It’s Worth It

I wish I could tell you about what I feel. There are no words to contain this. I do try, though. My being is a swirl of bliss if I let the reflexive thoughts stop. That bliss would make me blush, running red-faced from the room. Hours have been spent lying down, unmoving, caught in the grace and transcendent wonder as worlds would shift and move through me like some cosmic broadcast. We are all like radios, I thought. I would realize my capacity for realizing dimensional aspects of reality and the Source which I could not explain using words was the best way for grasping this new realm of experience. It was curious, too, how just a look could contain it all. This is perhaps why love is so powerful because at this level, it may be one of the few states that can contain and be aware of the multitudes inherent in reality. Feeling, I found, was how the universe lives and breathes (and responds to you) while the rational was designed to be limited because the feeling mind isn’t. Like man and wife, they compliment each other. I became a lover, but one who, in time, was content to be alone, the beloved alive in my heart.

I was shown that this love was not divided out but included all forms. Like every Christian mystic, I was found wed to God, or like yogis deep in a trance of samadhi, I made the realization that love is the way. People don’t know this but in Luke Jesus uses three different forms of love to ask Peter if he loves him. One of the forms of love was erotic love. This passage was mistranslated by scribes in order to obfuscate the true meaning. Most Christians just think Jesus is trying to point out that Peter denied him three times. That wasn’t what was happening at all. Jesus was describing a love or encompassing a love that included all loves into one. It was not divided like my love, it was all of it in one go. Somewhere the power of this teaching got lost and there is not more about it in any of the sources coming down to us. Whether Jew or Hindu, the experience is the same. It was so for me, as well.

A friend and I spoke for the first time recently about my experience and he asked what it was like. It was the first time I had ever tried to explain it to a person who hasn’t awakened. I tried as simple and direct an approach as I could, saying, “You know that moment when you can feel the point of no return in orgasm?” He nods. “I feel that as a spiritual and physical energy all the time.” My friend said what I thought he would, which was, “That’s gotta be frustrating!” I replied, “At first it was. We are taught that we have to throw this energy away. I learned that when that energy accumulated, a thresh hold was crossed where this energy began healing me, transforming me. I could have become desperate, and sometimes I am, but it’s like the energy is there offering a chance for transmuting it where this unspeakable mystery is found…”

I feel like I have been disabused of my old habit of feeling, which is to always think of bliss as just sexual. It’s funny how the sexual bliss is the door to another finer state. It’s quite something. Maybe I’m not like Gautama Buddha who was said to have found solace in being able to feel such bliss without a partner. I am singular and happy, but we are social creatures who I don’t think have found peace with having intimate relationships while being so “spiritual.” There’s always someone who thinks this is about being a guru or a teacher and then the old memes get dragged out and it becomes a show. Maybe we just aren’t ready for this to enter all aspects of our lives. Such capable levels of deep communion can be scary sometimes. I get it. I’m still sitting here catching up with how awe inspiring nature is. Talk about the ultimate technology of the gods..

It’s been worth it to have been through so much. I stuck with it, stone by stone, grain by grain. After a few years I turned around and found my mountain had moved. Everything seemed so big at the beginning. It was like living in a blizzard of energy. Instinctively I knew my job was to drive the energy higher in order to…..to what? I soon learned what. I availed myself of every opportunity, every method, every happy accident and synchronicity that led to a release. I was in the belly of the dragon for years. There were times in the first few years when it all seemed bleak, but persistence has paid off.

I will also add, there are more things to heal, but the difference now is I don’t feel defeated by them. Every single thing dealt with was like acruing some cosmic grace that never went away. I have found great solace in this. I also found myself drifting away from “normal” human understanding. I fit less and less. That too was an adjustment. I would feel out of sorts, but then find a new angle with which to be able to relate to people I know and love.

Twenty four years ago I was awakened out of sleep by the angelic being who had appeared in my room only weeks before and I was told at four in the morning to go outside. There in the dark, he said “Look over here..” and motioned to the woods. There I saw a long hallway open up, kind of like something out of a Maurice Syndak story where the boy’s bedroom slowly turned into the wild outdoors. This hallway began tilting downward uneasily as I heard my guide say, “This lifetime is the conduit through which lifetimes may be healed or redeemed.” That hallway was shaken like a bag of potato chips to get the last bits out that were left. I was being shown how this would go and that my guide had been there since my birth, “Watching over you.” I realized the next day that this had happened on Good Friday.

