Diary of Awareness

Ardhanarishvara

 

Mahadeva

When someone is going through intense spiritual experiences it's very easy for that person to feel alone and isolated, as if he or she is the only one in the world who's ever experienced what he or she is experiencing. For that reason I decided to share some of what I've experienced and undergone, in hopes that whoever needs this writing will find it and realize that others have been where they're going. For those people who need it, I hope what I have to say will provide support and encouragement.

When I think back on what I've read that has meant the most to me, it has been without a doubt the personal accounts of people's spiritual experiences. Those accounts gave me something to relate to, to compare notes to, sometimes to argue with: something to interact with. I first read Muktananda's Play of Consciousness less than a year after my 1978 experience, and it was the first writing I'd come across that I could relate to. I cannot describe how much it meant to me to be able to read someone's first person account of experiences that were incredibly similar to my own.

Shortly after that, I discovered Longchenpa, and shortly after him, Milarepa's Hundred Thousand Songs and biography. To this day, I still dearly love Milarepa: reading him is like coming home. Awhile later I discovered my attention being drawn to the right side of my chest during meditation, and a few weeks afterward I came across Franklin Jones’ autobiography The Knee of Listening, another excellent first person account. In that book, Jones mentioned Ramana Maharshi, whose name I knew but whom I had never explored —specifically, he talked about the right side of the chest and Ramana’s emphasis on it. So from there, I became acquainted with Ramana’s writings, and his first person accounts of his experiences. I had discovered that all I really needed to do was follow myself back, just relax into myself, rather than do any kind of complicated meditation practice, and I was overjoyed to read Ramana basically saying the same thing. So in that spirit, remembering how much those writings, and others, have meant to me, I decided to resurrect my old Spiritweb writing, with some updates. My hope is that someone will find my writing useful, and that it will give them something to relate to in their own spiritual growth and experiences.

I've considered putting this phrase at the end of every paragraph, in bold red type: "What I am, you are. What you are, I am. Everything that I've experienced you can experience; everything that I am, you are. Everything that you are, I am also." One of the most important things I can give you is to tell you to pay close attention to how you limit yourself, to how you don't let yourself be your Self. Please don't limit yourself by thinking that my experiences are somehow unavailable to you: they are available to you. They're your natural state, they're what you are.

Notes: I've put together a newer version of this site at www.lightseekinglight.com. The writing is the same but I've organized it more by subject than chronologically, and there's a search engine. The pdf file is the same as on this site.

Quite a few people over the years have suggested that I write a book, but I never seem to have the combination of enough time and enough money to be able to focus on a book project. If you find my writing valuable or useful and would like to see a book come out of it, please consider donating to my "Writing a Book" campaign fund. You can donate via "ChipIn" by using the "ChipIn" interface to the left. You'll be taken directly to "Paypal". Thanks!

 

2000 (not on Spiritweb)

A letter to a friend of mine who was having such strong Kundalini flow that she was leaving scorch marks on her bed sheets.

One thing I say to people is “follow yourself back,” but I’ve come to realize that it’s not really clear what I mean by that. I want to attempt to describe what I mean by “following yourself back.” All I can do is describe my own experience, but I hope that what I describe will be relevant to others, or at least give someone a loose framework to hang things on.

Please bear in mind that even though I’m writing about things to sound like separate sections, layers, planes, etc, what I’m really describing takes place as a unity, and that unity is completely contained within the field of the pure presence and pure consciousness of I AM as the field of pure consciousness. Read that last bit again just to make sure you get it: as the field of pure consciousness.

Similarly, all "identities", all "I am this" or "I am that", "I am Light", "I am Darkness", even "I am Everything" and "I am Nothing", are the manifestation of the pure presence of I AM: "I am Roger", "I am Michael", "I am Yvonne", "I am Cecilia", "I am Oscar the cat", "I am Muskeg the dog"; further: "I am hungry", "I am lonely", "I am happy", "I am loved", "I am unloved", "I am proud", and so on—all are manifestations of the pure presence of I AM—all individuality and all egos are that manifestation, and are not separate from the pure presence and pure consciousness of I AM. You do not have to overcome individuality or ego to become one with the I AM. All you need to do is follow yourself back.

