The Secrets Move Among Us Now

When I was young, eight years old, I dreamed of a very unusual building. I had never seen it before, but because of the content of the dream I suspected that it was a location I had lived in, or maybe it was created in my mind-it was so unusual looking.Enough information was there in the dream to inform me that this had taken place in the 1800’s. When it is important to find a way to convey the information, dreaming will accomplish it.

Years later I saw an image of the exact same building I had seen in my dream. I saw this building on the cover of a magazine. The building was the Tibetan monestary in Lhasa, the location where the Dali Lama resided before Tibetan monks were persecuted under the Chinese invasion of their country.

I know very little about Tibetan Buddhism. I grew up under a kind of inner decree as a child with a directive which stated that I was not to join any school of thought or any religion. This voice or presence said later when I asked why that I would understand this in time. For a particular reason it was important for my own path to not become invested in systems.

When awakening came, it soon became clear. My final chapter in dealing with the innermost secrets of Christianity was it seemed to show how its secrets are the secrets of all other traditions and that these secrets are accesible to all.

This has not been the case before our time now. In fact, the secrets have been surrounded by traditions that have locked them within veils both cultural and dogmatic. There have been reasons for secrecy in order to protect people who had not properly developed their minds and bodies for a force of understanding and presence that can send a person into shock and overwhelm. But in recent years, something has changed…

A series of events worldwide has resulted in a condition whereby what was secret is now being known. These events go back through the centuries and were catalyzed by what you could call steps backwards by humanity. There are too many to count, but they helped yo create a condition by which a threshold was crossed. I will say that I do not see this effect as being like God coming to our aid, but rather is part of a requirement for there to be balance if at all possible. The appearance of many people within so short of a time on earth who are awakening is just such an example. On the one hand, it communicates that we are in a dangerous time, but it also indicates that there are ways that we can eliminate or heal this danger through understanding better our relationship to each other, to our consciousness, and the interrelatedness of all life.

Dangerous times? What??

Yes. While the wave of awakenings is a very hopeful sign, it also is a sign of possible danger because something is being countered. Like? Like extremism of all types, like a darkening rift between those seeking illumination and those stuck in shadow. When I awoke I saw just how deeply some around me tumbled into shadow just as I awoke. One of the people tumbling down asked me if I had noticed this. Oh yeah, I noticed. I remained quiet about it because I knew what it meant. I knew these people would become purposefully ignorant, cruel, even bestial. And they did. The message was “respect freewill,nothing you say will dig them out, only they can do that.” And so it was. I fled the burning world.

So yes, our presence is part of a balance. Its also part of an evolution. This is an innevitable rise of a long-turning tide. In time, the tide will likely turn in the other direction. There will be a flowering for a time, and our movement or day in the sun may turn to winter. That is, if we let it. If we don’t teach, or spread knowing nondogmatically, people could devolve again. It is a cycle. It could also becone part of a new evolutionary spiral. It is up to us. Freewill. Anyway, I digress.

One remarkable culture that walked the talk of kindness and compassion has been the people of Tibet. They remain an important example for how we can be and what is in us to know. Their insistence on compassion and nonviolence is something we all could learn from. Many cultures that have remained sequestered from Western culture in the last 16000 years often developed keen insights into these secrets.

Venerable Nupa Rinpoche

This morning I had a video come across my feed. I wasn’t looking for it and I hadn’t looked at anything related to it recently. When I watched it, I saw someone in it who I felt an immediate recognition of. It was completely unexpected. I found myself in tears. Okay, so he is an old friend, someone from that time most likely in Tibet. He chose to reincarnate there as a monk later, but I chose to reincarnate in the West. I saw that what he is doing now is not that different from what I am doing, it is just that I am learning to do it without the presence of a tradition or teacher. I needed to have other experiences in order to break open the cosmic egg once and for all.

