As I look over our history as a species, from the Middle East and the religions it spawned, to the East and the philosophies, the almost-religions that stopped short of being those because they do not espouse worship of a deity or a god of any kind, I see a pattern emerge as it relates to our creative energy and all of its relatives; except under very specific conditions creative energy is only allowed to be expressed in certain ways. I am dealing with creative energy in a very broad sense here, so if you thought creative energy was that part of us that solved problems or helped create new things like cars or rockets to the moon or music and art, hang on. Creative energy, I have come to see includes all aspects of our being, from our desire to create art to our desire to build bridges and civilizations. Our creativity also includes the forces that maintain our bodies and it also includes our capacity, our ability, to create more of ourselves through sexual intercourse between men and women. All of this to my mind and experience is part of a cosmic strand that divides out in numerous ways in our consciousness but has at its root an energy that in its origin is wild and free.
The problem in our world today is that except as noted previously, creative energy has been tamped down, controlled. Churches have done this by instilling a sense of shame about our sexuality. We were to not trust our sexuality or our urges least of all so we relied on our religions to tell us what was what. And you know, I am not convinced that it was for good. Look at the scandals rocking the Catholic church and they don’t seem to stop. The Pope speaks out about it, but its like it is some monolithic structure with little accountability or willingness to change. If you doubt what I am saying here, just do a historical church of the scandals that have taken place with the Catholic church over the years and you will begin to see how difficult this issue is. Part of it stems from requiring priests to be chaste. I am just going to say that when our creative fires are so narrowly focused there will always be trouble. Creativity was meant to be wild and free, not tamed, and here we are with our religions trying to tame what really was meant to set us free. And instead, we are prisoners.
I will admit that what I say about prana is my take. People are keen to try and point out that our perception is just perception, so human, so frail, so likely to be distorted. But you know, this time, I don’t think so. As I read about the hundreds, thousands, even, of experiences describing the bliss of the flow of prana, I see the same thing. It’s seen as a goddess, perhaps, wild and free, powerful. But this energy is in all of us, the place where our inner man and inner woman meet, the explosion of opposites. That is the definition of kundalini….which is nothing more than this: prana in supreme abundance (finally!). What I observe is what everyone else observes. People may have different reactions to it. Some might close down, some might open up. Some might open and close in turns. Some will be highly insightful, some will realize there is more to their ability to plumb their depths. All through it, prana is the wild child to me, a liberating and spiritually lubricating force.
Torus form with multiple sheathes/fields
Prana is creative. It stimulates all centers of the body when there is an abundance of it. The ancients described bliss that was off the charts due to the increased flow of this energy. As I sit writing this, I feel a steady-state experience of bliss. I came to this level of bliss as a result of a lot of inner work. I instinctively knew that if I followed what kundalini was doing that things would get easier. They have. I still have my challenges that I deal with, but they change with every realization or inner breakthrough. I know that in my case that prana has fueled wildly vigorous creative energy. In fact, I had to be creative in the arts in order to build enough of a flow in my body to sustain the current level of bliss that I feel. When I go into the energy I can feel its wildness. I can feel that it was never intended to be tamed. yes, it is like water and will flow into any container in which it is poured, but the vessel itself is what limits or allows the flow of this force.
As someone who deals with awakening on a daily basis for over a decade, I luagh at the videos of teachers telling people how to awaken the kundalini. The “Sat Nam!” breath that is one part hammer and one part release into the Mystery. i know that if I had to depend on an exercise like that to awaken I think I should wait a very long time. Maybe someone figured out that it worked for some folks, but I direct the flow of prana by way of feeling only. This has always been what has opened the gates….always. Even teachers who say prana is breath are wrong; prana is a fine energy that is in no way contained in the air. No, prana moves by way of feeling. In fact, feeling is how we actually communicate to the cosmos. it is how the dream is made manifest (I write about this extensively in the blog so do a search to find out more).
The chakras are energy centers and every one has an emotional vibration connected to it. This “emotive power” inherent in the chakras is born out of this feeling quality I am talking about. No, people shut down their chakras and thus prana when they feel a hard feeling instead of a soft opening feeling. And even if a million teachers say prana is breath, it does not make it right even once. It just means that they themselves do not understand prana or have not been able to stimulate prana with anything other than breath (and this tells me as the observer that they may be lacking in their ability to connect with their feeling side of themselves to boot!). I know it might sound pedantic, but I promise you that it isn’t. When we understand something so simple as prana responding to feeling, we can get ourselves on the right track in our own work for bringin in more of it so that its flow can heal (which it does).