So, with these things in mind, I’m going to describe the process going in two directions: first, from the top down, so to speak, and then from the bottom up:

From the I AM to my physical body (I should perhaps add here that I use my physical body as a reference point, but this could be to anything on the physical plane. There is really only one physical body): as the I AM I experience myself as pure presence and simultaneously as pure consciousness. I think of the field of pure consciousness as an ocean of suns through which I, as pure presence, move. And yet I don’t move— an analogy would be the way electricity flows through a wire: we say that the electricity "flows", borrowing the idea of water "flowing" from one place to another, and yet electricity doesn’t flow like water, rather it moves by induction—one atomic particle inducing its neighbor to vibrate at a certain frequency (sorry if this isn’t quite correct and I offend any physicists or electrical engineers).

As pure presence I can feel myself interacting with the ocean of suns (of pure consciousness) and I can also feel myself interacting with each "individual" sun in the ocean (note the quotes around "individual"). If I focus my attention on an individual sun I can see that it has a field of blue around it, and that this field is made up of an infinite number of blue stars or blue pearls. As pure presence my presence causes the sun’s light and warmth, and this light and warmth causes the blue stars or blue pearls to vibrate. The vibration rate of the blue stars/blue pearls is the OM vibration, and this OM vibration gives rise to all creation, to all that is. All creation is contained in the field of the blue stars/blue pearls and all creation arises from the OM, which arises from the blue stars/blue pearls vibrating in response to the sun’s warmth. The sun’s warmth is love. (A side note: this vibration effect also takes place between person and person. If one of the people has an awakened kundalini, meaning that their vibration rate has been raised, that vibration rate will awaken the kundalini in another person if the other person is at all receptive, consciously or unconsciously. This vibration effect from person to person is frequently called "shaktipat")

The OM vibration permeates and sustains all of creation on all levels—it is the core vibration behind the oscillations of subatomic particles on the physical level, it is the heart of light on all planes of creation, from the physical to the astral, to the mental to the causal.

As pure presence I follow myself through the blue star/blue pearl into creation, into the causal, into the mental, into the astral, into the physical—and yet I am always the same, I am always pure presence. I follow myself from the individual blue star down to this individual human body on this planet, and yet I am always the same, I am always pure presence. As pure presence I experience myself sitting here at my computer, feeling the room warm up (it’s going to be hot here today), hearing Oscar my cat snoring under my desk. I take a drink of iced tea and I am still always I AM as pure presence.

Now, going in the other direction: it’s early morning and I’m awake because Oscar, my cat, has decided it’s time for me to be awake even though it’s barely daylight (typical!). Oscar’s sitting on the floor beside my bed looking at me; I can see my clock behind him. I’m looking at Oscar, and the clock, and I’m annoyed that I’m awake and that the clock says it’s 4:10 in the morning. At the same time my entire body is full of the OM vibration, not only that, but I can hear it fill the entire room and everything in it; I can hear it in my head, in my arms and legs, in every cell of every part of my body. I close my eyes and I can see it in the form of an infinite number of tiny bright blue/white lights in every cell of my body, all vibrating with the OM. I open my eyes and Oscar’s looking at me: Oscar the cat is filled with tiny blue white points of light, all vibrating with the OM, and Oscar the OM cat meows at me and the primary vibration of his meow is OM. I follow myself back to the source of the vibration, to the vibrating blue star/blue pearl and I become the source of all creation as the blue star vibrating with the OM, and yet at the same time I’m still lying in bed looking at Oscar and my clock. I am still pure presence. I go back farther to the sun and I feel myself as the life of the life of all creation, and I feel myself causing all the blue stars to vibrate and in their vibration to give birth to all creation. And yet I’m still lying in bed, looking at Oscar and my clock, and being the blue star vibrating the OM, giving birth to all that is. I then go still farther back and I am pure presence moving through an ocean of suns, an ocean of pure consciousness. And yet I’m still lying in bed, looking at Oscar and my clock, being the blue star vibrating the OM, being the sun and the sun’s warmth causing the blue star to vibrate and give birth to all that is. Finally (for now anyway—who knows, there could be more) I move back to being pure presence and only pure presence: I AM. And yet I’m still lying in bed, looking at Oscar and my clock, being the blue star vibrating the OM, being the sun and the sun’s warmth causing the blue star to vibrate and give birth to all that is, and pure presence moving through the ocean of suns. Actually, I suppose there’s one more step, but it’s really the same as the first step, which is experiencing myself as one continuous presence, present before the beginning and after the end.