The Tibetan tradition is steeped in learning how to harness tummo or kundalini for perfecting the body and mind. The video I stumbled upon today is a rare look into what many believe is a tradition that is dying out. I suspect it is in the process of transforming. The Dali Lama has said he will choose to reincarnate outside the Tibetan system next time. I did this a few lifetimes ago, choosing instead to explore the golden thread that runs through other traditions instead. I think this is what will transform some traditions, force them open, and make the secrets more accessible to everyone. I think also that awakening can be spread through a simple act of Presence now. This wont be enough, however. It wont be enough to “trust in God.”

Note: Before having watched the entire documentary myself, I went back to it after writing this to find the documentary expressing aspects of this sense about balance I have been describing. For me it helps to see how, for me at least, that this was a confirmation of the things that I have sensed inwardly.

It is with that that I reccomend to you this important documentary. It is not the be-all, but a piece of a longer strand of truth that runs through all traditions. We are the secret. To know this secret we need only know ourselves beneath the day to day monkey-mind that keeps so many distracted.

Yogis Of Tibet

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An Unmistaken Case Of Reincarnation

NOTE: I have been quiet for a while, I have been busy with building projects and doing work on the studio for improvements to make things work better. Everything is working great, and I am eager to re-christen my studio business after having let it law fallow for a number of years.  I would not have been able to allow myself to go as far “out” as I did in my inner work had it not been for being able to allow the incredible focus required in my business to go by the wayside for a time. That time is now past and I am revving the engines of my new studio practice that will have new elements that will allow me to work with the community in new and beneficial ways. It has been a busy but very exciting time. So with that, a story about reincarnation follows….

 

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It’s hard for many Westerners to wrap their heads around the notion of reincarnation sometimes. We are taught from an early age that this is a belief that verges on superstition, unsupported by science, that it is not within the confines of true Christian though, or of just about any thought outside of Buddhism. There is an incredible resistance in many people’s minds about this subject. I know that in my own experience, everyone that I know who is a skeptic is someone who themselves do not have a past life experience or memory.  I think its perfectly fine to be skeptical, but at a certain point skepticism becomes demagogery.  This is where belief sets in because the very nature of belief is that you are not accepting of something based on factual data, but on no proof whatsoever.  That is a tall order, don’t you think, to accept something without really knowing for sure whether it is true?  On the one hand, this is crucial for being able to explore new ideas or possibilities, but it can also result in swallowing a tall tale hook line and stinker!  In researching our history in Christianity, one can trace where the concept of reincarnation was weeded out by Roman emperors.  It is a fascinating story, and for years I had always heard that it was Emperor Constantine’s wife who was responsible for striking the concept of reincarnation from the Biblical accounts.  In fact, it wasn’t Constantine’s wife, but a later wife of an emperor named Justinian.  That story was recounted in a previous post on the subject on this blog a few years ago. It is worth reading and worth getting up on the subject if you are at all interested in how Christianity was shaped, changed, and finally forged into a version of itself now known as the Orthodox view.  It is not, however, the focus of this blog entry today, though.  If you really want to dig into the subject you can read about the history here:  https://wordpress.com/post/wakingtheinfinite.wordpress.com/1350

 

For whatever reason, I have had numerous past lives that have emerged over time to be known by me.  In most every case, the recollection was part of some lesson being integrated into my heart and mind at the time and which also bore on something that had happened similarly in the past.  What is so interesting is that this is exactly what Tibetan monks and other Rinpoche’s have said reincarnation happens in your memory.  That seems reasonable, right?  As one Rinpoche has said, if you want to know your past life, look at the conditions of your life right now and you will see everything that was in that past life.  These past life recollections were very often part of some pattern shared with events happening today.  In one case, I saw three lifetimes briefly, but which each showed me how I had explored the nature of possessing wealth.  In one life I was born as a king into it, in another, I was a grave robber of many of the surrounding tombs where I had lived and reigned as that king.  In yet another, I was a woman who was part of a large cache of wealth being transported in the hull of a small ship with several other women who I thought of as my sisters.  In this lifetime, I WAS the wealth; I was a possession.  I was part of a harem.

