Finding It

In my journey, the breakthrough that I made was in realizing the role of feeling in cosmic consciousness. I saw how backwards the world is. Instead of understanding feeling, we eschew this in favor of “thinking things through” or using the rational mind over the part of us that has the capacity to plumb the depths where the transcendental dwells.

We are taught to think but we are not taught to feel. We certainly are taught how to be emotional, but no one teaches or points to feeling as important (let alone superior to rational linear thought) because people are ignorant of what this means. This is like casting pearls before swine. No one sees its value and everyone is afraid of being criticized for such simple “thinking.”

Learning to feel is the most important thing you can do. It is what arouses the sleeping woman and man to life. It is what arouses kundalini, even. As you feel deeper, you open your consciousness to more energy. It can be analyzed, but not grasped by the rational self. It is so simple a child could do it, which is why those who do teach about it describe a simpler state or type of being to know more deeply. It isn’t fashionable by those who want to keep their grip on the cramped quarters of the rational, but it can in time can show you the superconscious side of you, a remarkable part of you that you have always been.

Using this part of you can confer peace (often gradually for most) because it is such a simple way to be. It is here, as the zen master Taishen Desimuru said that, “all the sand of the deserts flows through your hands.” You gain All by being simpler and quiet as you turn on your capacity to feel. This is different from emotion. It is a depth we all have.

By being in the rational mind we get confused by words. Here, in this video, Jiddu Krishnamurti answers a question about the existence of God. It isn’t until the 15:30 mark that he homes in on the important part of all experience. He isn’t talking about whether God exists at this point, but is pointing out how to BE in order to understand the world and consciousness.

When he says “word is not that” he means you have to move out of the thinking mind full of ideas about things and move to the part of you that loves with all of your heart and being. That gives your consciousness the means to take a word like “tree” and enter the place within that connects with the tree being discussed. Of course this can happen if you allow yourself to do it. He is saying, you must turn to this other part that is in you to know these things. You have to turn to your feeling self, your capacity to FEEL. And THAT is the simple but potent door that we open ourselves to the All. Here is the video…

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Depression, Awakening, and the Brain

I am doing some research for my book that helps to support an awareness I have had that the shift that we call awakening is mirrored in the brain and that this shift is one that leads to a flowering or catalyzing of a greater amount of the right brain functions in us. To keep it short and sweet, I will mention that current research has shown that the right brain, most notably the right frontal cortex, is considered to be the seat of many mystical experiences.  it is also the part of us that is most capable of glimpsing the very big picture that the experience of nonduality offers.  But along with this blooming of the right brain also comes the emotions that have been associated with that part of our brain, which is most notably feelings related to sadness.

Is the right brain sad?

In a sense, the answer is….kind of.  Our capacity to experience or process feelings of sadness do appear to be located right alongside our mystical experiences.  This part of the brain has been associated with the experience of deja-vu, sensing “Presence” (spiritual beings, God/Goddess, etc.) and being able to see how things are connected in our lives and world.  It is, in a word, one important way that we are able to perceive the “implicate order” of the cosmos and builds this awe-inspiring sense of how everything is quite literally completely interconnected.

So if the right brain allows us to sense deep into our sorrow, does the left brain do something different?  Turns out that it does!  And this is an important tool for each of you reading this who have struggled with awakening symptoms and effects.  While you may feel as though you have been launched into another world by this experience, the lesson here is that you might need to consider bringing your left brain along with you, too!  The left brain has been shown to allow us to tap into our more positive forward-looking emotions.  While its important to recognize what ails you, its just as important to know how to pick yourself back up with your left brained capacity to feel positive about life.

I think it really is all a question of balance, personally.  I find that people who are more analytical tend not to let the weight of the world get them down, but many times they also can ignore the material that needs careful processing in order to get through it properly. This could represent a kind of cognitive and emotional blind-spot of sorts.  On the other hand, getting too deep into the sorrow end of things is just as bad because it can become a trap.  I know.  When my awakening took a sudden turn in 2009 after about three years of symptoms related to it, I found that my right brain was called upon to deal with the sheer volume of stuff flowing into me.  Correspondingly, I came upon a place in my inner work that I write about in my book that I call the Sea of Sorrow.  At first my inclination was to just face this sorrow and let it out.  I spent time each day just letting myself cry.  That was a big first for me since before this experience, I could only think of a couple of instances in my adult life where I was actually able to have a good cry.  I had learned the well-worn ways of being a man who had to be depended upon to be that emotional rock for everyone else around him.  The only problem with this is that…..we are not rocks. So getting to this place I thought was a milestone.

I thought that I could just purge myself of all this sadness.  What I experienced was the sense that I was in a vast sea of emotion, a collective grief, if you will, and I went from thinking it was mine to realizing that this belonged to all of us.  The day came when I wised up and realized, “This is all of our work to purge if it even NEEDS to be purged…..this is just too much for any one person.”  With that, I set about doing meditations that showed me setting up a sail in my little boat away from these sorrowful waters.  I had to make the intention that this was no longer a place that would bring me any lasting benefit.  This was an issue for a different time. It may also be that this is an issue that we each will face in our own way, but getting down into the collective muck is not the answer.  I sense that this grief will be cleansed when enough of us chose to forgive and forget, seeing all of the hurt and deciding that it is time to just let it go. I also sense that higher force in us will have to do this work, and so I pray that if this is correct, that whatever in us that is able to do this, will do so.