2002 (not on Spiritweb)

In the past couple of years I seem to have developed, or become aware of, another level of “body” that is quite interesting, and whichmakes the most sense to me (i.e., it’s the one where I’m most comfortable). I find myself with a large body with the “central sun” at the heart, and a belly full of blue stars, the “Mahadeva” that I mention below. The light of the central sun shines onto and through the blue stars, which creates a field around and among the stars which contains all of creation that is generated through the blue stars. All of everything takes place inside this large body, including everything that I’ve written about the central sun-- the central sun is the sun at the heart of this body ( I now find that everything that I wrote in 2000 to my friend Cecilia, who was scorching her sheets with Kundalini heat, is now happening inside my body, my large body, and is mirrored in my physical body as well). If I focus on my lower abdomen, thighs, legs, and feet, I see all the creatures of creation: humans, birds, ducks, snakes, insects, plants, rocks, everything. I find within the past six months or so that I can initiate this state by simply focusing on my own physical body and following it back:  i.e., first there’s my physical body, then I shift so that “Roger” and everything that “Roger” contains, body, emotions, thoughts, etc, are on my lower right side, with every female that “Roger” has known on my left side. I then step back from that and find all males on my lower right side and all females on my lower left side. (For the most part I always experience myself as being half male and half female: males in the right side and females in the left.) If I step back once again, I become “Ardhanarishvara”. And yet I’m still Pure Presence and Pure Consciousness, and relate to this “newest” body as Presence and Consciousness in the same manner that I relate to any and all bodies. And I see this newest body manifesting in the field of Pure Presence and Pure Consciousness of myself.

If I step back from Ardhanarishvara, I usually find myself in a large blue body with a large blue column above it (“column” isn’t the right word here), and then I move back further into an even larger multi-headed blue body, perhaps five heads, all with columns above the heads. The best representation I’ve seen of this body-state are the pictures and especially the statues of Mahadeva—the pictures I’ve seen of the Mahadeva statues in the Elephanta caves are probably the best representation of this state. If I move back farther still, I’m simply pure presence looking at the Mahadeva body being illuminated by the central sun, and I, as pure presence, am the light of that sun. From this state I can move into and around the body of Mahadeva: the Mahadeva body is full of blue stars, blue pearls, and the light of the central sun energizes the blue stars and causes them to start vibrating. The sound of the vibration is “OM”. As a result of the vibration, creation takes place in the “spaces” in between the blue stars: the blue stars contain potentials for anything and everything that could ever exist, all polarities, and all creation, all time and space, takes place in the space in between the blue stars in the body of Mahadeva.

Blue stars (not on Spiritweb)

Random thoughts about "blue stars"--this ties in with what I wrote above  

On more than one occasion I’ve been walking down a busy city street and suddenly my vision shifts and instead of "people" I see blue stars, or blue flames, floating around each other, each holding a body in front of it in much the same way that party goers hold masks on sticks in front of their faces at a masquerade ball.

I always see one or several blue stars floating around me: sometimes they just flash and are gone, but often they stay for several seconds. Sometimes I see an entire filed of blue stares stretching out around me, especially if I do an open-eyed meditation.

