In The Shadow Of The Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dreamer

What a night.  I was up late because I fell asleep, but then awoke, momentarily refreshed and unable to call on the deep trance of dream.  Caught between, my mind was a flurry of waking dream images, a vast rumination running on autopilot. Like a psychedelic trip without the disorientation.

---

 

The Line

Dissolved

Between here

And there

Sleep

And waking

Dream and dreamlessness….

 

This dissolves

It’s a solvent

ripping apart

taking down

those boundaries,

setting in place

A poetry of soul

Self

And bone…

 

So many weep,

holding the remnant masks

grieving

For a nothingness

that came from itself

And dissolves back to its origins.

 

Rejoicing,

The soul rises

to its paradise

lying folded between the leaves

of lost pages

unknown

unseen

until the boundaries fall away

the mountains,

the walls,

the illusory beliefs…

as the book blooms

into a world of sweetened scent

and wonder

for the hidden

now revealed.

 

Your images fleeted through me

(she lay cuddled over him arms tucked in)

The words and sounds

Both of laughter

(She sits up, taking him in)

And wonderment,

Secrets only you knew

(Like a radio star; she received in pulses so fast)

Fleeted through an emptied house…

(Uncertain and dizzy with desire)

as images emerged,

Like a full-on psychedelic experience

Driven by dream

(And desire)

Focused through waking.

 

Strangers moved

Indexed

Stored

Released

As my mind

Balanced between worlds

Watched in wonder

As it all slipped through

My hands

like a great rushing stream.

 

My mind does not know what it means

Nor always to whom it belongs

It all becomes

Noise…

A flurry of images

From personal lives

The soul

Linked into realms of light.

I listened as I heard the peculiarly loud vocalization last night

that sitting here now,

I hear the man next to me chirping out

exactly as it had come

in a time that came backwards

from the way it usually comes.

 

What secrets do any of us think we hold in worlds such as this?

 

But for purposes

I wonder

The chaos of our world

Slipping through the radio of my mind

As the daily broadcast is ruminated

By minds other than my own

As my own can only guess

At the glue that holds them together.

 

The desire

The greatest one

Is what holds it all together

Even as none of it makes sense sometimes.

Sometimes it all just comes so fast

So furiously

Meaning meant for another self inside

While the mind just cannot grasp

Nor should it,

I think.

 

It is what it is

Assigning importance

Robs it of its reality

 

All our masks are lost

I think

To the deep river of time,

and as they do

you too will see as I have seen

as the veil thins

not between worlds

but in the world of the self

which sees all worlds.

Dreaming Awake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until then……sweet dreams.

In Dreams…

This idea of dreaming is near and dear to me.  It is near and dear to me because along with a spiritual journey since age nine, I have been fascinated with dreaming and what this very significant amount of time we spend each day is used for.  I have also been fascinated with dreaming because I have had what I consider to be quite fascinating events take place within my dreams and I am also brave enough to simply tell you what I have found and also what I think as part of a CONSIDERED opinion (which stands apart from an opinion that may not be based on significant evaluation of ones own dreaming).  I also like dreaming because its MINE. It is my own landscape, my own stuff. I get to go into the temple of my OWN dreaming and no one else’s.  I can explore and discover and learn.  I have spent years studying my own dreams, by the way, so I know a few things about it that are not in the mainstream and bear mentioning….

The thing I think that is so great about understanding dreams is that we each have the opportunity to be experts with our own dreamscapes.  Since we each dream, just as we live a life, we ourselves can learn a lot from our dreams. I did this by keeping a dream journal starting in high school until I was married, which was a period of approximately ten years.  We want, though, to wait on what others have had to say about dreams in order to understand them, but even the supposed experts haven’t been that great at coming up with a theory that works for how and why we dream.  Freud said dreams were unfulfilled wishes.  Excuse me, but my dreams have had healing elements, points of resolution, I have had what appear to be out of body experiences, and I have also had dreams that have clearly shown the future.  So if the supposed “experts” can be so off on all of this, it stands to reason that our own observations might well be a little more helpful in helping to progress our understanding of dreaming.  Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of fascinating information out there from REM being a way to nourish the cornea with oxygen, to dreams being an expression of unexpressed wishes and desires (thanks Sigmund). It is all sounds very nice, I just think it is woefully incomplete.