Maui

Since then, I have been reminded, like on my trip to Maui, that I am the “doctor” for my soul. I was connected almost immediately to a past life on Maui with a man who had become stuck, mired in a poor definition of what being male was all about, and in a fifteen minute direct experience while driving along the coast, I was able to telepathically show him the way to feel. This was a past life of mine that was unfolding very quickly. He was taught to be the tough guy who didn’t talk about his feelings to the point that he was miserable. When I hear about “toxic masculinity” I think about how little our culture really understands how the culture carves out behavioral niches that are not natural or healthy for men (or women). A lot of toxic masculinity is the result of cultural expectations put onto men that are not natural. But what man feels like he can emote and not have his woman feel her stomach turning or feeling like her man is weak…because we misjudge just how attracted we are to these programmed responses. Men are silent strong and quiet. We support and the quieter we are the better. Don’t talk about your feelings as you really feel about them (millions of men quietly wanting to explode from holding it in or so disconnected from feeling that they don’t even know what the heck their feelings even are)/ While being the mute male sure makes women feel secure, it is making men neurotic in the same sort of way that women have difficulties with unrealistic expectations put on them as well. Okay, so in that moment I could enter his heart and show him how to feel, to bring in what he could not allow himself to feel (which he really needed but equated with being feminine or being weak). Immediately, there is this expansion, this joy that was completely new and then this guy lying in his hammock began crying for the first time in decades in his hammock. Crying because his life had been made into a kind of emotional sepia tone image. When I reached him, there was a tear coming down his eye already, but it was not a tear of feeling deeply, it was more the tear of a man who had been put into a vice and then crushed for about forty years. He had been holding it all in for so long and he was miserable. And with those tears, his hardness was gone. It bled out of him like puss from a wound. I had to pull over to cry, to let all that emotion out and to move it along so I didn’t get stuck, too. To him, my past life gentleman, I was like an ancestor spirit coming to him to give him that good medicine. Me, I just knew right where to go to find him perhaps at his worst point in time. I just had this feeling like I had to go to Maui, but not for the reasons other people go there. It felt like I really needed to go to get something done or to see something…it wasn’t really clear. It was ironic, too, because there he was, dressed in traditional Hawaiian garb, lying in a hammock near the beach, looking at the sunset in what most would describe as paradise, and he could not have been more miserable. All of this was done by way of feeling, and being open. Truth is, I don’t know much, a lot of this involves me being led by a more capable self. So when my guide showed me all of those doors in that hallway and explained how this life would be a life where I would be able to clear and cleanse my soul going back lifetimes, he wasn’t kidding. It has been quite the ride and there have been no dull moments. I am glad I am alone because if I were to describe this to a “normal” person, I would likely wind up in a hospital.

I do a lot of listening inwardly and outwardly…and I also realize that I have a turn of mind that allows me great flexibility emotionally so that I can be what these past selves need me to be in order to get over their own humps, glitches, and limits. Every time this happens I feel as if I am rewriting the past and improving the present and future lifetimes and timelines. While its hard to travel physically through time, your consciousness can travel back with ease! I can only imagine the ripple effects this will have. Has this ever played through your mind, the implications of this work? If nothing else, I was able to help a number of people in my soul, all past lives and one future lifetime, to reap greater reward through this awakening. No matter what happens, the ripple effects will be spreading out through time and consequence…

Sometimes I tell my higher self that I’d like to help others, too, but it tells me that in my evolutionary spiral, it is better to help myself so that in other lifetimes my purpose can be dedicated solidly with serving others.

There was a time when meditation was tricky. I would drift into another energy state, but it never went anywhere. I wondered what I was doing wrong. Only after opening up this powerful energy did I realize how solid our “veils” in consciousness can be. The rise of kundalini found me pierced from bottom to top seven times. It was as though I had been pierced and opened so that the flood waters from the cosmic could come in. They did. I had to navigate tsunami waves. It wasn’t always easy. With practice and familiarity, it got easier.