If you think of the blue star as a stained glass window, any and all incarnations of the being that is the blue star on any and all levels of being are like the projection of the stained glass image onto the floor in a church (or wherever). The projected image on the floor is the "life" (or "lives") on all levels associated with the being who is the blue star (stained glass window). Where there are many stained glass windows (many beings), there is are many images projected onto the floor, some of which overlap, some of which interact, some of which modify others, etc. This multiplicity of projections is how worlds are formed.

Note, however, that there really isn’t a floor to be projected upon. Rather, the whole projection is created "in space". However, this "space" isn’t empty; rather, it’s the field of pure consciousness that I alluded to earlier (I said: "Please bear in mind that even though I’ve drawn things to look like separate sections, layers, planes, etc, what I’m really describing takes place as a unity, and that unity is completely contained "within" the field of pure presence and pure consciousness of I AM as the field of pure consciousness"). Pay attention to the "space" around you, between objects, between your face and these words: this "space" is the field of pure consciousness. It's the same space into which we project all of creation-- and yet we don't really "project it: rather, we make creation manifest as a vibratory matrix in the field of pure consciousness. Right here, right now, between your eyes and this word. Tan tanpura: everything is vibration.

In the analogy of the blue star/stained glass window, there’s another component: the sun. The light of the central sun is the "light of the world"--it’s the creative and sustaining force of all that is, on all planes. And this is where kundalini comes in (since that’s what we were talking about). To me, kundalini is the "effect" which results from the interaction of the "central sun" and the blue star, and the results of this effect are projected onto the "floor" as a "kundalini awakening" in that particular life or series of lives.

When I see individual blue stars or even fields of them, I can see that some stars are quite a dark blue, others are a bright clear blue, and others are bright clear blue with a sort of bright white corona, and still others are fading from bright clear blue with a white corona into what I can only describe as a "dissolving" or "blending" into the white. And still others are bright white with only a slight bluish tinge. This color change is a progression, due to the intensity of interaction with the central sun--the stronger the interaction and relationship the whiter and brighter the blue star becomes, finally turning into another sun.

On the "floor", there the lives are being projected, this interaction with the central sun, and the resulting change in the blue star, manifests as kundalini, and kundalini for the most part manifests as clearing and cleaning (kriya), restructuring, and reintegration (metanoia). This can present lives that can be very chaotic as the kriya occurs. As a result, beings that are quite "high" can project very strange, sometimes difficult lives as the clearing and reintegration takes place.

At some point, the being who is the blue star learns to act and participate consciously in the kriya, restructuring and reintegration process, which tends to lessen the need to act things out (and/or act things out by incarnating various lives). The most important stage in learning to cooperate and participate in the process is when the being who is the blue star realizes that everything he/she ("he/she" isn’t "he" or "she", but rather "he" and "she", since the blue star contains the seeds for both male and female) has ever longed for, has ever missed, has every really desired, is "embodied’ in the central sun--everything down to the last minute instance of need for anything-- life, love, ecstasy, food, everything -- in any of the lives projected on the floor, are all in the central sun-- that all the being’s eternal longing is really for the central sun.

You asked me about what I experience. I always sense the central sun over me, in front of me, around me: when I close my eyes I can see it, feel it, sense it. When I go to sleep, I see it visibly, and I either move towards it, or it moves towards me, and I dissolve into it, completely or partially. This isn’t just on a non physical level--I don’t leave my body to do this--it’s as though every cell in my physical body knows this, is aware of the central sun, and welcomes it openly. When I feel the light and love of the central sun I feel it on all levels, right down to my toes, in every cell of this body. At other times it’s as though things are reversed and I become sort of a window or mirror for the central sun, so that it shines into the world as best it can through me. For my part, I can’t have the process happen quickly enough.

For me, true spirituality starts on the "other" side of the blue stars, on the other side of the omkar. Everything this side of the blue stars, this side of the om, is the same: we call things spiritual and unspiritual, good and bad, light and dark, etc, but in actuality they're all the same.