It’s probably a problem of clarity, though, why we have so much trouble being able to figure out what dreaming is….. for the simple reason, most likely, that WHY we dream is so broad that any one theory will have trouble containing it all in a neat tidy way that will make a scientist feel good about his or her work and reason for being. It is a bit like asking me what the purpose of LIFE is.  Do you have a few days to have a seat and talk about it?  really, I don’t think you can sum it up in a few sentences, and if you do, it will probably be so hopelessly simplified as to bear very little meaning.   So having said that, I am going to tell you a few things about my own experience in the same way that a tourist might come back and show you a few pictures of a trip, say, to Tuscany, or Greece, or Neptune, or somewhere near the Dog star….

One thing I can tell you is that dreams can be precognitive.  Not maybe, but certainly.  Not only that, but my dreams have not only been clearly precognitive, they have also shown a most interesting phenomenon that an old friend named Rodney called “periodicity” when I walked into my Wednesday night jam session and explained how I had uncovered something incredible about my precognitive dreams. What you should first know is that I have had these precognitive dreams my whole life and second that they have been very detailed so as to eliminate any guesswork over whether they were just a lucky guess or actually seeing “remotely” the events that would take place later.  What I had uncovered in my journal work was a very distinct pattern in my dreams that all showed precognitive elements.  This phenomenon showed that my precognitive dreams all took place on very specific days, and this was tied to the lunar cycle.  Now for some, this might sound a little crazy, but to a scientist, this suggests other forces at work.  What those are, I don’t know, but in the same way that the moon has an effect on tides, it apparently has an effect on seeing the future as well….and as a result may well help us to better understand HOW to bridge the gap between now and the future.  For those who aren’t sure what precognition is, it’s simply being able to anticipate future events. Now I know that for some, such a thing seem preposterous and flies in the face of everything we think we know about time and space.  Well, clearly, we don’t know everything there is to know about time and space or else I would not be going around having these dreams about the future!

But so you can appreciate what I am talking about, let me give you a few examples of my precognitive dreams.  When I was a pre-teen I dreamed that my neighbor was pregnant with twins and that these twins were born and had blonde hair.  The twins were a boy and a girl in the dream. Now the thing to realize is that the mom and dad were both very dark-haired people.  The father had this jet black hair without a hint of gray in it and the mother had chestnut colored hair.  At the time of the dream, there had been no talk about their having children.  They were without children at the time of the dream that I had.  In just a few months, I did find out that the mother was expecting and while I did not pay much heed to the dream, I found that she gave birth to twins who grew up to be blonde, both of them, which was itself a bit odd since there was so much dark hair in the family.  Skip forward in time to 1985 when I have a dream that I am floating above the earth and witness an explosion at a facility in Russia.  I hear the voice of a t.v. anchor narrating the events taking place. He says that there was an explosion over Russia that sent a plume of radioactive gasses into the atmosphere.  I watch as I see a white cloud rise and spread.  This cloud spread to Europe and rained down as radioactive snow.  I watched as people were herded onto freight trains in order to get them out of the area quickly. I saw an odometer type device that was showing the current count of the number of people who had been evacuated from the area.  At the time of the dream I saw a number around 80,000 as it continued to climb.

At the time of this dream, I was more focused on the out of body aspects of the experience, which involved me flying over the earth and walking across a bridge that floated in the sky.  The experience with the  news broadcast began after I observed that the entire scene turned to snow or static and was replaced by a new scene.    At the time, though, I described the entire dream to my roommate, Joe, who in three weeks called me into the living room to watch a news broadcast about an explosion over Russia in the area now known by the world as Chernobyl.  Each element in the dream was exactly as the Chernobyl event several weeks later.  There was a radioactive explosion (not a leak—this was an explosion that sent a cloud up into the atmosphere). This cloud menaced Europe in the dream, which did happen in the Chernobyl event.  People were herded quickly onto freight cars both in the dream and in real life as a way to get them quickly out of the area.  The count I had seen was over 80,000 had been evacuated, which suggested this was a city or town area.  When Joe called me in as he sat amazed at the news report, they said during that report that as many as 80,000 people had already been evacuated from the area.

These are the kinds of dreams that I have had over my life.  They have been specific enough in the ways I have explained to you to be more than merely plucking a good guess out of the air.  The level of corollaries between the dream and the events usually within a month of the dream, have been extraordinarily good in my view.

