Archives for posts with tag: Secret of the Golden Flower

 

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In China there is a piece of writing that was penned during the Qing dynasty (清代前期), circa 1668–1692 that is entitled the Secret Of The Golden Flower.  Despite having been re-translated in 1991 by Thomas Cleary who proclaimed that the Jung translation had numerous distortions, I have given this book a thoughtful review and have found that the core teachings are present regardless of the translations.

But What Is The Golden Flower?

First, there are those who like to make all of this seem like it is so esoteric and hard to get to (it gives them a job and elevated status as the one who knows), but these things are actually very simple.  What is hard in understanding them is that most people are too complicated in their thought to realize that it is so fundamental a thing. So we begin with simple.    The golden flower is the pranic force in your awareness.  How you use this energy that your awareness “captures” by way of how aware it is of itself (which means that your awareness has unlimited potential for channeling prana or life force…depending on how aware you can be of your original or true nature as a child of the divine flame) will determine your experience of the golden flower in your awareness.

The Golden Flower is both you and the universe.  When you understand your relationship with it, it spells the end of the orientation of your thoughts as your being as separate.

Most people focus their energy outward and thus the energy of the golden flower gets “used” in moving the energy outside of ones core being or awareness.  It is thrown away on countless things that lie on the surface of the awareness of self…..you will know what these things are because they will take you away from who you are and will also take you out of the present moment.  Worry, anxiety, and fear do these things and most often subtle forms of fear or uncertainty (even in small amounts) has a way of drawing your focus away from your essential being and the source of your own energy.  These things scatter and divide us to the point where most people do not feel the bliss of the golden flower.

The golden flower is none other than kundalini.  It is the concentrated flow through being aware of it in the self, in the energy body as a flow of energy from the root chakra up through the centers of light (chakras) until they go from low vibration to ever-higher vibration.

The principle means of causing the golden flower to bloom is one method that is repeated over and over and over throughout the book….which is that one turns ones awareness inward.  Much is said about “turning the lamp of awareness inward or around within the self.  Clearly, simply, they are saying that you need to take your awareness as it normally is focused outward and turn the beam or illumination of its light into yourself.

As a westerner who has not joined any group, religion, or method, what I can tell you is that this creates a kind of loop in awareness where this life force is no longer dissipated.  You must first grow your capacity for energy.  All healing and change comes about as a result of a boost in one’s own energy.  All insights are themselves a sudden burst of energy that brings a growing awareness that is the “Ah-ha!!” moment, which is also inspiration.  All of these moments happen when there is a corresponding willingness on the part o the person to let go, to surrender in a sense, so that there is this burst of energy that moves through the self.  This burst of energy is the life force energy upon which the whole universe turns. This energy is highly intelligent and connects itself to all of the things because the nature of the ALL is in connectivity, not separation.  You can, then, feel the intelligence in this energy.  It leaves you feeling at peace and unified.  This is also how the human orgasm works, too, which is a building of energy until it triggers the release.  You are effectively building prana in your body until it is strong enough to begin to shift and break through the old structures that you have built within the field of your awareness.  These “structures” are entirely conceptual, but in the realm of energy, are encountered as entirely solid, just as real as any physical object.

The first step is in holding in this energy so that it can build strong enough so that it has the force to rise upwards through the body in what was described as the “backward flowing motion” which is just what kundalini does.  This is also what is described as the “rising in the flesh” that the Gospel of Philip and Thomas describe as part of inheriting the Kingdom.  When there is sufficient energetic force it is like someone who begins tearing down a cognitive wall or barrier within the self. The best thing to do a this stage is to remain as surrendered as possible since this will allow for greater flow of this energy. It can also be felt more clearly. Normally, one is already in a state of meditation in which one is turned inward in such a way that you are observing yourself.  This includes standing back and observing your own thoughts like a bystander. When you can achieve this type of awareness or stance, you are in a better place to not interfere with the flow of this energy, which is what people do without even realizing it most often. Step back and watch.  Be an observer of yourself.

What I am describing to you is what is being discussed in so many meditation groups.  This is called “mindfulness” and you will probably have heard of it since it has been something on the lips of most anyone who teaches meditation and ways of using the benefits of it for good living here in the West.  Mindfulness is a given in the East in their meditative techniques. The effect that this has, also, is that it does slow and still the busy hive of thought over time.  Trust me, this is not something that will happen in an instant most often, but takes some times to slowly train yourself how to be quiet within.  If you are persistent enough, you will break through the buzz of thought and will move into a profound space of quiet that is also alive with energy, too. Instead of having a gazilliion thoughts, you can instead have a gazillion feelings of the light or energy shooting through you.  This fuels bliss and is its own reward.  Plus, believe it or not, but as you learn to still thought, there comes a time when it is an UTTER relief to be able to just be SILENT within.  Most people don’t know how nice this state is.  Most are freaked if they are silent for more than a few moments.

By being silent you also have reason to see the chasm within that you have feared your whole life.  This chasm is what I call the place where all of our broken incompletely felt or processed emotions are dumped like a graveyard of sorts.  Believe it or not, this then becomes the center of ALL of our uncontrolled neurosis in our lives.  I know some of you wont agree with me when I say this, but this is something I have observed for years and have seen how dealing with this “region” in the self actually reduces and eliminates the neurosis within.  This process I describe as the elimination or healing of neurosis through dissolving blockages in the emotional/mental/prana bodies. The movement of the golden flower will also move these blocks right away and will continue working away on blockages for years as it moves from easiest to most difficult blockages (latent unprocessed emotion = shadow self).  This is what Jung identified as the necessary shadow work that liberates a person from their past neurosis.  It is also known among the Chinese and Indian cultures as how one achieve liberation from the things in our lives that limit us.

The Golden Flower cleanses you.

The Golden Flower movement in you will naturally clear you of emotional blockages.  I have scanned many people and what is most consistent is how much of a backlog that people all have, even people who think they have no blocks (these are the ones who have the most, very often 😉 ).  So the work of removing this psychic “debris” will actually have an impact on how the flow of the golden flower is perceived.