1995 Letters

What follows are excerpts from a series of letters to two friends: one lives in England, the other in Canada. The exchange allowed me to write about my experiences for the first time, and for that I owe both of my friends boundless gratitude and thanks, especially for encouraging me to make our correspondence available to a wider audience. My hope is that others will also find what I've written useful.

As far back as I can remember I've had out of body experiences, but have never been interested in them enough to want to try to control them. For a while I would generate a second body (in the image of my physical), but now I usually just find myself expanding--I don't mean my physical body, or any body, expands-- I mean my awareness expands, so that I feel like I'm looking in all directions at once, or else I just see scenes of other places, times, etc., without going anywhere at all. It's like the places come to me, instead of my going to them--this holds true for all planes. Back in June or 1978 I was living with some people on a farm in Alberta when I thought I was coming down with the flu or something-- I felt nauseous, lightheaded, etc., so I went to my place to lay down and started to relax my body-- I thought I might as well try to do a conscious out of body experience, since I was lying down and going nowhere-- I must have done it for about 15-20 minutes or so when this blast of energy went through me from below my toes and up out the top of my head and I went into a complete bliss state for I don't know how long--if the best sex imaginable were a '1', this was off the scale at the other end. Some time later I felt the energy 'turn', for want of a better word, and head downward. After that all I can remember is this huge vortex of energy point-down over my sternum/mid-section, and my being drawn up into it and disappearing-- I can remember starting up, and I can remember coming back, but nothing in between. I can remember lying on my bed and doing nothing but laughing--just laughing and laughing, for God knows how long afterwards. When I finally looked at the clock something like four hours had passed. I finally got up and went outside and the whole world had changed--it was like everything was transparent-- like holding a 35mm slide up to the sun and looking through it-- except that the physical sun, the one in the sky, was also transparent, and there was this huge, intensely bright "sun" that I could see shining through everything (like looking through a slide at the sun). People, trees, dogs, cats, horses, sun, stars, clouds, --I was looking at this huge intense sun through everything. My body had no weight--I wasn't floating, but I couldn't tell when I sat on something whether I was on it or above/around it. People said I was glowing, said they could see it even in the sunlight (I couldn't see it, but I could feel it). I remember a couple of days later it started to rain--I had no sense of cold or warm so I just sat out in it to see it--I remember sitting there and the rain was just pouring down, and I was looking at the raindrops as they fell and there was this tiny blue Buddha in each one--each raindrop. I remember sitting out in the rain watching this and just laughing my head off. I remember sitting and doing what I've come to call 'watching the world being made'-- looking up in the sky and seeing an outline of a huge tree, and then there are successively smaller trees 'cascading' down to finally arrive at the physical tree on the ground. This state of affairs lasted until about mid September of that year, and slowly things returned to 'normal', but not really. I started pursuing a crash course in Eastern philosophy, which I had before that basically dismissed- - I needed to find new or at least different ways of thinking and new models for things, but mostly I just wanted to compare notes--compare with the authors of the books, but also find some common ground so I could share with other people--I had may private maps that worked fine for me, but I couldn't give them to someone else.

So, I did the Eastern spiritual thing, meditated, which I'd never done before and which now was mostly spontaneous and highly desirable as far as I was concerned. Learned a lot. Two years and a bit later, I moved back to BC, lived in a small cabin up in the mountains outside Nelson, and meditated a lot--got up one morning, went down the path the visit my dogs (had two huskies at the time), looked out over the meadow and found I could change my vision to see anything I wanted--I could look at the distant mountains, think that I could see them up close, and suddenly I could see every detail, and they appeared to be right in front of me. I thought this was neat, then I looked around and found I was looking through my body at the world, like my body was a view-port to the world, like my body was one of those rubber gloves that are attached to the sides of a sterile box, and you put your hand into the glove and into the box, only my body belonged to the world, was a part of it, and not just attached to the side. Next thing I knew I was aware of being a bright 'sun' in a field of bright suns, and we were maintaining the field of the world, creating the world, in the 'space' between us, like a hologram floats in space, and we were all in perfect instantaneous telepathic linkup.