Now I know what some people have said to me about this in the past, which have been along the lines of “Well, Parker, its easy for YOU to have dreams like this, but you aren’t LIKE other people…”  and to this I have to carefully explain that in each person’s life there is some evidence for unexplained phenomenon.  Maybe you don’t have dreams that came true, but perhaps you find yourself thinking about someone and find that they were mentioning you at the exact same time, or perhaps you get a feeling of foreboding only to find that at the same time a loved one was involved in an accident.  Perhaps you experience this in dream, or waking, or both.  You see, to my mind, dream and waking are all part of life and both serve important roles in our lives. Me, I just don’t ascribe to dreams just being random firings of the brain as it sifts through the days’ material.  I know that dreams are therapeutic, quite literally releasing trauma from the past, working through issues within the emotional landscape as well as deeper soulful issues.  I also know that dreams are a kind of window into other dimensions, dimensions we travel to by traveling not through space but through our own awareness.  You see, we ARE the window to other worlds and that window CAN be found by expanding consciousness.  It is curious that in dream we do the same things as those who meditate and are able to let the ego go in order to experience cosmic consciousness.  The cool thing is that ego is dispensed with the same way you take off a pair of socks or pants as you get ready to go to bed.  In fact, you can’t really do most of your dreaming with ego still all around you.  But when you let go of ego, some quite remarkable things begin to happen.

Now as an aside I will explain why I am talking about ego. I mean, how on earth do I KNOW that we let go of ego when we dream?  My work during my awakening of kundalini has shown me quite clearly that the concept of “ego death” (a term I absolutely dislike for how incorrect it is) goes hand in hand with being able to experience similar KINDS of things while still awake that the mind does -normally- when asleep.  I have also observed how ego has been lain aside while awake in order for certain dream-like phenomenon to arise much like what some people do in meditation or in shamanic practice.  The main feature of doing this is that you are more free to tap larger portions of awareness that naturally get filtered out by the controlling agent called ego.  To show what I mean, perhaps you can remember starting to dream and then realizing that you are dreaming.  What happens when you do this?  In my experience I always stop dreaming.  I have become self conscious.  I have suddenly taken on ego as “I” identifies that “I” am dreaming.  Ego and dreaming don’t work together.  You need to have a loosening of the ego in order for the part of you that can create those dreams to operate properly.  Part of it has to constructing a kind of creative scaffolding where your imagery can spread out and play. This play, though can be mulling feelings over, venting, thinking, hallucinating, seeing the future, and traveling out of body (OOBE) somewhere quite interesting.

The ego can be quite the wet blanket, you see.  It’s a very useful thing, but you have to learn how to put ego aside so you can begin to experience the broader realm of your being.  I promise you that ego limits you absolutely.  And this is, of course, why I LOVED dream so much.  It let me go ego-less during a time when I was simply not yet ready for this thing called ego death (which I experienced during my awakening process).

But this isn’t about seeing the future.  Not really.  I am using seeing the future as an example of what CAN be done.  I figure if I can show you some rather fantastic examples of what has happened to me, you might just realize that you too have the same opportunities.  (Jesus said something about others doing even greater things than he did….) Granted, you might not be so keen about time travel.  Maybe for you its something else, like experiencing the effects of shifting from one brain state to another while “awake” in the dream state.  Clearly the static I saw in the dream of Chernobyl where once scene shifted into another was itself the shifting from one brain state to another.  I have actually been able to fool my brain into thinking I am asleep when I am actually awake and the exact same thing will happen, and I am able to observe it while I am awake and it is VERY much like a wall of static filling the view and my body and I simply vibrate into a different state and scene. It is, I do think, a way for the brain to travel dimensionally by changing its own energetic signature via its brainwaves. it turns out that this technique has been used for thousands of years by Tibetan monks and is a way for them to dream awake, or to have lucid dreams while being fully awake instead of asleep. You might think that dream and waking are fundamentally different, but I am telling you that you can and will break down the barriers between waking and sleeping when you begin to become more inclusive or broader in your awareness of these different states of being.  And don’t worry; all will not be chaos.  Instead, what will emerge is a sense of unity of awareness.  You simply wont see dream as some strange land anymore.  It will be understood as a very useful tool for relaxing, sleeping, as well as having all sorts of adventures both fictional and nonfictional.