The way of the Taoists who moved the energy of the Golden Flower is the same as it is for anyone going through awakening, in which there is a flow of energy through the body so that one vibration is changed by moving a “lower” vibration into the are of another center as they correspond to the chakras.  Now, the bias most practitioners have is that you have to take a low vibration and move it upward in order to refine it.  This idea has a lot of merit, however, there is something that most male practitioners have missed (and women, interestingly, most often do not miss unless they are just parroting the views of other teachers before them without really thinking about it very much) which is that all energy in the body can be healed and refined by bringing it into the heart region. By raising the vibration of the root up to the heart, this has a natural tendency to clear blocked energy that is in the root energy.  Also, by bringing the crown energy into the heart, this has a way of healing faults in the crown that result from not being properly rooted or grounded in reality.  The heart becomes more like an axial point of the body around which everything else radiates.  If you can see the light body this way, you can see how the heart becomes the center of all healing and is also the center of the three energy centers above it as well as the three below it.  The heart, then, becomes the balance point in all of this.

The way to use the heart in healing of this kind is not hard to do.  You do not need a method, but I will give you some suggestions to get you started. One is to take one hand and place it on your heart chakra and then use your other hand and place it on the center in your body that you feel the blockage the most.  Blocks can be felt like pain, tension, resistance, and even turbulence.  Take right hand and place on your heart and then take your other hand and place it on the center that needs healing and focus your intent on feeling the energy from your heart flowing through your hands into the area needing the healing. Focus on the heart center as a place of love, acceptance, and compassion. Do this for 15 minutes at a time several times a day for the center.

However, having said this, there is no rule about how energy must flow. Energy needs to flow in the direction that is needed in order to undo blocks.  In some cases, a “directional” flow from low to high is what is needed, but this is not the end-all in spiritual practice.  To be a good practitioner of your own work, you need to be a maverick and listen to your own inner voice not the voices of others who assume to know what is best for you.  This is very important for all of us on the planet at this time, which is to begin to rely on our own inner authority instead of those of others. What is closest to your own truth is you. While others outside of your situation can provide you with perspective when it is needed, it is time that people begin to use their own discernment in spiritual work.

Many describe the direction of energy flow, but this is itself a limited understanding of what prana does in the body.  The sense of energy moving upward is itself a seeming, an effect from a series of inner energetic events whereby energy is concentrated in certain areas that gives the feeling of directional movement.  Prana is like light in its sheer speed of movement, so it is important to understand that in order to really understand the flow of this energy, you need to slow your perceptions down enough to begin to truly sense the “flow” of this energy.  It is in truth extremely fast, and when you can begin to get into the energy, you will begin to learn as others have done through honing perception, that this energy has layers and levels to it, with our own perceptual abilities developing and growing as we put ourselves to the task.

Electricity in the U.S. “vibrates” or cycles at 60 cycles per second.  This is how the energy oscilates.  This is quite fast.  Imagine trying to detect sixty cycles or oscilations per second.  Prana leaves electricity in the dust.  In order to detect and feel the “movement” of the energy requires a special form of awareness. Because it is moving at the speed of light, the amount of information coded within it is vast.  It is more correct that it radiates all through us than that it moves.  The movement that people feel is actually the result of harmonics, which are multiple frequencies interacting with each other.  What we think we are experiencing as directional flow is actually about how different frequencies are interacting….and these frequencies are in truth “manufactured” in the light body as a result of how awareness either allows or impedes the flow of this energy.  As a result of how this happens (the self does this as a result of how it is thinking and feeling!—what thoughts and what feelings–for these themselves will have their own frequency based on what and how the person thinking about them feels about whatever it is that it is thinking or feeling), there is created this sense of flow.

Most people who are not aware of this incredibly fast speed of this energy will simply follow how the “flow” seems to operate and will put their attention to recreating the directional flow effect.  This works.  There is simply not the same level of comprehension about what is happening.  But in the same way that you can take an aspirin and not know exactly what it is doing in your body in order for it to work, so too can you detect these slower-than-light effects that give a sense of direction and just follow the directional appearance and it will work.

So what this means is that there is an effort on the part of most people who have attained an awareness of their energy as being part of a vast bliss field to use the energy through focusing the mind to try and transmute blocked portions of the light body so that the flow of energy might be less impeded.

The “backward flow” of the Golden Flower is itself an end to wasting energy and instead placing the energy of awareness back into the self so that energy accumulates within the self instead of outside of it.  Within this flow there is also a flow of energy that moves from the root or base of the spine upwards toward the heart and into the head.

It is a curious effect that when you are able to move the energy vibration that is in the root or sacral chakras, for example, so that they begin to vibrate faster than normal, they begin to express their energy as the energy in other centers, such as the solar plexus, the heart, throat, third eye, or crown chakras.  When this happens, it has a natural toning and shaping effect that will almost always remove blocked material. By simply changing the vibration of one chakra to another, this “reverse flow” is achieved.  Again, people swear that the energy is moving upwards, but this is not so. The energy is moving in ALL directions at once and is moving an incomprehensible amount every fraction of a second.  To say that it is moving like a snake is missing what is happening.  The snake is the result of energy harmonics in the body, the result of many different vibrations at different octaves or frequencies interacting with one another and creating a secondary appearance of movement. The energy is moving much much faster than any of these harmonic effects that are described by yogis, for example.

 

The central concept to awakening using the secret of the golden flower is how to turn awareness inward for a sustained period of time.  Buddha himself (Gautama) developed a method called vipissana that is a ten day period of no talk, just mindfulness and meditation.  This only works if you are able to turn enough awareness inward in order to “build” energy that can have the effect of breaking down the cognitive barriers that hold back awareness of the experience.  This said, you should prepare before practicing these methods.  Preparation to me would be resolving as many things that upset you about your life.  These will come back to haunt you in grander ways once awakening is initiated.  Those with a heavy load of trauma or unforgiven issues will suffer a great deal during awakening, and they will do so needlessly. You might think you have no major issues, but awakening will uncover them in such a way that you will wind up coming around to a place where you realize that we all have them and that they tend to be shoved down so prior to awakening we aren’t as aware of them as we ought to be.  Word to the wise!