As for the research and all of the official citations, I am saving that for my book.

So keep it balanced folks, and all the best of luck in all your work!

Overcoming The World (is Overcoming Yourself)

I know it sounds simplistic and not very mystical and woo-woo enough, but the seat of the two cosmic forces that are experienced as enlightenment rest in how the brain mirrors this state. I have been writing about this for a while, and I am going to keep it short. Just as the two forces of the yin and yang, the Ida and Pengali, rise to create the effect or experience of kundalini (a verb!), you are experiencing a potentiating of your own life force, prana or qi. And you can have much much more of it by allowing it to flow with your own greater awareness. It is that simple, but we make it complicated. The old yogis and ancients remind us; it is all within you. It really is. When we try to look outside at the world of effects, this is where we (I included) get tripped up. Ask yourself what an event in your life is teaching you. It is there not because of a series of random events. It is there for a reason, all based on a simple law of Attraction. This is what the Secret of the Golden Flower taught, a simple book about turning your awareness in on itself. By doing this, we see inwardly instead of merely outwardly. You may not believe it, but by changing what is in you, you WILL change the substance of your life. Okay, so there was your moment of woo-woo!

So what this has on offer to us is a new way to be. I observe that the world leans to the left brain in all that it does. Linear, logical, we have created a lot of amazing things out of this way of being from the linearity of language to the linearity of computer code. It is all the domain of the left brain by and large. And this is good. the left allows us to identify individual objects, focus on them, examine them, but it also means we do not see these things in relationship. And what part of us helps us do this? Why, it is the right brain! As we as a species learn to use this other part of ourselves, we also tend to become more creative, more able to handle mystery, and more able to see the interconnectivity of all things. Like being able to see how you sabotage yourself in your own life. Or seeing how you DO indeed have blinders on. the right brain will help you plumb this. People say to me how right brained they are when I speak of how left brained we are. I explain that it is relative. Yes, you can experience greater right-brained activity, but this is like someone who has been living in a desert being given a canteen of water. Wow! That is a lot of water! you exclaim. Smiling, I think of the ocean that enfolds me. That enfolds all of us without our entirely realizing it. It is a matter of awareness.

So today, consider that overcoming the world in all of its problems that it puts to you is actually something that can be handled with the part of you that does not rationalize at all but delights in the mystery of the vast realm of interconnected parts that now behave in a new way; an interconnected whole! Shift yourself, and you WILL shift the world around you! Stop pointing the finger and look inside yourself, not because there isn’t injustice in the world, but because that injustice is not entirely solved by merely pointing. Be the change you wish to see and it will be that much closer to becoming a reality. When you become more loving in yourself, you will inspire others to be the same. And it will spread because it is infectious!

You can overcome anything when you overcome yourself. You will also be surprised just how quickly this change can come when you just. Let. Go.

From This Mountain

There is a notion that exists within the realm of the nondualists whereby the Void, that state of pure potential, is seen as the original condition and that everything else that we experience is somehow inferior or less than this original state.  There are a lot of high-minded teachers who have espoused this, so in speaking into it means I am coming up against a lot of people whose own experience stands in a more monolithic way for some people.  The curious thing, though, is that at the end of the day, even when we come back to the poor pitiful state of our daily illusion, of the dream of the false self as the earthly self is called by these folks, we remain here with this self.  No one seems to even question WHY this false self even exists.  Some say it is through karma that this self exists and that through this reasoning, is the reason for this kind of cosmic error in our being. To me, this is nothing different from what has taken place within Christianity as the Fall whereby through sex we must emerge here, an experience which they have considered sinful and whereby a god-man came to free us from. It is present in Hinduism and other traditions, no matter how high-minded or “spiritual.”  This sense of self loathing exists in various forms and it all comes down to much the same thing.  WE have this sense that this place, this body, this self, is somehow less than that “other” state which is pure and untouched by the vagaries of psyche, emotion, and desire.  Afterall, aren’t these all the things that have gotten us into so much trouble?

But what, I must ask, might happen, if we were to learn that the self, which some call false, was actually intended for a new way of learning about the dream, this illusion so many speak of?

The thing is, there is an application of this bias about the self vs the soul-self that seeks to suggest that those who do not agree with this notion that these folks have about the pure state or primordial state that anyone who diverges from their argument or ideas are themselves somehow not fully enlightened or awakened.  And you know, it isn’t that I dislike someone saying I am this or that, but rather it is more a simple matter of perception, perspective, and awareness.  I don’t even think that they are even all that wrong with their notion.  There is a lot about it that is entirely on the mark, except when it comes to the self. It smacks of a deep unidentified loathing for this existence that even they would deny, I think,  feeling.