Sometimes “it” felt like a challenger, but it wound up an ally. It depended on what I brought to it. After months of struggle, the same struggle over five months, something finally clicked and everything went quiet. I mean to say, no thoughts. It was as novel a condition as weightlessness might be the first time in the body. After that, a great peace was available to me. I will also say that despite such a wonderful outcome, I would find plenty of instances where I would choose to be upset about something! We are so very human. Note to self: you can become a yogi overnight but you will still have to pay the rent…

I think that I think differently now. I rely on the grace of the universe saving me sometimes. It is tricky to be both Mr. Cosmic and Mr. Business at the same time. When I rely on God or the universe, it always seems to work out perfectly. A customer who is used to worrying about things, was put off by my peaceful demeanor recently. It was funny because she was speaking as though the thing out of place with me was this devil may care attitude that I seemed to have. Perhaps there is this idea that artists starve, that it’s a problem and since I am an artist, that is what must be happening. It isn’t happening, lol! “It must be so hard for you as an artist…” people often have said, and I kind of roll my eyes because it isn’t that way at all. It is a business like any other.

People incorrectly think that this is me not caring, which is my bliss state, when I care very much. I just don’t care to think about or worry about the same things other people worry about. I get how the visionaries tend to all get killed: they are no longer bound by the same steering forces and are no longer governable or controllable. People can look at you funny… It’s been worth it though.

It’s worth it to see my breath, so full of bliss, enter this world. I pray that it can be a gift to someone somewhere. I am not much of an evangelist…no religion, or guru to be found. I find I am just as J. Krishnamurti was on his pathless path. When you rely on yourself, an abundance of wisdom makes itself available to you. The more you rely on it the greater the wisdom that pours forth. We aren’t aware of the deep well of knowing that is available to us. You are one life among many. You are a child to a still-larger self. You exist outside of time. You are instantly god-realized in that part of you outside of time…and it then seems to be the task of these selves to realize their own divine lineage. Everyone is like this, I think. The answer seems to be found in our becoming limited in order to learn the most precious lessons, which often is about how to experience limitation and to touch one thing at a time, rather than constantly embracing the All in such an all-encompassing state.

All the work has been worth it. Keep at it. Follow your gut and heart while remaining open. If you can feel something with all your heart, that something will come. It seems like it takes forever, but every single ounce of it is accounted for and as the load drops, the soul becomes light. The bliss, which we once thought was to be used, or even thrown away, is now seen as The Way, a part of who we are. Instead of rising and falling, it is steady now. Hardly anything lessens it now. I am glad to have been able to show one person the way to bliss. If we all did that, the world would be a much better place. I talked to their soul about it and in one week the switch was flipped. I pray it has remained. If we can each do this, we would have a better, more peaceful world, perhaps.

It gets better. Stick with it. Surrender. Be a devotee. Within you is all the wonder you could ever imagine. Your divine parentage makes it so.

All My Love,

~ Parker

Advertisement

A Modest Approach

If you know  what I write about, you know a lot of it has been centered on how to escape the maze of karma.  Before my awakening, karma was one of those heady concepts that seemed over my head and out of my control.  The cycle of reincarnation, destiny, journey of the soul, those kinds of things.  And yet, when awakening took hold in me the force which some want to call kundalini had the very effect of removing the karma by removing not just the blocks that kept the energy from flowing, but the conceptual biases, the beliefs, which had kept those knots and blocks and  the karmas in place.

We are all littered with little programs that run in our awareness which are the result of different beliefs or biases we have taken on in one form or another and these in the aggregate serve to form what our karma is all about.  Yes, karma is defined as “action” in its most simplest form, and while this is a very good way to explain it, my experience has been that this action is the result of certain positions, ideas or beliefs about HOW we think things work….and for the negative karmas, that means that we feel the world works against us not for us (and then this notion serves to guide our actions henceforth) for example.  Beneath all of this is a sense which is in all people that has served to remove us from our own divine natures, a kind of deeper notion or bias about how we feel things are that isn’t really true but becomes true because of how the law of attraction works; you create your reality and then the character of that reality can serve to attract others with similar qualities of energy and consciousness and feeling.

Instead of just feeling our divinity, we have allowed this clutter of  programs to proliferate that get in the way of our own purer awareness of what we are in our root, primordial, or authentic selves. The Zen teachers who tell the story of the student staring into a pond that has a lot of pond scum obscuring its depths is THE image of what I am talking about.  We can’t see the depths because we have too much in the way to even see it.  Remove that, and the view begins to clarify.  The curious thing is that when you do this, you also wind up seeing into the rest of creation from the inside out.  For people so used to using just their physical senses, this is nothing short of an epiphany.  And for most people who do awaken, all of this is a bit of a process so that one day one layer is removed while on another day another layer is removed.  Slowly, or perhaps quickly depending on how you define “slowly” and “quick,” your view begins to change.  You still see the same view, but your awareness has changed.  What has changed is that you no longer have these beliefs and ideas that serve to keep you from seeing the real deal.  the other thing that you might know about me is that I do little about creating systems and methods and more about speaking into the essence of a given thing since that is where I think I am best able to reach the problem or issue in its origins, its essence.  But for this entry, I am going to make an exception.