So a process of releasing blocks is an important first step to having a more harmonious awakening.  If not enough is removed you can get stuck as many who are awakening spontaneously are doing today.  It is a natural hazard of the process as it is most often being experienced today.

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I know that for many who seek enlightenment, a better way, a more authentic life, this most often means reading widely and trying to see if you can pry out the gold from our storied past.  I was myself a seeker since age nine when I felt like there was something more.  I could not quite put my finger on it, but over the years this sense has led me down many different roads, but all of them have led back to me right here and now.

When I awoke and my blood ran with a sacred fire that began to transform me from the moment it began to move in me, I have been part of an accelerated process of becoming.  What I have seen, though, is that most people treat this condition as rare, unique.  I want to dispell this notion and explain that you do not need a system or even information on any of this.  You do not need kundalini meditation or yoga or special breathing, mantras, or any of it.  You don’t.  You do not need arcana, or ancient texts to get you there.  Chances are that the books that do speak of it, you wont “get” unless you already have it.  I have observed that ancient Christian texts that explain this process of awakening very well are complete mysteries to the scholars who study them.  By scholars I mean the likes of Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman, for a few.  The problem is that what is being described is itself a nonphysical reality so any effort at trying to describe or explain it will either be so basic that there is no information contained, or it will be clothed in symbol and metaphor.  The truth in most great teachers’ teachings about this is right out in the open and most do not get it.  Even Jesus laments that his own disciples didn’t get it.

Reaching the infinite, cosmic consciousness, or enlightenment, is not something that we were ever designed to reach by way of methods, and it is one reason why I do not offer many, if at all. Why?  Because it is just so incredibly simple.  Awakening is itself a release of what is holding you back from your natural state.  As it edges into your life, it becomes a sustaining fire of transformation as you and everyone else who has ever had this has experienced.  What we are undoing is centuries of programming that has conditioned us all to focus the bulk of our awareness through our rational minds.  This awakening is itself the result of awakening both the current and the hemisphere in the body that aligns with the current of energy that we are each holding back in our lives.  This current is known as the kundalini shakti in the Hindu tradition, but is highly aligned to the right brain and with nonrational and nonlinear thinking.  While the rational mind can be a good servant in this process, many people believe (Ken Wilber one of them it seems) that we go at this rationally.  But this is itself a mistake.  The rational mind is here to serve the right brain, the more feminine aspect of our consciousness.  Why? Good question. This is what is being called the Divine Feminine, and it is also the Holy Ghost (no matter how much some Christians would like to raise doubt that this is somehow a “false” spirit—no—it is quite real alright!)

We are beautifully made.  We have two capacities within us that handle a broad range of processing of experience.  The rational and linear left brain excels at making lists, making priorities, and seeing details.  It is, I content, the seat of the earthly ego that identifies  itself as an individual entity in its environment. An over-reliance on this part of our awareness and inner workings leads to a feeling of separation (leading to alienation, too). We are made to exist in stasis, in a delicate kind of range of balance in our physiological functioning.  It is all a matter of balance.  So just as an over-reliance on the left brain egoistic sides of our being can make us feel estranged and alone, there is another side to us that sees the other side of our world.  Sadly, THIS part of us has been largely submerged.  If it hadn’t, we would all see the connections indwelling in all things less as some mystic woo-woo but as a tangible verifiable fact.  No woo-woo needed!

Awakening, or bouts of nonduality all have at their core an experience of an erasure of that which seems to make us separate.  This is because at a certain level, everything is connected, but most people never reach this level of awareness.  It is, however, existing right beside your linear processor of yours.  Since developing this concept based on my own personal experience, I have found that a lot has come out that supports this notion.  Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, who I have written about a few times before, has both a book and a TED talk describing an experience she had of her left brain shutting down after the had a stroke one morning.  Want to guess what she experienced as a result of this?  She experienced a state of enlightenment.  She describes it perfectly in her TED talk.

Enlightenment is not something that we should have to work at.  Enlightenment is a natural state that has been suppressed.  But as a result of this, our race here on this planet have created all sorts of processes and methods to try and trigger it.  We have all kinds of esoterica that has been created over centuries that all point to it.  But at the end of the day it is about one simple thing: releasing the feminine aspect of consciousness (as we define it) from its cognitive cage in our awareness.  Doing this sets into motion a change in how the body functions. It changes HOW you feel.  this reinforces different modes of behavior, too.

The physiological changes that take place in the body are well known and observable.  It leads to better health, better cognition, and most often the awakening of latent abilities and seemingly miraculous happenings. What I write about in my book Waking The Infinite is how our physiology is actually connected, tuned in directly to events happening around us.  I know; you might think I am talking about the Law of Attraction. Not really.  To be absolutely correct, I am uncovering a way by which we can live where the rate of manifestation can be increased many fold.  I am not suggesting that we will get more things, more stuff; I am showing a way by which the self can be arranged so that when you are in the flow with your higher self and when you can clear away the energy blocks, it is possible to see events so uncanny that they defy description.  These happen ALL THE TIME in my life.  This is not some weirdo’s manifesto, but is, I observed, tied into what the quantum physicists say we cannot do (because there is no proof) which is to link from the atomic level of “weirdness” to the human-scaled level of experience.  What happens in the weird wild world of the quantum universe can happen in our world, and in the book I show you how this is done.  To do it requires that you change, to become all that you can be.  Then, just as Jesus said, when you ask the mountain to move, it will move.

