Do you see how different this story is now? Instead of “going there” and shaming Peter for denouncing him, he is instead asking him if he loves him without reservation, without any boundaries as pertains to social propriety. Jesus wanted to know how full and complete Peter’s love was. Now imagine “eros” being translated into the King James’s Version! That was because the image which those in the early church chose was not the real Jesus. The accounts of Jesus thus followed the narrative the early church fathers wanted, which was a nonsexually, non-erotic Jesus. In this particular case, I think it was quite possible that the error in translation may have been intentional. It is why I view this passage as being intentionally mistranslated; having Jesus speaking of sexual love didn’t fit their narrative, but it fit another story when not translated completely, thus giving the passage a very different spin.

The other problematic side to this which I haven’t gotten into is the fact that Jesus spoke middle Aramaic, which is a highly contextual language. This means you need to know the context a word is given in order to discern it’s meaning. Since all of the Gospels, we assume, were first written in Greek (“koin” Greek), we are all one step removed from the nuances wording Jesus was giving in his teachings. The elephant in the room though is that if someone did not understand what was being said, a different story might be told. This is a small but important point.

Imagine the scene: Jesus walks into the kitchens of Levi and says, “That is a very cool oven, Levi! How do you cook with it?” Levi later says to his friends, “Jesus cannot understand how I cook with an oven which has no fire…” In truth, Jesus was saying that he thought Levi’s oven was really great and could he show Jesus how he cooks with it? I know that sounds silly, but it’s very likely this has happened about central concepts about Jesus’s divinity, our relationship to that divinity, and the path to salvation. Actually, these small errors make for big missunderstandings!

Most people assume that the Gospels were written by the disciples, but many of the disciples were illiterate and the canonical Gospels have very sophisticated writing structure. They were first told, then copied. There were different versions of the same document in existence (such as two copies of Matthew, one purported to be for the masses while another for the more initiated). Scholars can also see how a Gospel will abruptly have a different writing style, which suggests a different writer. Most readers never even catch the difference though.

 Through translational errors as well as picking the versions of books that spoke more to the people’s own sensibilities who came three hundred years after Jesus, this likely became the force that defined our understanding of Jesus as the man we think we know. 

Then, it was quite easy to fold our arms and say, “For the Bible tells me so!” Except that this isn’t so because there is a problem with that Bible.

We now have books that were hidden away for over 1600 years that had been thought to be extinct. The fabled Gospel of Thomas was decried a myth by the church (even though it was mentioned in the writings of some well known people at the time) until a copy of it emerged having been discovered in the desert of Egypt in 1945. Along with it came a trove of over 40 books all bound in leather folio’s, the contents of which have caused scholars to rethink Christianity in a radicaly new way. 

It would be a different story if the books made no sense at all, but instead the teachings are extremely deep, so deep that gnostic scholars admit that they have trouble understanding them.
They don’t understand them because these books are a treasure of esoteric teachings, the marrow of how to find God, how to know the self, to know about the twin forces within awareness that Jesus says many times in different books as his being “One with the father and mother.” This only sounds strange to someone who has no experience with awakening. Thus, the books in the Nag Hammadi have this as a consistent theme. Yes, there is mention of God the father, some writing in the NHL uses this term exclusively to describe the masculine aspect. But it also focuses on the feminine aspect exclusively too, (Pistis Sophia) so there you go. These “new” themes are difficult for scholars to understand because they themselves do not know or already taste the nature of the experience. 
It’s hard to pull back the veil when you don’t know a veil is even there.
 
To better understand the rift that occurred in the early church and how heresy was the origin of Christianity (as defined by the church in Rome), you have to read the history on all of this. You won’t find the whole history within the church because the church had its mind made up 1600 years ago and it hasn’t changed much since Instead, you have to pick up scholarly analysis to begin to see the additional materials that help to clarify the issue more.