So let’s talk about seeing what is there instead of seeing what we think we see (or what we feel we see).

I have known many people who have each helped me to understand how this works in the world.  At the time, the experiences with these people were all hard and this was learned at great cost because it meant that I experienced how their schisms affected me, but that also meant that I got to see some things up close, which has its benefits. What I had was a front row seat watching how people were interpreting what it was I was doing (which was effectively reading into my actions their own interpretation of what was going on inside of me).  If I worked long hours, this meant I was actually wanting to escape my family in order to work in my business.  I didn’t care about my family and preferred my work instead.  Now I know how I feel.  This is not a big mystery.  I could hear all of these sorts of things being said and I know just how far off the mark they are.  This was really more about HOW someone felt things were instead of how they actually WERE.  Truth was, had this person actually KNOWN how I felt, she would have used that as her guiding principle instead of making all kinds of assumptions that were incidentally factual, but in reality not true.

To add more depth to this picture I will say that I was all along expressing how I felt.  When we have our illusions wrapped around us, we literally become blinded by these things that we are so invested in that they seem to make up the whole of our reality.  It is easy to say this is the result of the false self at work, and while in a way this rings true, in other ways I find such words or terms to be distortive.  This is NOT a false self, it is an illusion, a pure creation of ourselves which we then most often project in perfect Jungian style onto the world.  We use people and how they seem to us as we look at their behavior through our lenses of illusion.  It is just as true that my life as an artist meant many long hours.  I was the maker, the packager, the webmaster, the accountant, promoter, and salesperson, shipper, and receiver.  I was the finisher of the work, and I designed the displays that helped sell the work.  I developed new work, I supported the work that was more mature.  I had to hustle and the day did not fit into a neat 9-5 regimen like most people’s lives.  None of this was a mystery, none of it was any surprise.  It wasn’t like what I did was a big mystery to anyone.  THIS is how deeply we can hold our illusions about what we think or feel is true.

What kinds of illusions do you live under?  What colors your world and life?  What keeps YOU from seeing the clear light of day?

The path through awakening is most often one that leads to a place of neutrality in a sense, a removal of the lenses and thus the ability to see all sides and to see how the sides are or are not distorted by these self made lenses.  Now, having said all of this, the reality remains that I attracted a person like this into my life who was like this, so in all honesty, it is easy to point out the mote in my neighbors eye whilst ignoring the mote in my own.  Continually pointing out the problems in the world or in others is actually a waste of time because the most productive thing you can do is to take care of your own stuff.  If you find yourself continually focused on others’ ideas of you or feelings, then you simply are not focused on your own inner garden.  In this way, yes, there is a certain importance to taking care of YOU first.  It is madness to assume that by being a servant to everyone else is going to naturally lead you to a life of spiritual abundance when your bucket needs to be repaired.  You just wont really ever receive any lasting satisfaction from trying to fill others’ buckets with your own leaking like a sieve.  So you heal your own fractures first and then suddenly the light and life begins to fill you.  You no longer point out the problems of the world simply because you feel so full.  When you feel so full like this, you do not feel lack or loss.  You only feel……full.  Imagine a world full of people working from this side of the equation, of inner abundance instead of running around pointing out the problems in others, which is only pointing out your own short comings in a rather backward manner (via projection).  The curious thing is that if you have a leaky bucket, you will find yourself surrounded by others just like you.  Fix your own and you will find others around you doing the same.  It is a scheme that works very well all the way around.  You can heal the world by healing yourself.  Heal your own fracture and you often find the same happening around you.  This sounds like magic, but it is a common feature of how this kind of work goes.