The one thing that I have been afforded in this experience is being able to ride the coat-tails of the energy present in awakening whereby I have seen so many things.  I am an adventurer and I like to go waaaay out.  Down into the subatomic structure of the universe.  Down into the coding of the atom and how everything is itself holographically formulated in order to wed everything to everything else at a deep fundamental level.  Sitting deep in thought I am drawn into a revelation of how consciousness expands “outward” into larger and larger aggregations of conscious energy which goes to form our experience, then our world, and then still other realities of which we but simply are aware.  It is akin to a series of wheels within wheels (thank you Ezekiel) whereby one wheel rises to meet another which turns at a larger arc in the heavens and whose own heaven is turned by still greater and greater wheels.  At each seeming level, different phenomenon occur as a result of creative energy.  The one common thread is awareness.  In bearing more awareness, we naturally bear more energy.  As we learn to handle this energy, we also learn to handle still “larger” forms of consciousness.

I know that the makers of this world were themselves dreamers.  For them, their art was in simply dreaming such incredible dreams that we here experience their productions as a stable template upon which we exist and agree upon. We all see the same tree grow and die.  We each see the same sky, the same clouds.  And yet, the flexibility built into this realm is the ability to transform it, or seemingly transform it, by simply being….different.  And it is here that we get into something that leave those who feel that the body is so limited in the dust.

Instead of loath the body as imperfect, I see it as misunderstood.  Entirely.  Within us lies the promise of paradise, the kingdom, nirvana, here and now.  Encoded within us is the possibility for the seeming impossible to emerge.  We don’t understand how this could be because it stands, or seems to stand, so far out of people’s own limited sense about this world.  One side of our awareness is mirrored through the left brain which is a linear processor while the right brain is a parallel processor and which is VERY different from its left sides compliment.  These two brains also mirror the current of the yin and yang that moves through us and helps to enunciate their underlying truth, which itself is a still deeper truth about the form our own consciousness takes, which is this seeming dual form of awareness.  Whenever I have sought to bring both sides of my brain function into a closer unity always the result is the same; an explosion of inspiration.  This inspiration leads to all manner of new ideas, new creations, new ways of seeing, feeling, and knowing.  It is in this place where I have been taken into places that have revealed the inner workings of a vast array of things that are commonly referred to by the yogis as “secret knowledge.”  The only thing that served to limit my perception of this information and experience was how I was allowing my own awareness, as defined partly at least by my own brain function, to be.  We call this by many names, from awakening to kundalini.  When I awoke, I awoke to find that the world was a different kind of place, and that it seemed as though the world awoke when I awoke. Not coincidentally, this was a notion expressed by Buddha, I would discover just a few years ago as I began to investigate whether what Buddha experienced was the same as I had.  While where we go in awakening may differ, and while our own journeys are themselves individual, there are many common markers, which, if you know about them, you can begin to identify.

So this is just the tip of the iceberg.  A lot has not been covered, but I will leave you with this parting thought; what if, instead of the false self, we simply say that this is our earthly vehicle whose potential we are now only beginning to glimpse.  And for the world being illusion, what if we were to instead call it a creation.  By calling it this, by thinking of it in this way, we are then suddenly free to create anew, or to recreate how we see and respond to it.  An illusion itself suggests something that is false, but what if this illusion actually speaks or mirror a deeper reality about who and what we are?  And instead of the great Void as being JUST the pure original state, it is just as many have experienced including myself; a vast endless “realm” of energy existing in potential.  Now, potential is itself great to feel.  It is.  It is pure bliss.  And yet, the Creator itself is….well…CREATIVE.  Isn’t it in our nature, all of our natures, to create?   And is it not through what we create, that we have the opportunity to learn from?  For good or ill?  And isn’t this all a function of freewill, which was granted us as a central form of our being and which while it has been blamed for so many ills could also just as easily be blamed for all of our miracles and great discoveries about how to build a better world? I mean, really, isn’t this a dual world after all?  So instead of saying it is this or that, what if we sought to merge the two into a new synthesis of being and get off our high horses and learn the great secret of our being, which is to unlock the potential within us in order to realize that here we can have a paradise…..that we can wed the pure potential to the world of how that potential is realised, utilized, which is the same as it has always been; to create.  Sitting in a pure state yields only that, but it is like a boat in a harbor; it was not made for that.  Out of the potential, we draw and we project and thus create.  We want to say that creation is folly…based in desire….and yet if the teachings are to be believed, the highest form of consciousness we know, created all of this because such an act was so fundamental to consciousness.

It is known that nothing that we experience here in this less than perfect body is not registered unless the brain is able to process the information at least at some level or another.  So that sense of the Void, it is compliments of your brain.  See into the infinite? That is your brain again.  In fact, while some suggest that the brain is unable to conceive of the infinite, we are learning that there are parts of the brain that actually serve as filters and that the very process of awakening seems to serve to remove those perceptual roadblocks.  In people who have had damage to their left hemispheres, often their experience blooms into what is described as something very similar to mystical experiences had by monks, yogis and more.  Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is one such individual who was able to observe what happened when she experienced a stroke that happened in her left hemisphere.  Speaking at a Ted Talks Conference, she described what was for me, eerily similar to what I had been experiencing during my awakening process, and illuminated a sense that I had had for years that the answer to accelerated consciousness lies in our ability to shift our focus from a left-brained dominance as a species to one that was more balanced with the right brain being given a broader expression or awareness in our own mind.  I have posted this talk before in a previous blog entry and it is posted here for you to consider.