We are releasing the very block that each of us have placed in our emotional lives that keep the waters of “she” dammed up.  This is the fluid part of us, the part that can see vastness in a moment, and see the interconnectivity in all things.  The rational mind cannot, will not, do this.  And those who try wind up grasping a corpse.

When you consider that enlightenment is releasing a cognitive block that allows awareness of something long hidden to flow into conscious awareness, you can perhaps begin to understand or see how the self needs to arrange itself in order to best accommodate this change.  Many people struggle with it, and the more they try to be rational with it, the more they struggle.  You can see the evidence of these types, and some do a very good job of it, but they are taking something entirely without limit and trying to fit it into neat cognitive boxes.

You can comb and tease through this field gently and get all kinds of amazing ideas, concepts, discoveries, yes, and they will become the mountain of 10,000 things….all physical phenomenon, creations that are part of our being here.  Each important as markers for where we are as individuals and as a species.  Without being able to abide with this rich sense of Presence that is the energy that is in all things, doing this may be limited.

The first year of my awakening I had what I describe as being taken by the energy down into the world of the subatomic.  It was itself an amazing journey, one that showed how a very basic form of matter could turn itself from matter into energy, basically changing its form.  It were these incredibly small particles, I was told, that formed everything.  These
“particles” though were themselves conscious.  They formed aggregations of themselves in amazingly immense and vast ways that create matter, events, and were the things that our thoughts ride upon.  These things, whatever they were or are, were like a key to understanding all of matter.  What was most interesting was how they behaved: they moved from particle to wave and this I was told was VERY important.  When I looked into physics, like what Einstein was dealing with, there was little talk about any of this. I suspect that this is why Einstein’s theory of Relativity fails to help us come up with a unified field theory…..which if its on the mark, it should do.  But it doesn’t.  I soon found that quantum theory was explaining a lot more, which is how matter is both particle and wave.  This is important because in a way, consciousness is this way and it is the dance of our two sides of the yin and yang.  One is limited (particle) which is the left brain and the other is not.  In fact, this “other” (feminine) has the capacity to create sheer miracles.  In physical life, the feminine is capable of nurturing two particles that merge into something that is greater than the sum of their parts, which is a new life.  What happens on the physical level of our animal nature is itself a reflection of what happens in consciousness, but at another level of dimension of experience (meaning that it is not literally the same but approximate or similar).  Thus we have the yin (feminine) and the yang (masculine) in the Taoist tradition and the Shakti/Shiva in the Hindu tradition.  And every other tradition has aspects of this contained within it. This was possible because I had merged these two forces running inside of me. The more I merged them in bliss in my body, the more this material would come.  These were in pitched states of intense meditative focus.  I became  hyper-aware.Turns out that the Vedas actually describe how people often are able to SEE into the world of the impossibly small, in documents that describe very well the concept of the atom, for example.  Thing is, I am not a Hindu.  I do not need faith or belief.  I ONLY need to be HUMAN.  People!  HUMAN!  WE ARE ONE.  🙂  (I am beginning to feel like Dr. Bronner in his soap label sermons!)

I once had a friend explain that I felt like I was “Waaaay out there!” but in truth, I am incredibly present.  This is because the missing ingredient, the “feminine” in me was now moving and merging with its counterpart in my body, which is just as kundalini is said to do.  It is also what Jesus described when he said “I am one with the Mother and Father.”  Yes, he said “Mother and Father” many times as verified in apocrypha and in the Nag Hammadi scrolls, documents dug up in the deserts of Egypt in 1945 and which were fully translated in the early 1970’s.  These are new (old) stories that have managed to survive the book burnings that took place in the wake of the Nicean Council that was intended to determine what the dogma and the books were going to be that we would later call the Bible.  Sadly, the truth was made into heresy.  But regardless of what did happen, the little secret here is that no matter who you are or what belief or system you are into, when this comes, unless you are dead, you will feel this very sensual rise of energy that feels like the embrace of TWO in one (Christ or Cosmic Consciousness as the child of their energetic union).  Now as I write this, understand, there is no man nor woman there.  These are forces in our very physiology that causes one to feel this way.  It is intelligent, yes, and its movement will change your life.

In every situation, whether it is traceable or not, what stirs awakening is a letting go of that which held back the waters of this experience.  There is nothing that you need to know.  Like a baby, you are programmed for this.  It is in your DNA, it is in your blood.  It in fact runs in your body even as your consciousness has blocked it out.

What is happening to us is itself how our feelings inhibit the production of those chemical triggers that sustain the fire of awakening in us.  This is NOT just some cosmic energy.  It is ALL of us, all the way down to the calcium in our bones and to the tremor of prana lighting us up.  When you are able to release the emotional material that is serving to inhibit this physiological shift in you, awakening is itself only a matter of time. I know: there are centuries worth of people who have spoken of only the righteous “getting” this.  Bullshit!  The ones who “get” this are those who have in some measure been honest or who have helped to release something deeper within, something that they may have suppressed for a long time.  Some of it may not even make sense for the very fact that this suppressed material DOESN’T make sense.  This is part of our irrational selves.  When something has been shoved down inside of us because its too hard to bear or look at, it forms the corpus of blocks in our bodies, both physical and etheric.  There are traditions built on aiding in releasing these blocks.

What can trigger this is broad for the simple reason that our emotional material that is suppressed is broad.  In some cases, people do not identify what just  happened to cause it, only that something came loose.  Maybe it was the twig that broke that caused it.  Sometimes we ripen by ways of simple things, less like science and more like poetry.

In some cases, it is a simple willingness to stop rationalizing and allow awareness to return to its root.  Sometimes a chakra cleansing exercise might be enough, and this most certainly does release blocked material.  In some cases really strong emotions can unblock material.  There are a LOT of people describe how intense emotions were felt just prior to their awakenings. Sometimes strong emotions did it.  I had a twin soul (as they are called) who described a dream she had about six months before we awoke together where she was standing looking out across the world from a great height and a man walked up to her and asks her somewhat chidingly while the depths of the energy began to stir, “Do you remember?  Are you ready for it?”  She said she did, and that she was.