 

In other instances, I have had past life memories bearing on events in my life today, such as a life as a native American man, a freed slave in the post-civil war south, and as a leader of a group of Polynesians who lived on islands in the Pacific during a migration.  This memory came up as I lay on the therapy table with my body worker who does deep tissue and energy work.  Hers was called Kahuna medicine and it honors both sides of our energetic potential; the masculine and feminine forces of Chi or life force energy.  I was lying there as she removed a blocked piece of energy and I found myself jarred back into a very old memory that involved me looking at my feet as a small child of three, suddenly and completely aware of where I was and what was happening.  I was standing on the beach along the Gulf of Mexico in Florida just before being hauled out into the waves to clean the sand off of me after our outing there.  Because I was afraid of the waves, this was a terrorizing event that left me crying all the way home.  Odd reaction, you might think, and maybe so unless you were there with me as I slipped from childhood memory to yet another memory further back in time when I was living on an island in the Pacific with a tribe of dark-skinned people who traveled from island to island in our quest to find our own paradise. In that memory I had called for us to head out across the ocean only to run into a storm so violent, every single person in our group was completely wiped out.  The waves crashing down were unbelievably large and the guilt that lay around my neck was deep and heavy.  It took lifetimes to get to a place where I would be able to release both the guilt but also the fear I had of water that was mirrored in my childhood experience but whose genesis for that fear was farther back in time.  The point being that these two memories were tied together in a way that made them relevant.

I am mentioning this because there was a time when I ever wondered if I would ever have recall of a lifetime. It seemed that for years growing up that things were…well…normal.  And then things began to happen once I moved away from home.  I just began to wake up more and more.  As that happened, more and more things rose to the surface.  Over time, I found that my own dreams at night often carried past life material in them.  So far, I have two languages to my credit that are no longer being spoken from two distinct cultures that I had lifetimes in.  In each case, hearing the language spoken in the memory led me to the culture.  I say this because somewhere you might have traveled to some faraway location and felt it was so familiar, you might have met someone who seemed as though you had known them before and that you simply picked up where you had left off in some seemingly unknown past. Maybe you have friends who wonder over your ability to do something better than most people.  They call you gifted, but maybe it comes from having done it before, having had lifetimes of practice.  An event might have triggered recall, or you might have had dreams about them.  I am of the mind that we need to know who we really are in order that we might perfect ourselves so that we might be able to open our minds more and know how the world really works.  The Easterners call this pulling back the veil of illusion.  Me, I just consider it being able to more accurately perceive the world as it is, instead of as we are.

Well what happens when your teacher dies and you are tasked with finding the new reincarnation of your teacher?  This has already happened and the story of its happening was recorded and is available for you to see on Gaiam tv and Amazon Prime Video.  The story I am writing about is that of a Tibetan monk who recently went on a journey to find his teacher’s reincarnation in a process of discovery that is nothing short of remarkable and should leave those who have been stolid disbelievers with a twinkle of possibility concerning the reality of reincarnation. I have always felt that we need to record instances like these in as clear and unbiased way as we can because helping people to know their true selves, their fuller being in this world is what spiritual liberation is all about.  Jesus taught it, Dogen taught it, Buddha taught it, and all of the other great teachers down through time have taught it.  While their methods might have all been a little different, their concepts are not that different from one another.  Jesus spoke of the “life” or the “water of life” while Zen Buddhists described it as the golden flower, the bloom which bring imperishabillity.

 

The unmistaken child is a contemporary story about the reincarnation of a Rinpoche, an enlightened being who has come to earth to assist others in overcoming the veil of illusion that keeps souls caught in a cycle  of both suffering and reincarnation.  It is quite a lovely story, worth seeing if you get the chance.

 

“If you want to know your future life, know your present actions.”

-Padasabhava, 8th Century