What happens when we cease seeing life as illusion and see it as a creation?  What happens when we cease seeing the self as false and see it more as designed to do things that we currently are unable to realize but can actually learn to conceptualize by using our brains (both of them) to experience what was previously thought impossible?  Is it just possible that the real problem in all of this is that we simply have not learned to balance these two sides and that maybe, just maybe, by learning a better balance, we might learn a new synthesis that is itself evolving in human beings even as I write this?

What are we creating?

A Modest Approach To Transcendent Spiritual Work

We are taught in school and in our world culture that the mind is the way through solving all our problems.  We have done this because of a left-brained tendency for ages that has followed the march of linear rational thought and also an over-dependence upon masculine awareness, energy, and consciousness. Now come the cooler more fluid irrational, right brained things….the feminine, the counterpart to linear rational thought.  This is part of the balancing act that is taking place right now and right here on the planet.  The coming of the feminine.

The one thing that you can do in your own inner work to help to anchor some of these aspects that we associate with the feminine side of consciousness is to allow things be a mystery.  Stop trying to SOLVE every problem.  It is a curious reality that when you, little you, earthbound self-you stops trying to solve a problem, it actually is offered up to your higher self and the higher self works on it.  If you do as some Christians have done, which is “give it up to God” you will actually find the same thing I am writing about. Being able to do this also does something profound to you; it allows you to relax.  It seems counterintuitive that by stopping all thought and worry about something that is nagging us that we are able to resolve it so much easier, but it is true.

To do this you must make sure that you do not have any competing beliefs that will get in the way of this working.  If you find yourself interested in the idea of letting go of something and letting the higher self work on it but find that there is something in doing that that worries you , concerns you, or that you find yourself saying “yeah, but…” then its likely you have a competing belief that will get in your way.  If you do not believe you can, then you wont. Clear the path and your purpose will be clear and powerful.  This is part of your work. You are clearing a path for a giant to enter your life and do work for you.  And it can.  If you just allow it.  This is the giant that has stepped into the room with me when I awoke.  It is the vastness that came in when Buddha awakened.  It is the part of him that “awoke with him.”  You are the universe.  You are yourself, yes, but tied and woven into its very matrix.  You have some pretty powerful stuff on your side.

Somethings just aren’t always something you can make sense of or solve.  How you feel, how you respond, or how other people have responded.  You may not always know the reason in a clear way.  But there is a part of you that can help to resolve it.  The answer may not always be the one you THINK you should get, but its the best one for you NOW.  Otherwise, its just as strange as our giraffe showing up in the photo above…

Another problem is that if you feel like you are supposed to solve the problem and that by letting go you are somehow engaging in an act of heresy or irresponsible behavior, well then, you have some inner issues to work on. Some of these can be niggling small.  Slivers, really.  If the power of the sliver is stronger than the power of your own intention, it is enough to counter anything you seek to manifest.

So let go.  Be vulnerable.  When you do this, you tell the universe that you are ready for it.  You are signalling a great deal of receptivity to it.  By doing this, things have a way of coming to you.  Be ready for miracles to happen. Don’t be surprised when you hear the footfalls of giants in your life.

It really is hard I think for many people to realize just how incredibly limitless they are, that the resources that they have are so significant as to render any problem or issue impotent and healed if only we could stop sticking  our fingers in the dyke and trying to hold back the vast rush of the universal energetic that is our souls. You wake up one day with the realization that all you are is a particle of water,  drop, really, but that there is this curious capacity you now have for merging your awareness into the drops of all other drops until you no longer see drops but feel vast seas and oceans surging and moving and flowing and this is all within you.  This is cosmic consciousness.  And I am sure someone like Buddha or someone similar had something to say about drops of water and oceans.

Once you feel this it is so authentic, you don’t need a teacher.  You simply need to remind and encourage yourself to keep pressing forward into that place where you can let go and surrender.  When you do, you signal you are ready for more.  “More” has a curious way of coming. The trick in all of this is not to worry over HOW the answer will come. Don’t worry about that.  I mean, if you do you might be entirely overwhelmed by the big footed movements of the giant as it comes crashing and moves all the furniture in your life….Your job is to remain simple and in the moment.  When you do this, you make youself available, ready, and receptive. Instead of being some kind of adversary, you will find that the universe has fallen in love with you and all the problems you have had or think you have aren’t the result of the world beating you up, but something inside of you that was off kilter. This type of awareness, this feeling of the universe falling in love with yourself is just the place where things can be seen in an entirely different way.  It is a radical shift in awareness and seeing/being. If you just let it.  Let yourself be seduced by it.  Go ahead.  Try. But in reaching that place, don’t seek to put controls on it.  Be like a child who has no expectation of what is going to happen.  When you do, you can better be led by this powerful force.  When you can’t do this, your awareness quickly shifts and drops right out of the sheath of awareness that is this state of higher vibrational being. Knowing when to activate the more receptive parts of your being with the more action oriented parts of yourself is a delicate balance, but when it comes to larger things, receptivity is a powerful approach that can lead you to unexpected places.  There is great power in this silence, this receptivity.  And in the end, you may not HAVE an answer to your problems because, well, those problems were just so gnarly, who would have been able to understand them once the transcendent comes knocking on your door?  It becomes like some distant foggy dream.  Sometimes things just need to be kept that way.