When Buddha awoke, he was not doing much of anything except meditating under that tree.  THAT is how simple all of this is.  As a result, Buddha sought to develop a method for his followers to attain what he had attained, which was essentially a copy of what he had been doing.  This is called vipisanna meditation.  I have a family friend who awoke using this method.  It involves sustained quiet, mindfulness, and meditation, a state of being that most people almost never allow themselves.  Normally, we are so focused outwardly that it never occurs to us just who or what we are.  This method can help with this.

Will it do it for you?  It is hard to say.  I can say with absolutely certainty that what helped me awaken was letting go of a long-standing sense of guilt with the universe that I was not doing enough in my life.  When I let that go, it was as if a log had been dislodged in my heart and I began feeling different immediately.  This log was itself a block for any energy moving in my system.  Who knows what sorts of blocks you have, but there are a lot in most humans (hundreds of thousands from big to small and in every center of energy in the body from foot to crown).

This feeling, once allowed enough room in me, continued to grow over a six month period until my process grew into a full-fledged “awakening.”  I suspect that the reason why my awakening was gradual was that I had a lot of material in the way, a lot of suppressed material that had to be slowly teased out of my consciousness.  Once that was done, the fire rose up through me.  Everything that you could say about my awakening went against what the scrolls and documents all say.

So what do I do?

You realize who you are without the coverings, what some call illusion.  I resist calling it that because I like to call it what it is (like a proper Tantric would) which is that it is a CREATION.  If you see these things as creations you see perhaps that you can create something different!  You can live and create in a wildly different way! My own creative life has been completely renovated in so many ways based on my own awakening.    WHat you created a year ago will be different now.  But to understand what it is that you are creating, you also have to examine the beliefs that underpin those actions/creations, for they are surely born out of that kind of foundation. But this is where things get juicy and wonder-filled!

You have to get to the part of you that dreams, that is the “secret” you, the part of you that you feel within you that is not subject to outwardly looking into the world.  It is the part that knows there is more but is softer, more afraid of speaking the truth for fear of how it might sound.  It is the wellspring of our magical selves.  It has been suppressed and called illegitimate for centuries.  It is our source-point and wellspring of wonder and awe.  It is so strong, so powerful, that it alone is capable of taking you apart, piece by piece and putting you back together again.  It alone has the awareness and the intelligence.  The rational mind cannot do this.

Just look at our world and you can see how we have teetered on the edge of destroying the planet and ourselves all due to our short-sightedness, courtesy of our rational minds that are unable to glimpse the bigger picture. It is also part of our imaginations and our creative selves.  If you look at how artists have been treated in our society, you will see how lopsided our values have been.  We prefer to build bombs that are ten million dollars a piece instead of fostering creativity as a nurturing source for culture.  It seems we are about as busy destroying culture as we are in trying to build it!  And of course, artists are often seen as weirdos, freaks, or just “out there.”  The reason for this is that most rationally minded people never bother to get enough into the mind of the creative self to every see and feel what its like to live there. We say artists starve and so its not a good idea to be one, and yet, its because we so undervalue the creative that we are ourselves choking off culture in all of our communities.  We cheer when an arts organization gets a grant for $50,000.00 without ever considering how much we put to armaments on a per capita basis.  If we knew the difference we might blush or grow white! I’ll tell you that in 2009 the per capita spending was $2,141.00 for our military spending Source. What do you think the per capita spending is on arts, do you think?  Yeah.  You get the idea.  With bases all over the world and our hand in everyone’s pie, it is no wonder things are so expensive.  Time to be a light house.  Time to realize that our involvement in the world is not really spreading democracy as we have been told, but is only serving the military industrial complex and those who stand to make the most money from it.  It might seem cynical, but it is true. We spend 22 billion a year to secure our borders.  It is something to think about, really see and understand in terms of where our priorities are as a nation and species.

The world of energy is in all things and as a result, the energy residing in a mouse in the deserts of Mexico can be felt and discerned from a great distance for the simple fact that energy, having no mass, can be anywhere and everywhere.

Knowing and abiding with who and what you are is not as easy as it sounds.  Inside of all of us is also lurking our skeletons within that depth of being.  It is as though the cabinet door to Narnia, a magical world, is first populated by our horrors that we have each put in there in just such a way that they also keep us from delving too deeply within it to see that beyond our skeletons is a deep blue world of wonder.  It is this part of us that those who awaken discover once the skeletons are dealt with.  In just the same way that we can see the world through our physical senses, we also have a part of us, the opposite and hidden side of us, that “Shakti” lurking that also has senses.  We each have these, and they are tied into our etheric or pranic bodies.  The world of energy is in all things and as a result, the energy residing in a mouse in the deserts of Mexico can be felt and discerned from a great distance for the simple fact that energy, having no mass, can be anywhere and everywhere.  Those who awaken describe psychic abilities, which are a natural result of a more conscious awareness of the flow of this energy within them.  This energy can itself be anywhere and it forms the basis for all psi abilities.  They might all SEEM different, but they are at their core based on the flow of energy that can be and is everywhere.  These are what are called siddhis by the Hindu yogis.  This is not a Hindu thing; it is a human thing….be you Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Native American, Eskimo, or Aborigine.

This is also why some can awaken by the simplest means.  You turn, you feel something drop and boom.  You are a goner!  Krishnamurti, identified as the “World Teacher” by the likes of Blavatski and the Theosophists didn’t have it.  He dissolved his “Order Of The Star” because he knew better.  Whatever it was, he didn’t have it.  It took years before it struck him.  And perhaps some might argue that those Theosophists had an intuition about that U.G. Krishnamurti….and perhaps they DID see something….or perhaps it served to help him to examine himself a little more and ask what IS this thing they think I have that I KNOW I don’t have?  He met with those who DID have it.  One of them said he wasn’t ready for it.  U.G., being prone to indignation and arrogance, became angry at this man and his dismissal of U.G.  Years later, when asked how others could “get it,” he replied, “You don’t want this.”  Those who are not ready for how it rearranges your inner furniture will have a very hard time of it.  You have to let go and let this thing just take you apart.  You have to be honest with yourself, brutally honest, and let it have its way with you.  “She” is always right!