Not to belabor the point, I will give you a quick example of what I mean.  I read somewhere someone who was quoting something from Ram Das’s Be Here Now.  His teacher and Das were talking about how his old teacher’s students were not catching on to a certain teaching that the teacher had espoused.  Das was one of these people.  He wondered aloud to his teacher why it was he was unable to embody this important teaching.  I forget exactly what this teaching was, but the specifics of this wasn’t the point.  What was the point was that his teacher observed that the teacher had not himself fully embodied the teaching.  The teacher probably heard that something was a good idea and thus he passed on the good teaching. But the teaching was not really part of who or what the man was, so he quite naturally attracted people who could not embody the teaching either.  This is what I mean, and if you think this is magical thinking, this happens ALL THE TIME and is most obvious when you have a way to observe what someone says and what they do.  Eventually you will, if given enough time, be able to observe if the teaching has sunk in and is part of who the person is.  Without that, the Law of Attraction works perfectly.  On the other side of the coin, having a teacher who then is able to embody a given teaching can result in freeing up all of the people s/he taught this teaching to to also embody it.  When we heal ourselves, we offer an opportunity to the world we have created to also heal.  So in this way, healing yourself is actually very huge. Its just not as immediately apparent to most people, but it is nonetheless how things work.

Being caught in our illusions is a bit like how someone makes the assumption that fire trucks cause fires.  Now we all know that is preposterous, and yet, it IS true that fire trucks ARE at an amazingly large number of fires, so it does make a kind of sense that they could be construed to be involved in creating them.  But in using this example, I am trying to underscore what we all tend to do at one time or another about the events in our lives.  In the words of the writer Anais Nin, we see the world as we are instead of as it is, and it is this tendency that leads not only to misunderstandings, but it also leads to suffering because, well, its so far off the mark of what is REAL.  I would later meet someone with the same kind of karmic issues as my (now ex) spouse who would make even more difficult statements that had to do with how I abused my students, how I manipulated people with my new-found powers.  It was all pretty crazy to me, and yet it all had a basis in something that existed before I even came along.  I had stepped into a karmic merry-go-round and was experiencing something I had not yet cleared from my consciousness.  When I saw and heard these things being said, it was hurtful, yes, but it also showed me so clearly how people describe a world that they FEEL is happening rather than what is really there.  We have this habit of not stopping and actually looking at things from a dispassionate perspective without bias and belief playing into the moment, and this is how a distorted world view emerges.

All of this is the result, I contend, of just what Buddha was so famously known for espousing, which is how expectation plays into our own suffering.  Instead of expecting something that is realistic from people or events, we choose to expect what we feel we desire.  This is actually based on something NOT realistic at all, but actually forms our own karma, the thing that serves to cloak our own divine selves.  Some desires are  soaked in karmic issues and so will not adhere to what is real but will speak instead of something deeper inside of us that also happens to be unresolved and most often, volatile, hurt, and broken feeling.  All of this material is brought to bear in the moment, at least potentially, so that our desire governs our actions and feelings instead of our being able to see what is there.  So instead of accepting what happens, we kind of fight with outcomes so they serve to make us feel bad or hurt because we feel we did not get what we wanted.  But what we wanted was itself based on these memes, the beliefs that we have floating around inside of us, and this all traces back into our karma.  There is a reason for all of this and you CAN release all of this in time if you want to go that deep, but for now, a more modest approach to keep things simple.

When you enter an experience, stay open to what is happening.  Try not to put too much investment in an outcome.  Try to simply go with the flow and make your mind up in the moment about what you want to do for that time.  This will keep you from leaving THE MOMENT.  A curious thing happens when we leave the MOMENT.  We begin to imagine and our imaginations naturally form based on our beliefs and inner Karmas.  Try to shorten that and keep yourself in the here and now. I know how hard it is to keep imagination out of it, I am myself highly imaginative, so it’s not easy.  But try it.  You might feel like this is just too passive an activity.  I am not suggesting that you not voice your opinion or just go along for the ride, but rather to observe the moment more and give yourself some time to really feel into that moment and into what it is you feel that you want.  Before you make your decision,  ask yourself if this is really what you want. This is not something you have to agonize over.  But over time, by doing this, you may find that your choices may change first in a small way and then in larger ways.  Don’t let yourself fall into the trap of doing what you think others would have you do; do what YOU want to do.

Observe your thoughts and watch how your own thinking naturally may turn back to a sense of expectation about something.  When you find yourself doing this, stop for a moment and allow yourself to suspend this tendency, first for a moment, and then the next time, for a longer time.  As you go through each moment in life, you will find you have an endless series of opportunities to do this careful self observation.  It might not be easy at first.  In fact, it might be downright cumbersome to you.  But I ask you, if you are interested in overcoming the things that lead to your suffering, isn’t something like this worth it?