In this case, an empty mind is a very good thing.

The Power To Manifest

So this is a bit long, but it begins to lay out issues related to manifesting and the physiological and psychological basis for how this will work for you.  Understanding the root of it can help you in knowing how to resolve issues later on down the line by applying these basic principles. All of this has been the result of direct experience, not from other sources.

Sometimes the idea of being able to manifest what you want in life seems like so much woo-woo, right?  The rational mind cannot see how any of this is possible.  There is a reason for this.  In a world where we really have leaned so heavily on the rational left-brained side of our awareness and consciousness, it can be hard for us to realize there might actually be a different way.  After all, stories of natives in the jungles dancing to bring rain just sounds like so much silly superstition, right? In an earlier post I wrote about how the medicine man Rolling Thunder was often observed harvesting plants that were not available at the time when he was harvesting them.  People would observe how he would need a flowering plant for a healing only to go out and find it along the path he was walking.  In my life my daughter has been able to observe this phenomenon as she wishes for a desk that is the same height as her bed only to find one the next day, set out by the dumpster, in perfect condition with a chair that is brand new AND at the exact height of her bed.  She has seen how when something was needed, it was found within a day.  The last time this happened, I had wished for a jewelry case for my gallery.  These are normally a couple hundred dollars used.  I walked into my local thrift store, saw a jewelry case up ahead but didn’t have a price on it.  With a ratty table for over a hundred dollars sitting next to it, I breathed deep and wished for the case to be fifty fifty dollars after the attendant went into the back to ask what the price was for the case.  They came out and put $50.00 on it.  Perfect, you see.  Even though I knew that the few cases they had in their store were at least a hundred dollars or more, I did not let this affect me.  I breathed deep and knew I could have it for less.  I simply used a tool located within the feeling self to make it happen.  I know it may sound like magic, and perhaps for now we can just call it that, or we can call it the power we all have to manifest things through unordinary methods.

The left brain, seat of much of the processing power for linear object-based understanding is a machine that excels at identifying things.  It has been an important part of our toolkit for physical survival.  See the threat, and take care of it!  Done. Nice left brain.  Did the job, brought home the bacon, pat, pat on the head. We have come to enshrine the left brain to a great degree, and I think we have done so at the cost of the other side of our brains and our being.   If you know anything about the energy system of the light body, you will know that the right side of the body has been seen as the part of the larger energy system that carries the masculine energy up the nonphysical template of the nadis or etheric energy channels.  You may also know that in the physical body the brain and body do a little switch so that the right and left sides of the brain control the opposite side of the body.  What you might not know is that the etheric energy also does a cross in the brain or near the crown so that masculine energy goes up into the left brain while the feminine current that moves up the left side of the body runs up into the right side of the brain.  This crossing that takes place energetically is the way nature and the cosmos has chosen to assure that your own body and light body have access to the necessary union for a fuller realization of what it is capable of, which is a subtle and overt blending of two different polarities within the body. This happens etherically, and it also happens physically.  It serves as a template for allowing a broad range of experience to happen all within our very small frames.   We may not have developed a device to show all you left-brainers out there that this energy exists, but we do have systems that utilize an understanding of those current channels such as acupuncture as well as movement disciplines such as Thai Chi, Chi Gung, and even the martial arts of Judo and Karate, just to name a few.  Once you realize how movement assists in the flow of energy, then these seemingly woo-woo movements stop being so and take on a broader context.  Movement is an important aspect in releasing karmic knots or energy blocks in the body, both energetic and physical.  So in the same way that a masculine current runs up one side, a feminine runs up the other.  This is energy 101.  These energies merge and are used in your awareness to build what you are.  You are literally drawing off an infinite source of energy, whether you know it or not, to focus your own awareness and consciousness in the world.  This means that one half of the equation, the yin or feminine, has a voice in all of this.  You determine how much of each you use based on a slew of factors, some which have to do with your own personality and habits, as well as what feels “right” to you.  The only thing keeping you from a full awareness of that point of union of both the feminine and masculine which exists in everyone is AWARENESS.  Simply that.  No switches, no knobs to turn, no mantras or methods.  You were born with it.  Anyone can experience huge loads of the feminine energy flowing through them, even if they are male.  All you have to do is allow it to happen.  The same is true for the masculine.  The only thing that is keeping you from feeling them is your own choice and filtering process that is in place. Your own subconscious decisions are all made and you do not even know they have been made, but you can drift away from your normal mode of doing things easier than you might realize in order to experience these energies more powerfully or differently.  I know because I have done it ad it has never once resulted in my feeling estranged from who I am, but in many ways helped to clarify what I am and how I feel.  The secret is in ALLOWING it, and this allowance is achieved through feeling. This allowing is the right brain, the feminine, the yielding aspect of your personality.  If you have a great capacity to yield, you might well find that you have a greater ability to bring in the powers of the right brain into your life