You are using your earthbound consciousness to form a kind of bridge with a higher order awareness that is at once a part of you and a part of your higher self, which you have largely been out of contact with for most of your life. This bridge requires a certain “arrangement” within the self, and it CANNOT be done by way of the rational mind. The rational mind is limited.  It is like seeking to hook up 4 million volts with a wire that is rated for 40 amps.  Silly, right?  So you use the part of you that IS capable of dealing with this, and it is the irrational and unlimited and also the dreamy side of who you are. Two wires are now joined in your awareness and the thing that brought these wires together was what was removed that was getting in the way of conducting a circuit of continuity from one end of you to the other….a microcosm for how the universe is made: we are all made to be connected, tied together.  All of creation is like this.  We as the silly humans are just now catching on to what the Native Americans have said, the aboriginal peoples, who have explained that everything is part of a web of life.  It is so because they felt it, saw it, and knew it.  Sitting Bull spoke about how he would find answers from listening to meadow larks.  Now that might strike you as crazy, but not if you live in the world the awakened do!

The charm of the world emerges in all of this.

And so here you are wondering what this is.  It is so simple.  It is who and what you are but most of it has been suppressed. Its not hard to understand what it is.  Look at our societies down through time.  Look at how the feminine has been suppressed, marginalized, swept under the rug.  The story of Mary Magdalene and Jesus was itself the subject of a lot of disinformation. She was labelled a prostitute by a pope early on in the process.  The church has since admitted that there was no evidence for this.  The Gnostic texts describe how Jesus says “I am one with the Mother and the Father.”  A paternalistic tradition followed in his wake and sought to take the Mother out of the picture.  And this Mother is the Mother that lies in our consciousness…..not as a literal anima, but as a quality of consciousness.  This is why most male teachers who awakened also softened during their years.  Buddha was himself angular and sharp, he was part of a warrior lineage that laid control over vast swaths of land and made themselves kings by their own decree.  But this man is shown as soft and round, not the strong angular fellow he was who also wore a beard.  He is shown sitting on a lotus in his bliss.  It is because of the flow of this field of energy in him that did this.  It will also do it to you.  And the more you resist the “her” the more you will make this process maddening.  You simply have to trust it, what Christians say, “give it up to God.”  If you can trust this larger awareness, it will stop seeming like an outsider and will connect you into the larger realm of your awareness so that you will cease being a Balkanized consciousness.

You will be knitted back, each block released, each misgiving let go, you will feel more whole, and more able to send the kit of your earthbound self into sheer infinity.  Most people are just not ready for this fire, so they resist.  But once awakened, its going to keep working on you.  By letting go and allowing this thing to work on its own, you can be here and let this larger part of you work on the harder stuff.  This is nothing short of learning how to merge with your higher being ongoing and in a contiguous way.  And most people will simply not like this approach because its too simple.  The problem is that every method is meant to help you FEEL a certain way.  This is why teachers create methods.  But what happens when you don’t get what it is they are trying to get you to feel into?  You move from method to method.  Ultimately, you will learn it is not about method but about simply being, of releasing that little something that knows itself as part of everything else, that part that is anchored in your right brain that is able to glimpse, see, and make connections within with this “everything” that is nonduality.  This can be scary for some people for how unlimited it is.  A drop of “her” in your awareness is enough to do it.  One drop contains the whole, and YOU are part of this whole.

So meditation sometimes does it.  Going within and being quiet and looking inward can help.  But realize, many people try to go within and get quiet and most often wind up situating themselves inwardly FEELING themselves but while looking out with their senses.  You have to go into your FEELING self and look outwardly through THAT part of yourself.  We are not used to this, but this is where the infinite lies.  The lens of our energetic awareness is within our feeling selves, not our rational selves. We communicate to the universe through feeling, not through the rational.  the rational factual material SERVES the creative aspect alive in every atom, cell, and world.  But you have to know how to turn your awareness inward.  You can’t sit and then just be aware of all the noise on the street and the itch on your butt and the fly in the room.  When the awareness of this gateway becomes obvious to you, all of those things wont be distractions.  They will simply be a part of all phenomenon because by then, the world will begin to feel like one big BUZZ of energy.  The Taoists said “Turn The Lantern Of Your Awareness Inward.”  The reason for this, as described in the “Secret Of The Golden Flower” is that  we bleed our energetic awareness outward through our sensory selves.  It isn’t like we have a limited amount of energy, though.  It is due to there being little awareness of the inner illumination.  Building up some energy within can cause things to happen.  Building energy inwardly is like striking a match and then having a sustained flame within.

This is not all there is.  Just as there is a physical world, there is the soul of the physical world, too, the inside of things.  This awareness will bring you an awareness or a capacity for this awareness of this side to the physical.  But to do this you need to really turn your energy inward instead of outward.  FEEL your energy.  Sit with your energy and be quiet.  Get really quiet. You might have to do this when you go to sleep because sometimes you really do have to get THAT quiet and still within.  Our inner chatter is so deafening that it drowns out the awareness of our own energy.  But the energy itself is the thing that will liberate you.  Keep it flowing within instead of flowing outward.  It is no surprise that many methods seek to have your look within.

Something that is very simple that will help you to feel your energy more and more is breathing using an alternating nostril breathing that I have used and have had my students use in art school.  It is incredibly calming for those who are willing to let its magic work on them.  It involves closing one nostril with your finger and breathing slowly in and then out four times through that one nostril.  Then, you alternate to the other nostril and do this four times, alternating all the way.  What you want to be able to do is to have your thought chatter slow or stop as you place all awareness on your breathing.  Breath work has an amazing capacity to stop all thought, and stopping this chatter is one way to help you to get in touch with your energy and to know yourself.  Do this exercise as many times as you need in order to find your thoughts calm.  Then, the process is so simple most miss it: FEEL how you feel without thinking it or trying to analyze it.  It is so simple, it escapes most people.