Breath, when properly used, has a stimulating effect on the body which in turn stimulates prana. It isn’t even that the chakras respond to thought, it is deeper still than that. Feeling….the whole world is lacking in feeling and awareness of their power to feel. People who are not awakened will laugh at this, but trust me, the world carries a level of numbness in them…..even awakened people. The journey to full feeling can take some time. I know that I have been gifted with a kind of energetic “reset” by a healer who revealed the true depth of my woundedness, which sent me into a very real sense of physical pain (which was itself emotional/spiritual but now boosted by the presence of prana so it feels physical), so I know that we can go merrily along with the work of awakening only to find, “holy bejebus! there is so much more!” even years later. So this is why all of this can become such a journey for people. This is a journey to realization. Realization comes about as a result of awareness. Sometimes, once in a great while, we can meet people who we connect so deeply with that they share something about themselves that can spark all sorts of realizations within ourselves. Some are direct, some tangential. Some are unintended. But this is why relationship has been so important in awakening and is also one aspect that is largely denied by the world’s religions as a bona fide religious or spiritual “practice.”
Yes, prana is creative. There are stories of how women who have undergone awakening have experienced a sense as though they were pregnant, that they were going to birth something. A close family friend confided in me during one of our talks about her awakening process that she went through a period of time when she could feel her body wanting to physically birth something. She sensed that this was part of her awakening process, but it was a curious experience to her. When I explained to her that many other women have reported the same experience it made her feel a little less crazy. The experiences have all been extremely similar and I think that it points to powerful energies that are creative in nature but that operate at higher dimensional levels and are having their effect in our day-to-day lives (because it’s all connected now).
So I think that when we are faced with the spirit and the higher self, it is quite natural for higher-order experiences to be transmitted into the language of the body, to be related to our bodies as well as all other levels of ourselves. I have noticed that at a certain level the self knows itself to be One with all things, so naturally the creative energy of prana is the same as the creativity of our personalities, the same creativity of our physical bodies in making babies, and who knows what other forms of creative output there are in other realms of experience that we have yet to discover as sentient beings. What is universal is that creativity always feels blissful. When we create babies in the physical our bodies provide us with an orgasm to make the experience that much more filled with reward, but creative energy also brings chills and goosebumps to creators of music and art. It at once expresses and evokes powerful feeling. People who have awakened almost all go through intense creative bursts. As an artist I can say that my awakening has fueled a number of new directions in my work that would have never existed before. It’s a little crazy in a way just how crowded my inner landscape is with ideas. My only challenge is in bringing these ideas to fruition. And, in the way that prana also works, it speeds up manifesting many-times over. For example, when I began thinking about how close I was to reopening my studio practice after teaching, without saying a word, but thinking how I would like to have some good assistants, I received one highly qualified request for being involved in some part-time capacity at the studio making work as well as two beginners who expressed a sincere desire to learn the discipline. The interesting part of this is how well-timed it was. By now, I am not surprised by any of this, but I know that when my prana flow increases, it accelerates manifestation of desired outcomes. That said, it might bring me a person who WANTS to work in my field, but it does not guarantee that they will be excellent or that they will decide to stay with it a year or even a week later. Sometimes, you have to dig deeper to find where these glitches exist. But that is for another time.
But here is the problem as I see it, at least as it relates to many of our institutions on earth, which is that our creativity has been hijacked. It’s not some demonic conspiracy to enslave humanity, just a desire to tamp down creativity because it scares people who are in positions of power. One thing I know about power is that the vast majority of institutions and the people within then have a great need to control. This control on the one hand may have been intended to keep people from killing each other or behave badly, but the other side of the coin has been that it also limits freedom. It limits our creativity. When I look at what I have seen in my meditations about creativity and how wild and free it is and when I look at the human race, I see a big disconnect. And the problem? Here is your problem…..