Works by Bart Ehrman, while criticized by the church, are some of the best examples for understanding the Bible as it was instead of how it has been made to look. He does this by examining the facts. He draws on scholarly research instead of faith.
Even in his own work, there seems to be something missing, which is the gap between the esoteric works and the exoteric (canonical Gospels). Somewhere between the death of Jesus and the birth of the church under emperor Constantine, there was a dividing of the way in understanding. Somewhere, books were radically changed. Perhaps this was done piece-meal, changes that took place as the result of people hearing the stories and having only a limited understanding,and then writing them down.  What we know is that the Gospels, most of them, were not written by their authors. We know this because of how they are written. They often use the name of the writer as having said what the book contains instead of the writer using the correct  form of person if they were writing it; “These were the words that Jesus told Luke” instead of, “These were the words that Jesus told to me, Luke.” Even in Thomas the same form is suggested in the first sentence:. “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.” In the case of Thomas, the sayings were without narrative, so it was easier to simply copy them as they were. Scribal errors were reduced with the document  because it had been written and then buried for 1600 years. But this book was copied many times even as the other Gospels were.We do not have another copy of Thomas with which to compare. We do know that some of the sayings found in Thomas were found carved in a building in India, a country, not coincidentally, that Thomas was said to have been encouraged to go to spread the teachings.

(5)Jesus said, “Recognize what is in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you. For there is nothing hidden which will become manifest.”

The process of awakening is one where you increasingly learn to see things as they are. When you are able to pierce the fog of your belief and inner bias, events will look vastly different to you. You will also attain secret knowledge, which is referred to as “gnosis” and that those who did know were the “gnosticoi.” While writing this piece I had a comment made on another earlier post where a reader, herself awakened, described how she could discern answers to problems, any problem by sitting down, getting quiet, and ‘listening’ inwardly for the answer…. which, she added, always comes. So that is an example of what I mean by “secret” knowledge.

The act of merging the opposites within is what keeps us from being “one-sided” or stuck in one mode (masculine/rational) of thinking. It is when we merge them and find union within that the energy rises and we are saved from death.

The “rising” is mentioned in Philip, and it’s quite remarkable. He explains we must attain this while alive now if we are to live a fuller life. He suggests in his explanation of it that simply waiting to find it when we die wont do it; doing it here is important. He uses the term rising in the flesh. He also explains that the concept of resurrection was wrong. We do not die and come to life, but we are as though dead and come into a larger spiritual life, becoming more alive. I highly suspect that even in his lifetime Philip was seeing a corruption of the teachings by people thinking Jesus would come back to resurrect them, which is a distortion that shows up in the canonical Gospels such as in Revelation where Jesus comes in glory to raise up the dead and judge them too. This is how the fairy tale that is the rapture came to be I think. But Philip explains, no, this is a rebirth, a resurrection of the self in flesh as though it had been dead. This is not a literal physical death. This is a death of soul, of awareness of ones true potential.

This concept of those who are “dead” are found through both Thomas as well as Philip. It is clear that Jesus is playing with words to make an important point. It is also word usage that befuddles scholars. “The dead are not living and the living do not die.”

Those who are not awakened are like someone who is dead; they do not live the fuller life that awakening, or the kingdom affords them. The living do not taste death because the gnosis which they attain upon awakening shows them that they are more than flesh and bone and that the universe is a living breathing subtle presence that supports this new life by way of the Creator who is both masculine and feninine. It is by joining the two in yourself that you live in the same way as the deity does. This is why it brings gnosis of the deity; the twin forces that are in you are present in the deity. This becomes the way to know this larger life.

The difference between canon and the Nag Hammadi is the role Christ plays. In canon, you seek the Christ as Jesus to be saved by him. In the Nag Hammadi, the Christ is found within. You already have the capacity to BE a Christ. The idea that anyone could be a Christ right along with Jesus was an anametha to the church and could land you in jail, and you could lose your life.

The clues to all of this is in knowing that the sayings were meant to stir your own knowing. It’s there for you to know. When you do know, you will begin to see what is being said. While the vocabulary might be different from Vedic teachings about the rising of kundalini, and while they may vary based on aporoach and their details, they both are speaking about the same exact thing. This teaching is the same as found in other non-abrahamic religions or philosophies.

The sad part is that this was weeded out in the beginning as “heresy” when in fact it contains the esoteric teachings that Jesus conveyed to his disciples because, as Jesus explains, the masses are not able to understand his deeper teachings even though they are present in every single parable. He also points out to Peter in the same sentence that even though Jesus speaks plainly to Peter that even he does not understand.