It is here that the source of all magic lies.  Our notion of magic, though, has been subject to a kind of mythologizing process.  Magic is actually real, but we have simply choked it off.  We have instead made our leaders or our god men and women do amazing deeds while we have languished because of original sin or some other reason that has served to keep the fire of being at bay. When you awaken, when you think of something, it has a way of happening.  Buddha, upon awakening thought how he no longer wanted to fast, that he needed to eat.  Just then a woman walked by with a bowl of rice and asked if he would like it.  I have no doubt that this story sought to tell the story of the “synchronistic” event within awakening.  Jesus also was trying to teach his followers to rely on this aspect of their being teaching them how upon awakening when they ask the mountain to move, it will move.  Those who have awakened often describe how their lives are made up of one event after another like this.  I did all the research for my book Waking The Infinite using this method.  It takes some getting used to, but it works amazingly well. It requires you to think and be different. It means letting go of control so that this “other” can enter and begin manifesting in just the right way.  It is this other side of us that this can happen, and it can happen each day.

How many times have I allowed these events into my life, entirely impossible events where my finger plucks a random book off the shelf in the library without looking at its title only to find a passage that speaks directly to what it is I am writing in my book.  Listening deeper, I have followed inner promptings to go places and to do things a certain way, never sure what it all means, only to find myself standing in front of the source I needed for my next chapter.  This is why some people were branded witches, I am convinced, because their lives seemed to be charmed.  Of course we have also been suspicious of women who knew how to practice old methods of herbal medicine and many men drove them out of it by branding them witches and having them killed.  Most were likely devout Christians, even!  But the women who were in touch with their own source of magic often had unusual things taking pace all around them.  If they asked for it, it just came.  Since they may have not bought into a more mainline kind of Christianity, many would have assumed that they had some pact with some being other than the angry and punishing father God.  All the while, it is all so much more subtle than this.

The energy that flows through us that makes all of this possible flows when the rational mind steps aside.  When the ego is pushed to the back of us, the flow increases.  When this flow has been the strongest, this is when the magical events in my uncanny life have increased.  Every time.  It is a corollary that I not just see each and every time, but something that I allow when I let my mind stop being so limited.  “Dream big, Parker” it whispers, and when I do, the flow within meets and mirrors a flow outwardly that is the same. When it happens, it all seems so impossible…..and yet it happens over and over in such a way that there is no mistaking it. When there is nothing inwardly (a block) that competes with the thought, it can manifest very quickly.  It seems like magic, but it is the forgotten aspect of living a life that now have the awareness of our fluid Shakti selves alive in us.  It is also the channel that connects each of us to ever larger realms of consciousness.  What is felt as a flow of energy is like a creek by your door.  Following it, it leads to still larger creeks and eventually, to rivers and then to a vast limitless ocean.  This is an ocean of bliss.  It is what we have all been waiting for.

Come, the ocean is beckoning!  It is simple.  It really is.  Overcoming the patterning and old habits of being the victim in life, or being powerless, or not mattering, or being inconsequential, or any of the thousands of stories we tell ourselves, will all in time, at least potentially, we swept aside.  For each of us, it is a matter of our free will.  Can’t nothing come up against THAT force!  So make sure you are ready and able to let go the desire to control.  Let go of the bank and let yourself float, flow.  It really is innevitable.  I am only here as a reminder.

Beyond all methods, beyond all our supposed knowledge, we are each as simple in awakening as a flower is before the sun.  We GOT this!  It is WHO and WHAT we are.  Don’t let anyone else try to make you think or feel otherwise!  I came here to spread what was utterly ubiquitous where I am from.  I am here to spread in whatever way I can, the “heaven” that is locked up within us.  But admission to this “heaven” means getting rid of your shame, all of it.  Thus, everything that we are suddenly moves from seeming dirty and broken-seeming to glorious and perfectly made for meeting awakening.  It is a 180° turn in our awareness.  It was here all along, right in front of us, we just could not see it for what it was.

It is the essence of what Tantra seeks to teach at its core.  It really isn’t about sex.  It is about feeling bliss in such a way that there is no shame and where there is no overemphasis on the sexual.  Our entire BEINGS are lit on fire with the bliss that makes us incandescent.  How do I explain how what was once base energy is allowed to be transmuted….but also released so that the whole body feels energy that is not verging on the orgasmic. How do you allow yours whole body become flooded, engulfed by this sexual-feeling bliss like the flooding of the Nile, and not let it cause a stir in your beyond feeling marvelous?  The blocks, like rocks in the river, cause the perfect flow of this bliss to become rough water.  If enough are there, then we get rapids and white water.  It all happens when the channels for this bliss narrow.  Too much is trying to get through and we all look to the rough water and ooh and ahh and seek those places and wind up upside down and lying on the bank!  But letting this flow all through you unhindered without needing to make it into anything is an important step.  It is how we heal and transmute.  The mere presence of this energy is itself healing.  It teaches you how to handle incredible bliss without losing your head. Like riding the waters of a swift river, you have to keep your head about you.  I can admit to having lost my head a time or two in such waters and it was not pretty, but I also did not drown.  I got back up and continued on.

Imagine if people felt this good all the time.  Imagine how quickly our world would change.  Oh, no doubt, there would be the rational types who might be in hospitals, but there would be enough of us to help them through it.  Right?