When you meet someone for example, resist the desire to pigeon-hole them.  Keep your mind open about them.  I knew someone once who identified me with her father due to one important but really incidental trait that we both shared.  The result was that I found myself being compared to her father about a whole list of things that actually had nothing to do with me, but were actually things that she had not yet reached peace with her father.  It was interesting and also painful to watch and experience, but it sure was educational for me.  Here a person had become blind to the real me and was no longer really dealing with me but someone from her past.  This is a very hard thing not to do, so it means you need to practice what is called mindfulness.  This is simply being aware of what you think and feel at any moment.  You do this through a practice of observation.  You simply allow yourself to be more in an observation role and for some, it takes some practice, but after a while it can actually lead to a nice little space inside of you that is both quiet, calm, and even happy.  It is a place of peace inside of you if you let it.

This method can work a variety of ways and you can actually adapt it to your own use, but the core of the idea here is that you stop yourself from forming opinions about things based on your first impression.  Rather, allow yourself to register those thoughts and impressions, but just don’t make up your mind about them, because once you do and ego gets a hold of it, the next step is in placing those impressions into a belief about something.  Once something is a belief, however small, it takes on a life all its own.  It is actually something that has a life of its own.  You let it drop into your subconscious self and the rest becomes more or less automatic and hard to change once set in motion unless you have a supple ego who can give up the good readily.

This is a modest approach, but is one that you can use to help change your own level of suffering in your life by being aware of the process AS IT HAPPENS that results in unrealistic expectations or expectations that simply do not fit reality.  This can also lead to a simpler life and calmer self.

Now one path through this is to actually release karma, which will result in a lessening of these expectations, but for some doing this type of karmic release may be too much to take on right now.  Besides, it is also possible to come at this from another direction without such heady  issues at hand.  Goodnight and good luck!

The Way Out

To heal a life it can be instructive to understand how suffering was first created….not to relive it, no, but to understand the underlying impulses that led to the trouble to begin with.

Humans universally push down hurtful material that they do not feel the capacity or ability to deal with in the moment. By doing this, the trauma or hurt gets shoved down, so deep that it can be in the subconscious regions where the material still echos through the self but the waking aware self is utterly puzzled over where the trouble is coming from.  And if the self DOES know the source, knowing how to heal it seems, often, a mystery.  Even small things can get hung up within the light body.  I have dealt with scores and scores of little things so inconsequential, yet present, that I could not even begin to know exactly where they cropped up, only that they slipped quietly away only to be replaced with a sharper sense of focus, knowing, and love.  Even the slight slights leave their mark.  But we can erase them.

The way we have shoved material down requires that we remove it the opposite from the act of its submersion.  From experience I can say absolutely that the things that were seemingly inconsequential leave quickly and from the “surface” of awareness.  The harder material has remained longer, seems more central and deeply set within.  Some people struggle with these things for a lifetime trying to get down to the depth of where they rest.   If they got shoved down deep, you have to go deep.  Feel deep.  Forgive deep.  Love deep.  More completely.

To seek to reveal pent up emotion by denying it in anyway wont work. This is itself a form of denying emotion with was the problem to begin with. No, to remove material in a conscious way requires you to feel it as deeply as it has been shoved down.  I think you will agree that some of our junk has been shoved way deep.  Deep into the etheric sheaths, deep into the psyche.  Deep into the self.  Deep.  So it means to get it out means being completely honest.  Honest with your feelings, even if they make NO sense, freak you out, scare you, or make you feel shame.  Often it is the very presence of shame that has created a lot of the trouble in us from the beginning.  Shame begets repression and repression begets madness.

 

To feel the depths of divine love, grace, and forgiveness means being willing to love all our broken parts with acceptance, all the way down, no holding back, no holds barred.  When you do this, you actually provide a pathway for your awareness to travel deep inside the nether regions of your own spiritual madness, your own hurt, your anger, rage, and all the rest.  Somehow, this direct honest is the perfect eraser for past dysfunction and fracture.

Lets say that you feel shame for being attracted to something or someone….and as long as you feel shame about that, you remain connected to it.  Maybe it is a behavior, a thought, a philosophy, a way of thinking, or a person.  Hold back, and it keeps its hooks in you.  You have just made your work harder.

Why?