This is a tall order for us, then, to understand these teachings. Perhaps the difference in content may have been due to the differences amongst the disciples themselves, with small differences equalling substantive differences in what they each understood the teachings to mean. Even in the letter of Peter to Philip, Peter describes Philip as standing or keeping himself “separate” from the rest of the disciples. Could it have been that Philip found himself at odds with the rest of the group in his understanding of the teachings? 

I won’t pretend that the Nag Hammadi is without fault, though. While it has those parts that seem to lift off the page, it also contains a lot of what I would expect from a culture of the time as being highly resistant to the feminine principle having equality amongst the masculine. This is no more evident than in the creation story that was written by this group of people. In it, the error in the world came about by the feminine principle seeking to create a world on her own, which results on a demiurge that then sows all kinds of havoc in the world. It seems women just can’t get an even break! But you can see how the bias is there and results in a prejudice against this force, which we all have in ourselves. But luckily, the truth is there inside you, you need only knock and the door will be opened.

When I awoke, I became aware by meditating and focusing on the energy that this thing felt like the embrace of a man and woman. I called it that. I also found that the i focused on their embrace that I could begin to feel a third presence emerge from them. I called this “the child.” I didn’t know that this was kundalini, I simply knew what I felt. What I did not know was that this was the same result as the early Christians had and were describing. In fact, they used the image of the bridal chamber to explain the sexual bliss that existed in the experience of this union. The Christ was the one who emerged from this bridal chamber called the “nymphion.” Boom.

It was in reading these words that it all came  together for me; the union of the inner man and woman producing the child, which for me was a transcendent awareness that unleashed my mind and brought “secret knowledge” was the same thing Jesus and his followers had described. It was also an idea the later Christians who devolved away from and could not stand the idea of their god-man as being sexual in any way. This also meant that the teachings of Christianity did not offer the teachings which, despite their prudishness, would have actually saved them and redirected them into a new life.

It was a big “WOW” moment for me to say the least. This was the origin of the Trinity, and the takeaway here was that the Holy Ghost was the missing link, the feminine aspect that if understood, could have jump-started a revolution in being here on earth. 

In recent posts on how to release trauma, you can perhaps understand why I stress why it’s so important to release trauma or emotional material from the past. It is because it serves to divide you and keeps your insides turning away from the trigger that brings awakening.

This is not just achieved by dealing with emotional material in a more or less direct fashion, it can also be achieved by way of somatic release exercises which recognizes that emotion is stored in the body and can be released through body movement without having to reexperience trauma, but simply to face and acknowledge the emotion. This is at the core of pranayama yoga as well as chi gong, just to name a few. This has, though, the result of releasing what divides you and as such, will lead to awakening when enough of the right material is healed or released. It isn’t for the elect, it is who each of us are regardless of class or religion. It goes way deeper than that.

The teachings found in Thomas might speak to you as they spoke to me and others. For me, it was through Thomas that I knew someone besides me had experienced this before. Philip explained that Jesus was trying to get his disciples to be Christ’s. This happens when the two merge deeply into each other and remain so from then on. This is the consumation of Augustine, the divine marriage of the alchemists, and the Bridal Chamber. It is cosmic consciousness of the Hindu, exemplified in the merging of the yoni and lingam, the Tor of the Druids in England, and cosmic mind of the Zen Buddhists.
Critics of these writings seem to say that the writings in the NHL are of eastern lineage and are not aligned to Christian thinking. I rather think that the truths espoused in all of these traditions or strands of thought arise from direct experience of a spiritual reality that is common to us all. I was able to describe my own experience without the aid of a tradition. Further, I was led to writings that had passages nearly identical to what I had written. 
What I did was no different than what anyone else has done who could witness their own awakening. It isn’t that the early Christians were  a “Gnostic” group, it was that they had insight that led them to describe what all other esoteric traditions have done for ages, with the descriptions illuminating a condition, or state, or structure to consciousness that is common to all of us. What the critics do not get is that this experience is often so clear and vivid that those describing it as the union of opposites are describing it as it is. No tradition needs to tell you what’s happening because you feel the energy rise, you feel the physiological and neurological reaction to the energy as serpentine, and you experience the rush as it pierces the chakras and opens you even further for the universal awareness to move through you.  I described it on my own in exactly the same way that the early Christians had-which was the truth of the Trinity.

All of this amazing stuff is in you, and is the source of all that I write about. I hope that you might find this so that you can walk in this new life which is the real “resurrection and the life.”

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 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.