All the gurus who speak of divine union speak of this not being a thing of the mind.  It is far larger than anything the mind itself could come up with or hope to mirror.  When I say mind, I do not mean brain.  Mind is a construct within the brain or within our awareness (which some scientists are saying is actually not all located IN the brain but appears now to be all throughout the body…imagine that!)

The part of your mind that is incessantly talking and rambling, even right now, is the part of your brain that processes language and does so in a highly organized and linear way. This is simply how language and verbal communication is most often.  So the left brain is set up to deal with most of this processing.  But while it can identify and choose individual words, it falls flat in being able to take in the forest of words.  It is not so good at broad concepts or ideas that are of a more transcendental nature.  This is why people who try to shoe-horn the rational into transcendental experiences  fail miserably.  The zen master Taishen Deshimuru observed that monks who were overly mental in their personalities had the hardest time with reaching a state of transcendent awareness. They were simply using their left brains far too much.  But like anything, how we are is based partly in habit and you can change those habits to let in a broader range of experience.

I know it is not 800 words and I have not even mentioned manifestation, but I just need to lay this foundation, so hang on there….

When you shift into the right mind, it is such a different part of your being, you might not even recognize it at first.  For as good at the left brain is in organizing, the right brain does something very different.  And this right brain also mirrors a nonphysical character to your soul, too, just as the left brain does.  Two brain hemispheres are thus merged through a large nerve bundle called the corpus callosum, and in the physical this is the point of union for them, something that also happens in a similar place with the etheric energy streaming in. Allowing the two to speak to each other is where inspired states take place.  Recognizing right brain activity is the first step in giving it more leeway in your awareness. There is a lot of truth to the sense that the right brain  is highly sensual, free, and fluid. The right brain has excelled in bringing us great discoveries and imagining the impossible simply because it is quite simply able to conceive of the inconceivable.  This means the right brain can lead you to very revolutionary states of feeling and being, ones that never even existed before.  The right brain, also,  has the capacity of conceiving the infinite because of how it has developed. It also has a curious ability to not be oriented along lines of boundaries and old repetitive patterns.  We like to think of this as a kind of radical out-there woo-woo artsy mind-set, but this is only a result of the fact that so few people actually utilize their right brain in an aware and awake way.

I was speaking with a Chemistry professor who teaches at the same university that I do about this issue.  I said it was too bad that we do not teach students how to be creative.  By this I did not mean artistically creative, but just creative thinkers.  She said “That is what everyone here calls the”he’s smoking weed” mentality!” ”  What she meant by this was the sense that when we shift out of the rational mind and into the right brain mode, it is seen as a whole lot of airy-fairy silliness.  Or smoking weed.  Out there, man! You get the idea.  But this is unfortunate, which both she and I agreed because its the incredible power of the right brain that can bring you discoveries that do not always come from the daily grind of testing compounds in order to find just the right one.  This method works great, but it is incredibly time consuming. It does not occur to most people that there might be a different way, a way that is the territory of the right brain.  We don’t know that much about it simply because we spend so little time working effectively with the right brain to even know its capacities.  I will say, though that we DO use it, we just are not used to a more balanced approach.  We are kind of holding the dam back in a sense, the little dutch boys of our world. What would happen if we just let that flow move on through? Maybe be brave and bold and not be concerned if people around us started saying “Oh, she is on weed….”

During my awakening process, I reached a place where I was surrendering more and more  my old ways of being and thinking.  As I let ego go more and more, I found that it curiously sparked my creativity in a pretty big way.  I had ideas just springing out all over the place.  Books, new designs for work.  All of it was almost too much to keep up with.  I have a backlog of work right now all based on that activity. I have shifted awareness somewhat simply because it begins to get a little ridiculous for me to have so many ideas and not enough years to make them in. But as I let go of the old way, I relaxed into a very sensual mode where I felt more expansive.  I was not as hemmed in mentally.  I was more easy, more fluid.  I saw that ideas were just pouring in.  The tap in my consciousness where ideas came from went from sudden bursts to a steady flow.  It became a flow of ENERGY in my body and at any time I could convert it into ideas.  All I had to do was turn my attention in that direction and there they would be.  I was, in truth, in a state of near-constant inspiration.  The right brain allows, the left brain focuses. So let yourself ALLOW this state to be in your awareness and body!