Maybe you aren’t ready, or maybe you just aren’t sure.  Ultimately, you alone will have to find how this works for the heart and soul.  But in the end, letting go is letting go.  Denial is not letting go.  For as deep as we have shoved all our stuff and denied it, we usually need the same in reverse, which is awareness, and acceptance, and forgiveness of self.  Not just saying you forgive. Feeling it. Being it. And then you become something else (kind of).  You are returned, one step closer, to your essential self. When you are ready, you are ready.  IN that time, there are no more bargains, no glossing or hiding or guessing. You will know.

Feel it or don’t feel it.  Its up to you.  If its in you and you do not wish to feel it, it will for the time being, remain. But when you are ready, letting go, surrender, is unconditional.

Radical Release

Awakening, the power that rests in all of us offers the possibility of erasing the knots and blocks that, like computer viruses, block our awareness of what is and turn in us affecting our emotions and behavior.  This was just what Philip in his lesser-known gospel was talking about when he said “It is the evil that makes you do what you do not want to do and keeps you from doing what you want to do.”  Perfect.  As you wake, you will begin to brush up against this as the churning of kundalini releases these knots.  The self resolves into a calm pond instead of one constantly in agitation, chaos.  What seemed normal for so may years, perhaps your whole life is suddenly seen, or gradually seen, in a new context.  We have just been so used to have out sensitivity scoured away by the daily grind of the caustic presence of this backlog of karma and what it does to us.  You might think that for as bad as all of that is, once you tasted this new life you would never want to go back to the old.  Yes and no.  We have been so conditioned to this mode of behavior that even though it is dysfunctional, it has served to define us for so long.  Learning how to step away from the addiction to bad behavior and chaos is like weaning a drug addict off of heroin.  And none of us are immune.  Even those who have taken great strides all have their hitches and challenges.  The idea that when you awaken you awaken perfect is not true, and is the glitch in our own karmic need to give away our personal power to an authority instead of making discernments on our own and making up our own minds, following our own instincts.

Compassion is what levels the playing field.  Without it, it is all a bunch of finger pointing, Inquisitions, and an inability to take responsibility for how we feel and act.  The freedom we will find is in this path of radical responsibility.  IT is the freedom and has the power to heal great wounds and fears.  Fear, once faced, melts away.  What is left after years of melting?  Your authentic self….and this self is most interesting.

If healing fears and hurt and hard emotions is eluding you, one of the ways to deal with them is to gently, fearlessly, face them.  Look at them. This turning away, this fear, this avoidance, it is what has bred the long-standing hurts to begin with.  We tell ourselves that others hurt us and thus we shrunk back and hide inside ourselves like animals who fear the shadow of the hawk.  And yet, I say to you, this is all based on a lie.  The real truth is that no one ever made us feel ANYTHING that we ourselves did not agree to feel.

Five people in the same room all seeing the same event can all respond differently to the same thing. Of course, we want to think that since we are human we will ALL respond the same way, but this is just not so.  We have choice, and you make choices moment by moment on how to feel about any number of things.  When you shine a bright light on it, which kundalini does, the small things become big and you are shown over and over just how involved your choice to feel is engaged in the creation of your life.  You are not some powerless lemming.  You are infinite. We tell ourselves even that we are not godlike, that it is heresy and error to think this way just to let ourselves off the hook for being responsible.  But we are each responsible. When we own that, moment by moment in awareness, then how you feel when you go out to the car and feel that stab of uncertainty about whether the car will start in the cold, or that feeling of anxiety in having to talk to your boss, or even just having to go out to the market when you’d rather just stay at home, all become perfect examples, small examples, of a much larger continuum at work in your life.

So what about the really big things?   There is a way out of this, and part of it is knowing there is nothing to fear except fear.  It may sound corny and very FDR-ish, but the man was right.  He perhaps used this for his own political ends, but it is absolutely true.  Life can be faced with fear or it can be faced with bravery which is simply not prejudicing yourself in the moment and thinking you know that something will turn out badly or could turn out badly or feeling uncertain.  The brave are not brave because they lack fear, they simply do not seek to drag fear into the moment and thus are free to meet the moment on its own terms. The path to healing begins in this way and it begins with a willingness to change and a willingness to face the truth, whatever that truth is. What may have been faced fearfully becomes a lesson that standing up to a fear meant there was far less to fear than thought, and with our primate brains engaged, we learn quickly so next time it becomes easier. Greater are the rewards when we follow our intuition and not give ourselves the time to even ponder over how we feel.  This, when done with grace, leads to a very streamlined movement through a jungle of things.  I say this because I have experienced this and I wish I could say I use it each time I face something, which I do not, but I am learning…..bit by bit I am learning.