The path through this is one of self honesty. Until you can practice this, moving through your process can be difficult.  I know.  All of the material that I KNEW lay within me that was unresolved was always the source of all my troubles and failings.  I cannot begin to tell you how those blocks served to limit how I was able to see.  And once awakening comes, it is important to realize that this force in you has the ability to heal you completely if you let it.  Opening yourself up to your own truth, listen and allow your rational mind to count all of the things that need to be identified that are your worst problems.  It will happily go about this task and deliver it up to you perfectly appointed and arranged on a silver platter (but don’t let it do any more than that 😉 )

Seeking healers in awakening will often be limiting.  You will find that each healer will often, not always, mirror just where you are.  There are healers out there who in subtle ways serve limitation and thus our healing is also limited.  In some ways they can open our eyes, in other ways the limits that they accept are the same limits that we are not aware of ourselves.  It is very rare to be able to find healers who are not limited.  I was lucky to find this, and you have to be ready to seek the highest, to not put any conditions on finding a healer or teacher who is sufficiently ahead of you and healed that you have the chance to heal a lot yourself.  Sometimes we can get very blessed.

A teacher who KNOWS how to parrot a teaching but who does not live it will never be succesful at getting students coming up to embody those teachings.  WHY?  Because beyond the knowledge, there is BEING.  Did you really think this was all about knowledge?  Silly, it is about being.  All great “teachers” are able to simply remind you of who you are beyond your filters and lenses when the “student” is ready.  This is why a glance is often more powerful than any conveyance of information.

You are simply here to remember.  Are you ready?

book blogI promised myself I would not read other sources on awakening while writing my book.  This was not meant to be a term paper, a thesis, something that leaned on the past through countless well-researched sources.  Mind you, I teach and have had a lot of schooling so I have had plenty of work under my belt where it comes to research.  It wasn’t that I eschew research, no, I just wanted this to come from me alone.  I wanted to know that if I was seeing things rightly, that other sources would naturally agree.  This wasn’t about reinventing the wheel necessarily, although I was up for something along those lines if something new popped up.  Okay, if not a wheel, then a few extra fancy spokes in the wheel.  :smiles:

So as many know, the bulk of the book is done.  Whoo-hoo! This has freed me up to begin wandering and reading some things, and in a way I think I have been thirsty for this.  I have been thirsty less to learn but to taste the different flavors in this experience.  We all know how to discern, to read and take what works and leave the rest.  What we don’t understand, it may resolve into comprehensibility at a later date, right?  You are ready when you are ready, and the things is, the universe has a way of bringing it to you (least it does for me) in perfect, sometimes amazing timing.  This fills me with so much hope and it also teaches me that I need to be more trusting that the same is happening for everyone else.  Seems as humans we have struck out on Crusades and all kinds of rather righteous campaigns in the past untrusting that the truth will resolve within when it’s perfectly suited or time.  I know that may sound like some kind of New Age wishy-washy stuff, but you know, I know it is true.  What I am about to relate to you is another example of this.  It makes me happy.  It makes me hopeful.  It adds a  little extra glisten to the moment I suppose.

So I decided I wanted to find me an old juicy text from China that was not cluttered with someone’s own ideas about what it means who is writing from the present or semi-present.  I had finished up the book I was writing by doing some research on Carl Jung’s concept he coined called synchronicity.  I know I said I didn’t do any research in my book, and mostly this is true, but I felt a duty to make sure I was not taking anything for granted about what I thought I understood Jung to have said as it relates to this term he came up with for this phenomenon.  It was while doing this that I came across some quotes he included from some Taoist sages, and some of them I liked because they seemed to be on the mark to me.  I jotted down their names and decided I would go to the university library to look up some books on them to see if they had something interesting to say about awakening.

I dutifully searched the card catalog and wondered to myself if this was really the right approach.  Understand that all of my research that I have done for my book were all books or sources that came to me by unusual routes.  When I was working on the chapters having to do with coping with kundalini and accelerating healing blocks, for example, I had a series of unusual events that happened where I had different people told me about how the role of movement helped to heal past trauma.  This was one of those woo-woo kind of events that happen frequently where information just falls into my lap without my looking for it.  It was a great way to do research.  It just would come to me.  So as a result, I wondered if this was the best way to do it, looking for a source instead of letting one just fall into my lap.  I dutifully wrote down the sources and went looking for them anyway.

So there I was in the stacks getting the books I searched for.  Taoists.  While I was there, though, I noticed a random book in the stacks that jumped out at me.  It jumped out because it was so small, so thin.  I pulled it out not knowing what its title was, the binding was so narrow along the back.  I took my books and decided I would leaf through this little book with the pretty flowers on the cover.  It was called The Secret Of The Golden Flower.  Was it poetry, maybe?  I looked inside while taking the books to check them out and thought maybe so because it looked like it was divided up into verses.

I got the books home and read through some of the Taoist sages Jung had referenced.  They were okay, but honestly, there wasn’t a lot there that spoke to much about awakening.  But this book, this accidental find, this casual pluck from the shelves turned out to be one of the big books about awakening.  Perfect.

So I have been reading this book, and I like it because the person translating it keeps his own commentary out of the writing itself.  In an interesting twist, he mentions Carl Jung in the book, a point that I had not noticed in the information I was researching when working on the material for Jung.  I searched through Jung’s book Synchronicity and did not find any mention of the book in the portions I had read, but found it later.

It is interesting how the book itself was written.  It was a problem I sought to correct in my own, which was that ideas were brought up recursively throughout, over and over, instead of a straight line progression.  Always returning to the lamp, the light, turning within.  I am not sure that it is written in a style that westerners can relate to.  And yet, this is not something you can really write and describe.  it is less an idea you apprehend and more that it is yourself that you apprehend.  Like dry pressed flowers between the shaves of a forgotten book, the remnants only speak vacantly of the great life which once existed within the one-dimensional faces of fading beauty.

The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by Thomas Cleary.  It is, I suspect, the best translation into English.  If you are reading this and your native language is not English, my guess is that a book like this will be translated into still other languages.  It forms the corpus of nondual understanding in a simple frame.  After all, the universe conspired that I pluck it from the shadowy shelves of that vast library of books only a few days ago.

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