Dreaming can be a way to expand your own energetic signature and mobility of consciousness.  The more aware you are of what you do in dreams and HOW you FEEL in dreams can lead to being able to relate to certain energetic states that correspond to deep shifts in consciousness within those dreams.  If you can learn how to FEEL the way you FEEL in a dream, you are actually that much closer to being able to experience an expanded state of awareness while awake.  You don’t need mantras, you simply have to remember.  The more you do, the more likely you are to see the phenomenon in a dream begin to make its entrance into waking.

I recently read a comment someone made about dreaming and meditation and the person described meditating as a form of self-hypnosis.  The sense I got from the commenter was that this was somehow bad or not desirable.  But really, the vast amount of self-improvement that we do, whether in meditation or in the therapists office is actually attributed to hypnosis.  What many people don’t fully realize is that MOST hypnosis today is done while the subjects are completely awake. Hypnosis might work at deeper levels of the self if you are put into a deep state of relaxation (the “trance” as it is called) but everyone in the psychiatric field knows that this is by no means a requirement. So anytime you want to change, you simply make he suggestion to yourself that you want the change.  That is the nature of suggestion.  You can go into a deep state of relaxation, you can even make hypnotic suggestions as you lie down to sleep that you will use the dream state to do lucid work in that dream.  This is much like I did when I experienced Quetzalcoatl in dream work from the same year that I had the Chernobyl dream (1985).  In THAT dream, I was attempting to use the dream state as a way to springboard into an OOBE. The technique I used worked really well, and that technique was as simple as a suggestion I made prior to falling asleep.  You can read that entry HERE.

As an aside, my observation about out of body experiences (OOBE’s) is that they can allow you to experience broader states of awareness than you might otherwise.  In some ways, it can be a catalyst for greater change because it seems to me that once free from the body to a great degree, the experience of energy is so much larger, or broader.  The reason for this, I sense, is that the consciousness is not so tied to the body.  The body itself, not just the brain, is a series of blocks of an emotional nature that inhibit the flow of prana or universal consciousness.  When these channels are cleared sufficiently, there can be a powerful flow of energy released which the Hindu call Kundalini and what we often simply call “awakening.”

To some, this is kind of the holy grail of inner work since kundalini acts as an accelerating catalyst for inner change. This is nothing more than life force now flowing in abundance, but the effect this prana or life force has on you is that it stirs every inch of you and if you surrender you feel freedom and bliss and if you hold on, you feel paranoia and pain.  The stirring, though, is the stirring of the old blocks that reside in your body.  When these blocks are cleared, you experience the moment differently than before. Think of it as a kind of cosmic tune up that involves releasing lifetimes of pent up karma that has been recorded in your light body and is stored in your physical body.  It is itself a powerful process and can be akin to riding a roller coaster; you get on and there is no getting off until the ride is through.  But I suspect based on my own experience is that OOBE’s can provide the same unlimited flow of energy as in awakening without bringing it into the body.  This could have some advantages.  It COULD be used to gradually acquaint you with what its like to have this kind of energy flowing through you, to overcome what seems to be some anxiety or fear of such incredible flows of energy coming in and learn how to cope with it.  Now I say this based on my own experience with the out of body state, which was nothing short of a grand face to face experience with significant amounts of energy.  And where there is energy, there is consciousness.  That means your consciousness will expand. That sounds a bit like some of the goals of meditation, right? Find out who you are, what you are, what you are capable of?  Your birthright, right?

There are many ways to reach what it is you are looking for.  We are all in some way looking for it, even when it seems dysfunctional.  The thing we seek is what this prana force is.  It is love. I will just tell you now and get it over with because in time, if you clear the way, you will feel it so utterly that it will be entirely obvious.  But when that day comes, you will know this love less as a thing you feel for someone as it is a force as gravity and the wind are forces in nature.  It might be hard to imagine how love might be a force like that, but it is.  When you clear the way then you will feel love in all of its different dimensions or aspects.  And this is good because in doing meditation work based on curiosity about what you are, you discover the most beautiful thing about yourself. And that is a whole lot of good!

The Coming of Quetzalcoatl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the  Codex Telleriano-Remensis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update:  8/20/2012

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

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