Along with this comes humility, the humility to allow the world to show you what you most need to see in yourself, and once shown, look at it without turning away and own it.  Only in owning it will you release it. When you choose to own something, you are effectively no longer running from it, or avoiding it.  The divine does n0t work in you properly when you run from what is true.  Some are made fearful of the consequences of admitting shortcomings or fault.  After all, there is a price to be paid for not doing so, which is being cast into hell or being ostracized from the group, right?   Some of us still resonate with this belief, this feeling, this fear. I ask you, what divine consciousness which can design the world and dna and blackholes and all the rest, would seek to cast a part of its own self into hellfire?  No, we cast ourselves into hell.  Lacking love, only hell is an option a loveless soul would choose.  We are lost without this love…..which is not the love most know, but is a pulsing vibrant and living thing, the parent or root of all other loves that are FOR something.  This love IS something….and is not merely a current that moves through he heart of a deity or person, but is something I can only describe as ALIVE.  That, though, is another piece on the blog.

When it comes to hell, I say it is our own creation.  We do it ourselves, and we get out of it ourselves.  The same is so with karma.  All blocks resolve back to karma.  Removing karma releases joy and a refining font of bliss in you.   This is an odd turn of  our minds that say some outside authority will be doing this to us if we don’t do right.  This must change if we are ever to get a handle on our own suffering.  The  authority lies within us and if we feel badly about something, we literally create discomfort in ourselves because we are not in harmony with the divine.  The divine does not seek retribution like some angry father who keeps score.  We humans do that.  It is time to OWN the hell we make for ourselves for only we can transform it.  But when you do, it is instantaneous.  It may be that you transform a small part of it, but that part resolves into something brilliant and beautiful.

Curiously, most fire-breathing dragons lurking in the depths of our souls are in fact very different once we no longer see them through the lens of fear or uncertainty. Enemies turn into allies, threats transform into opportunities.  The side, the duality, the Other simply ceases to be.  Instead of fighting agains the world, you use the momentum in the world to flow with it in harmony.  To do this well often means letting go of ego, to a position or agenda.  It is more selfless and it is far more powerful.  It is easier to transform the fury of something in you or in others and use its forward motion for a divine purpose than to allow it to remain as a threat and a hardened object in life.  Turn the attackers forward motion in your heart into a force for good.  You simply choose to see it differently.  As you do this, life will change. Bit by bit, “battle” by “battle” fears are overcome as they are squarely faced.

The power of awakening can lead to radical release of all manner of material within you.  Years of burden are dropped, some in dream, some while awake, some while just riding in the car or buying groceries.  This does not require, now, a temple or guru or method or posture.  ONce you “get” it, its very presence seems to move through you like some new life, transforming the compounds in your body, transmuting grief into joy as now the old ways no longer suit or satiate your hunger for fulfillment.  A new life begins, a devotion is born….and while you can ignore it or hide it, it is a bell that cannot be unrung.

Being able to set aside wah you think all of this might look like seems to me in my expereince the perfect precursor to having this actually take place.  Let the mind go blank, cease the ramble of all that you are and allow what is in the infinite begin to flow in.  Outside this small corner of the universe in physical reality, the flow of time is not the only rule of existence.  Beyond this is the infinite, which is an expanding presence of consciousness that we perceive as a form of time, of causal landscaping.  To know yourself means going back to the very root, to the “beginning” of what you are.  This will show you your connection to everything, what you are and the great royal lineage from which we all spring from.

This release is life changing and makes the high low and the low high. WHat once was one, becomes two, and what was two will become one.  When ego collapses, when you say for the mountain to move, it will move. No longer are you working the world based on the limiting aspects of the ego and individual self but the infinite self now more fully present in time.  Perhaps those who awoke and who exhibited these traits were seen as sorcerers or witches and often were shunned or killed.  Many have been killed just for suspicion of this. So perhaps no wonder we have a fear of stepping out of line or being different. There is probably a evolutionary hindrance built in for that, but we must each press against those bonds and ask of the higher to show us what is next, what it is we can become even if we ourselves do not know what that looks like.  It always winds up far more beautiful and amazing than anything that could be imagined or dreamed up.  A constant return to the root, to the essence of all life, to all being, to all knowing.