One way to know that you are getting there is you feel a sense of drift. You do not focus on doing this, you ALLOW yourself, and this is important in order to KEEP this going.  Where the rational left brain focuses, the right allows.  It does not grasp.  Left brain does that. The right brain steps back and just sees.  It is not making judgements, it is taking it all in.  This is important to being able to be a great innovator because in this state you let all of your hidden biases go at least for the time being. These biases govern how you think and behave whether you know it or not.  As a result, things that you could not anticipate come to you effortlessly. In fact, they can seem accidental because it was so effortless. This should help you to anticipate the great power hidden in this part of you.  Meditation can often lead you there, but one of the most effective means is learning how to either quiet the monkey mind that likes to chatter, or to do what some do which is to not mind that the mind is chattering and to develop a kind of middle focus where you hear the chatter but it no longer bothers you.  It is like a train going down a track.  You tend to tune it out after a while, or you might wind up just listening to the patterns without paying attention to what is being said.  But you tune that out.  What you are tuning in is the holy grail of all enlightened states, and I will tell you right here and right now that it is assisted by waking up and using the right brain.  ONce you get that part in on the game, you can bring the two hemispheres into balanced action.  And all of this enlightenment talk is itself something that is firmly planted in physiology.  It is NOT a spiritual energetic off in the ether thing only.  The body HAS to register it in order to recognize it.

The double benefit from bringing this on is an acceleration of a force that has the most unusual tendency of bringing things to you at the perfect time.  This story is symbolized, whether it happened or not, by Buddha awakening and realizing that he was hungry.  Just then someone came by who offered him a bowl of rice to eat. When you begin to utilize this part of the mind the blending of the two vibrations has an uncanny effect of bringing you just what you need in the moment. This is along the lines of dancing for rain, yes.  And yes, it works.  The more you ALLOW the better it works. This means that you learn to become expert at making a clear wish that has no hurdles within you in feeling or belief that would keep it from happening, and you let it go and not dwell on it. This is important for some reason I have not fully understood, but it feels a lot like writing down your order on a piece of paper and then sending it to the kitchen where the staff work on it until it is done.  IN this case, it is the universe working on it. This is the part that seems like magic, and I suppose if you want to use that term, then fine.  Perhaps, using that same logic, this has been why we even HAVE the term magic to begin with, which is that we have observed over a long time period that some people just seem to have a knack for getting what they need or want.  Some people have the uncanny knack of getting it in the most miraculous of ways.  So we call it magic because we do not understand it.  But I am not describing something that a magician like Randi might employ, but rather something else that we are taught does not exist even though we see its presence in our lives or in our friends’ lives from time to time…

The idea that you can manifest things in your life may seem like magical thinking until you actually try it. I have found that all the things I needed or wished for I have gotten. I also ask for big things, things that I feel will help me in the major movements of my life.  This wishing made it possible for me to go to both undergraduate and graduate school without owing a penny in loans.  I simply asked for a way where I would be able to pay for it, to afford something that given my meager means I could somehow swing.  I had no idea what that would look like, but in one case it meant being admitted to a school where my tuition was waived the entire time I was there while also being paid a modest amount of money each month. In another case, I had another tuition waiver and also worked my way through school as part of this waiver. As an artist, I did not want to have to pay a mortgage each month, so I asked for a way to have a home without the mortgage payment.  I was able to pay for a home in total, no mortgage.  These are just a few of the things that I wished for and found coming to my door. In some cases, these were things that I had little or no say in, they just happened.  It seems that the less control I have over them, the better able they are to happen in the right way.

In your mind, you must allow the right brain to flow.  This is not doing, but allowing.  It is not trying to cause the water to break into a wave in your awareness but in standing back sufficiently  to let the flow develop and grow.  This wave of energy will build as long as you keep your awareness out of the rational left brain.  The energy of the left breaks all wave phenomenon. Period.  The way you observe all of this will need to change, too. This was the “focus” I learned when awakening came and I have since observed that it is a focus that monks and those who reach higher states use. It means turning off the talking mind.  It also means allowing yourself to naturally float into a kind of nowhere place that can take you into sleep if you are not careful.  It also involves turning off your need to identify phenomenon while observing it. THIS is very hard to do and seems to be something that takes a while to develop. However, it can be done. It is the very same type of focus that brings on dream imagery as you slowly drift into sleep.  Have you ever laid down to sleep and found yourself drifting and beginning to dream and something inside of you asks “Hey, where am I?”  And bam!  You are awake.  The dream stops.  The wave of phenomenon ceases.  For anyone who has had out of body experiences, similar things have happened.  You go into an “altered” state (right brain) and find yourself floating, perhaps standing by a window.  You stop and ask yourself how you got over to the window and as quick as can be, you are back in your body.  THIS is the same type of drift I am talking about.  It is nothing and something all at once.  You are kind of dropping into this place within you that is like a vast sea of possibility and as you allow your awareness to let the waves develop, they do, until you bring in the rational mind and ego consciousness, which just breaks everything down into discrete particles and the wave ceases.

You do the same thing with creating events in your life.  The nature of all energy is that it attracts more oft itself.  If you do not have any impediments in feeling within you, the energy of the wish is free to move out and attract itself in the physical. I see it as a circular motion where the wish is conceived, it moves through your being like a ripple and then begins to affect the world around you.