Other stuff happened, I moved to the west coast, other stuff happened. One that stands out: I wake up in the middle of the night for some reason, and I'm drifting back to sleep, but only my body, I'm wide awake. I start expanding, no big deal, done that before, but this time it's different. I go to a point where I'm seeing millions, billions of blue stars, blue pearls--like grains of sand on the beach. I look into them to see what's in them, and they're like zillions of polarities--on one end, call it the top, of each blue pearl, were the highest forms like saints, gurus, buddhas, etc, and on the other end were the polar opposites of them, the Hitlers, worse. What struck me most was my reaction to the polarities--from my point of view they seemed of equal value--Jesus and Hitler, no difference. Diamonds and dog shit, no difference. Then I found myself moving again, this time becoming this tremendously huge figure, looking in all directions at once, and out of my mouth was pouring all of these blue stars, these blue pearls, like a river, an ocean. I'd been there before, so I wasn't too surprised at that (but I hadn't noticed the river of blue, and hadn't looked into them). Next, I found myself moving again, going back to the blue stars, and I was breathing into them, like blowing into them, and they were vibrating--like blowing on violin strings-- and they started to hum and to produce sounds and the energies in them started to flow between the polarities, and they made life on all planes in all universes. Then I moved back up to the big blue figure and found that I was breathing into it and it was vibrating also, and producing the blue ocean of stars. And then I realized that what it meant to be the life of the world, and also the life of the life of the world.

Now, when I sometimes look out at the rain, sometimes I only see rain, sometimes I see little blue buddhas, and sometimes I see my own face in the raindrops.

Well, I guess I've been sort of off the planet for a while-- I'm still off the planet, but now my hands can at least find the keyboard on my computer. When I finished up that long string of work I was totally fed up with my life-- felt like I had to be anybody else but myself in order to survive, and if I was myself I'd starve to death. I'd got to the point where surviving was nothing but a nuisance, and a waste of my time. I'd been feeling that way for quite a while, but it sort of came to a head. I decided that what I wanted for my birthday was my own life back-- and I was serious. I went to bed one night, just started relaxing, but thinking intently about how much of myself I'd given away simply in order to make a living and to be able to be part of this local community, and I was lying there when suddenly this huge column of light came down on me from above and hit me just about mid sternum and then sort of radiated outward in large ripples all around me-- like someone pouring water into me. I could feel all sorts of things being 'rearranged'-- for want of a better word-- stuff sort of being 'peeled' off of me-- the ripples extended down past my toes and up over my head. For the next couple of weeks I walked around sort of spanning creation-- like I had one half of me in infinite light and one half of me in the world, and I was this sort of bridge between the two-- immersed in this overwhelming love. The past week or so I've been slowly sliding back into the world, and I'm trying really hard not to feel trapped, trying to maintain the bridge-- especially since I need the feeling of love, the contact with that, to be able to stay here. I need that more than I need food for my body. I can feel that my physical life is very different now, but I don't quite yet know how. I'm really hoping that my body changes-- there's nothing I'd want more for myself than for my physical body to be able to live off that light. Back in '78 when I had that initial experience my overriding concern was how I was going to make a living-- it was like I couldn't be in both places at once, and yet I couldn't leave here. Maybe now I'll be able to be in both places. I don't know.