We value war and destroying in the name of greed and the usurpation of land and wealth through military invasions and keeping our race held hostage by the fear of the next fabricated threat that the military industrial complex decides to come up with next (read your history on this—most of our wars have been coups on the part of the CIA or an effort to fool us into war, this didn’t start with the invasion of Iraq, this has been going on for a long time). We are taught that to be a man we must be warlike, unfeeling. Women have their place, perhaps one of the greatest fonts of creative energy alive on the planet and our women are shut down to such an unbelievable degree. Their thought process mimics men in their rational approach, with that fabulous intuitive and feminine character of soul nearly gone. Really, you have no idea. But so are the men shut down. We all are, so don’t think I am picking on anyone in particular. But men are shut down in such a way that it creates this rage and it just keeps feeding their desire to go to war so they can just kill something. This, my friends, is creativity turned into itself. This is the dark side of the creative force. Do I really need to point this out to you? Men who don’t know how to command their sexual energy, women who are afraid of these men, and then women who aren’t in command of their own sexual energy too, and use their emotional forces of manipulation to work things in their favor. It is a crazy mixed up mess if you ask me.
Our institutions by and large forswear sexual expression as a necessity to make babies, but by and large, we have incredible taboos placed on our sexuality. While there are good reasons for governing behavior in theory, my observation is that our attempts to govern sexual energy result in greater dysfunction than ever. Men pitted against women, the war of the sexes, men not in possession of their source of power and women not in full possession of their source of power either. All the while we are taught that our sexual nature is dirty, that lust is not redeemable, and forget having sex if its lustful. In fact, most of our institutions teach us how to sublimate sexual energy as a convenient way of side-stepping the issue altogether. In many parts of Asia its as though the teaching of Zen Buddhism and Taoism and other strands of Buddhism would rather deal with packaging bliss so that its no longer sexual as their axis mundi for solving the problem. Women no longer in possession of themselves will never engage a man at the level of his divinity for very long, but the exact same can be said for men with their women. I ask; how did we get here? I feel like I am in that video by the Talking Heads for the song Once In A Lifetime where a clearly out of control David Byrne seeks to illustrate the chaos of our lives as controlled beings while desiring finding the flow of life.
When I step back from this madness, I can feel a world within me swirling with the forces of creation in a way that I had always hoped to be able to feel, actually. I had always hoped prior to awakening that creative energy was this vivid and strong (and it is). But when I look at the world I see we have a long way to go, baby. We have a long way to go because we have squashed the creativity of the feminine and masculine both.
It’s interesting to me how as men begin to soften, kundalini is coming onto the scene also as women are learning how to find their own strength and their own sovereignty. I observe that on a collective level humans are reaching across the aisle and integrating more of their opposites into their lives especially over the last twenty years (which also corresponds with the sudden increase of awakening (I could be wrong, but I don’t buy that these awakenings are due to someone decided it will be, but are the result of a myriad of factors all resulting in the changes we see today. If you know how awakening is itself defined by the fusion of opposites in consciousness, then you can perhaps appreciate how it is that we now have a mass awakening taking place on the planet. Right. Now. And honestly, I observe that the progress we have made not just for hundreds of years, but especially during this last century, just happens to be of a kind that favors the fusion of opposites. What if instead of this being some grand cosmic event as many want to say it is, we are simply glimpsing the natural result of people having reached a kind of threshold point in their development with awakening being the result. This period has shown us more possibilities and people have been able to shrug off the control of their institutions just enough to begin to evolve in new directions, directs that favor awakening.
I think we need to be less concerned about how others will react or treat us. We already are made into a kind of outcast by the differences in our experiences moment by moment from the average Joe and Josephina. I mean, admit it, even as you go through your life undercover as the awakened being on the planet, you also find that this makes you feel so singular and lonely. Social things for social creatures. I think that the teachings of Tantra have a lot to explain about bliss. While tantra is itself not necessarily sexual, the parts of tantra that are do not seek to shy away from confronting issues in our consciousness (well, it is the same with white tantra or black, both head straight-away right into the center of the fire which is how all emotional release work is done in fact). The lesson is that you never skirt the briar patch, you head right into it and liberate it of whatever hitches that reside within the self. Free yourself from shame, guilt, and repressed emotion. I know that in my life I have worked to dissolve as much of it as I can. I have more to go, but as this last block rears its head I am reminded that if I am to be able to hear the voice of my intuition and my inner guidance as clearly as possible, I have to continue to be clearer. Don’t be tamed, friends.
Waking The Infinite 