“But hang on there, chief.  You say that I can manifest things in my life.  I wished to win the lottery, and that was twenty years ago and I am still playing the lottery without a single win!”

What I would tell you is that you have to be very clear about your feelings.  Yes, you may be VERY excited at the prospect of winning hundreds of millions of dollars.  Who wouldn’t, right?  But very likely, lurking in there, is some competing belief or feeling that disrupts the flow of this energy.  Otherwise, you would have had some kind of win within a reasonable amount of time.  This does not mean everyone wins the lottery, but it does not bar that possibility either. We just believe it is not possible for everyone to win all at once. So that does not and will not happen. So how do you feel about money? Do you feel like it is something of a curse?  How do you feel about other people who DO have money? Do you feel like its unfair that some have it and some do not?  Or how about having money leading to greed or lack of caring?  Do you wish you had more money but somehow feel like you are not deserving of it?  You have to be able to be very honest with yourself when it comes to this part, and if there is anything standing in the way, then it will certainly affect the power of your wish.  Even a sliver of a doubt can have a countervailing effect.  You want this to be a wish that has nothing standing in its way.  Knowing that this is all a matter of clearing up your own insides can lead you to doing the interior work necessary for making manifesting more possible in your life.

Not convinced?

During awakening, I had the stirring of a desire to teach more.  My studio was to yet at a point where I felt comfortable having the public coming in even though the space was certainly adequate for having large groups in.  I had the thought how nice it would be to be able to teach at the college level. I even looked at job offerings with the thought that maybe for a while I might even move somewhere where I could teach.  It was about a month after this that I was called by a local community college and asked if I would be willing to teach their sculpture class.  I was called at 1:15 in the afternoon and the deal was I had to be there at three to start the first class! No interview, no paperwork.  I got that all done in the weeks that followed. I was also told by someone in the community that a position at another school would be opening up for a sculpture professor.  I interviewed for it and got the job.  I wasn’t really ready to be full-time, but rather preferred to be able to dip my toes into it while still being able to run my studio business.  The job was itself part-time.  Perfect.  This has worked out very well.

So there you go.  But it also gets more interesting as you get into the semesters I have been teaching….

When I began, I still had some issues I had to work through that were still very much pressing down on me, which namely had to do with blocks related to authority and personal power.  I was a bit of a mess during those days.  I was simply not in my own power.  The students I had also tended to reflect this, too.  I had students who were dishonest and who sought to shift blame for their own shortcomings onto me.  I had to look at this issue squarely and learned it had to do with how I was to owning my own personal power.  When I was able to do this more and more, I found that the quality of my students changed dramatically. Partly this was due to my behavior having changed.  There was no sense that I was a push-over anymore but held everyone accountable which was a direct result of my holding myself more accountable.  I wasn’t a hard ass, no, I simply had a better mix of  qualities that helped me to keep my classes on a more even keel.  The group dynamic changed and students enjoyed the classes more less based on what I was offering and more on the chemistry present amongst the students themselves.  This has now led to our doing a group project in glass that will involve my students creating an installation of glass sculptures in a garden space on campus.  As I have been able to stand up for what is correct instead of being a push-over as I was due to fear issues, I have found a much better way to be.  This does not mean that I have to act aggressively, but to be firm and follow what is true.  Those who cannot or will not fall into that type of alignment tend to weed themselves out of my life pretty quickly through their own actions or behaviors. I no longer see this as a loss but a gain.  But as long as I allow bad behavior to continue, I am giving it a pass.  All of this has changed how things work for me both on an overt day-to-day way as well as on a more subtle level.  This has had huge ripple effects, far larger than I could have even imagined, but in the end I know that while I may not see how any given event will work out, it always works out for the very best. I am simply no longer caught in the old way of doing things.  And life can get simpler.  I am still working on this, there are more layers to peel back and resolve, but it is the kind of thing that I can live with!  The more you own your life, the more you own your feelings, the more you work on yourself, the more the world will mirror these same qualities. And this can happen on a dime.  It is broad, too.  It can affect not just one corner, but all corners of your life.

So what do you say?  Want to give this principle a run for its money? I will begin by saying that you have actually been using this principle all along except that you have had some competing material standing in the way.  This material is both emotional, belief, and karmically based.  It is YOU, but it is the part of you that is not fully resolved.  When you resolve it in feeling, you literally clear a path for the energy to run unimpeded.  And this is very much what happens with a kundalini awakening within your body. You work with it to clear these blocks. Most of them may resolve without your even knowing what they were or where they emerged from, you don’t NEED to know. You can just let them go in favor of a better way of feeling. The degree to which you are not invested in the old way is the degree to which you can let it go.  The less mental you are in your approach, the faster it can be.  The more you tell yourself there is “work” to do is the degree to which you delay the work being done….which isn’t work at all. It is a simple realization of what you are beyond what some call “illusion” and what I call “creation.” Because all of this is what we have created.  You can call it false beliefs, but I find that too off the mark. They are real, but they do not serve you.  they only serve a broken sense of being that you have taken on in your belief system.

Now is the time to start changing it, and the way is knowing that you can!