The point of doing the dream yoga, etc, isn't really about having lucid dreams, or out of body experiences-- these are sort of 'teasers' to keep a practitioner motivated. It's similar to doing yoga practices to develop sidhis-- supernatural powers and abilities-- people see these as the goals and do the practice ardently, but usually when they get to the goal they find they're not interested any more. In fact, as I'm sure you know, many schools stress the avoidance of pursuing sidhis because they can be such a trap. Anyway, the point of doing the dream yoga, or of doing one-pointed concentration, etc, is to develop what is called 'witness-consciousness'-- where you never lose yourself in what you experience and in doing so identify with the experience, ie, take on the identity of the experience as being who or what you are. When you start to become steady in this state you'll have the sensation of always being the same, of always being yourself, of always being the "seer", the witness-- you say " it makes no difference whether I close my eyes...I can still "see".."-- same thing. And yes, it'll make you sad, because you've been looking for something in all your experiencing, and all that experiencing just turns out to be "experiencing"-- and whether you experience this world, or an astral world, or absolute nothingness, or nirvana, there's still you being the experiencer. Remember I used the image of a central 'sun' ? And remember I wrote to you back in November about being immersed in this overwhelming love, and how I got there, etc? If your attention and identity are focused on the body, as most beings here are, you'll experience the sun as the fulfillment of bodily goals, which is primarily eternal life (all life strives to live forever, all life develops infinite survival strategies to try to guarantee a chance of living forever, either as an individual organism, or as a species, or as an ecosystem, or as a creation); if your attention and identity are focused on your emotional center, your heart, you'll experience the sun as infinite love, as the fulfillment of everything you've longed for in terms of emotional nourishment (everything wants to be loved-- heavens and hells are defined by the presence or absence of love); if your attention and identity are focused on your identity, your third eye area, then you'll experience the sun as your true self, as who you really are. A lot of traditional yoga paths follow this last way to the sun-- which is why there's such a strong emphasis on developing the ajna chakra-- and the ajna chakra is also where you begin to experience 'witness consciousness'-- the more you isolate yourself in the ajna the more you'll experience the witness state-- but the more you isolate yourself in anything the more you'll begin to experience things solely from that standpoint. The problem with the witness state is exactly what you've run into-- well, here I am, what do I do now? And right there is the main thing-- what do you DO? All life, all planes of existence from the physical to the mental to the super-mental to the buddhic to nirvana, are all DOING, they are NOT Being. All spiritual striving, all yoga practices, all going from discipline to discipline, teacher to teacher, life to life, is DOING. You can hang out in witness consciousness and look for what to DO next and what you will get is more doing. What you have to do is not do-- you have to let go and just be. I'm not talking here about how you live your everyday life, I'm talking about letting your awareness let go of looking for the next doing-- especially when you're in the witness state. It's like trying to fall asleep-- the more you try, and the harder you try, the more you'll stay awake-- when you finally stop trying to fall asleep is when you usually do. You have to go from the witness state and trying hard for the next doing to a sort of falling asleep into the sun, and you do that by not doing, by just being. And then you'll experience yourself as the sun, as the source of being, as the source of consciousness, and as the source of love. After that it's between you and the sun-- you may simply merge into it-- the classical samadhi thing; or you may become a sort of bridge with one foot in the sun and one in the world, which is where I seem to have wound up.

(To my brother)

I've been thinking about the relationship between your past profession, psychology, and some of the stuff we've been talking about, and I keep coming up with images from a couple of 'dreams' I've had (note the quotes). One of them was just a couple of months ago--- I was standing on this large flat plane (a geometrical plane, not an air plane) and there were a lot of people walking around, and there was this large staircase near me that I had just finished building. The staircase was solidly on the plane, but went up to just above my head and then disappeared from sight-- it appeared to vanish into thin air. The people I could see around me were all dressed in black and white striped clothes-- prison outfits-- and so was I, except that under my black and white striped jacket I was wearing my carpenter's toolbelt. And I was really annoyed because no one seemed to want to use the staircase, and I couldn't figure out why. It occurred to me that perhaps it was because it appeared to go nowhere, but I knew that it did, so I decided to check things out some more. So, I climbed the stairs but tried to view it as one of the locals would, and I realized that as I looked up to see where the stairs were going all I could see was a mirror reflection of myself, and I realized that the whole 'sky' above this plane was a huge mirror, which was why the stairs appeared to be going nowhere, and furthermore, that anyone climbing the stairs would be climbing toward a reflection of themselves that got bigger and bigger the higher they climbed and the closer they got to the mirror surface. I also realized that the image in the mirror, or rather, how they saw the image, was completely dependent on how they perceived themselves, or how they'd been taught to perceive themselves, so more often than not anyone climbing the stairs would run headlong into their own self-image and turn around.

Now, a second dream, from a couple of years ago. I'm standing looking at a mirror image of myself, something I see frequently in dreams-- there's no mirror, just the image-- and I realize that I've been seeing this image a lot and it's pissing me off that I don't understand why, so I decide to go into and through the image, just to see what will happen. So, I go through my image like Alice going through the looking glass, and immediately I'm in this large luminous space full of this gold-white light, and all I can see are thousands of hands reaching out toward me, some are applauding, many are touching me, sort of moving me along. I realize that they're moving me toward the intensity of the light, that the light is getting much brighter until finally there are no hands, just the light, and I'm moving into the light and slowly dissolving into it.

The image in the mirror above the plane in the first dream and the image of myself (or anyone else) in the second dream are the same. The stairs in the first dream leads to the experience in the second dream.

Now, about psychology-- it seems to me that psychology gets people to the point that they can look at themselves in the 'mirror' and not turn away-- it 'unskews' their self-image. But that's where it stops. It stops because it sees its goal as producing well -balanced individuals in the world-- people in prison clothes with smiles on their faces; it also stops because it sees its own well-balanced reflection in the mirror and thinks that that's all there is-- it can't get past its own narcissism.

However, if you can integrate what you've learned about fixing people's self-images with your being able to stand at the top of the stairs and helping them through the mirror, you can combine the best of "both" worlds.

(To a friend)

I find that every day I face dealing with the problems of survival-- food, money, health, and so on-- and I'm constantly asking myself "what am I getting back for all of this foolishness"-- I work so I can make money to buy food so I can have energy to work to make money to buy food so I can have energy to work.....Beyond the basic survival instincts, like pulling my hand off a hot stove, I can't think of any reason to be here if all I get out of it is participating in consensus reality and a stupid north american society that I really don't want to participate in in any case. Even simple things like eating drive me nuts-- why do I have to keep feeding this thing-- why can't my body just be? I find I have to be very careful not to get very self-destructive-- normal life, everyone's goal, everyone's joy, is a prison for me. But not in terms of wanting to be somewhere else, because any 'somewhere else' looks good until it becomes 'normal', and then you're stuck there again. No, it's just a matter of no t wanting to do this any more, of having seen it a thousand times, and of realizing that you don't belong here any more. And I think that that's the key-- of outgrowing this world, of seeing it for what it is, so it loses its magic. For me, I know that I won't be back here again, that this is my last life, and that in this life I'm basically reviewing and integrating everything I've learned from being here in god knows how many previous lives. This also means that I'm developing an immunity to the things that have trapped me here in the past. This is all very hard work and I've had to go in directions and into areas I never thought I wanted to see. It's not about renouncing or giving up anything-- it's about recovering all the pieces of yourself that you've given to others-- whether it's to your mother or father, or to Hitler, or to Christ. I think that at some point the desire for wholeness becomes as strong as the desire for life,the desire for survival-- and I think it's this desire for wholeness that will get you through tough times even when your desire for life has faded, or when you're telling yourself in your heart that all this bullshit really isn't worth the effort. Unfortunately it's really easy when you get to the tough parts to just give up and walk away, even to give up your life-- unfortunately, also, the drive for survival only operates 'inside' a life, while the desire for wholeness operates inside your soul-- so you'll keep coming back until you've found all your pieces. The desire for life is universal-- everything wants to live. And everything wants to be whole-- that's also a universal drive..

Ok, now I'm going to try to write about things I haven't written about before-- I've written around them, but not directly at them, if you know what I mean. Whenever I think about telling someone else about this I immediately start getting all kinds of 'interference'-- can't think clearly, get distracted easily, find something else to do all of a sudden-- when, and if, I write what I want I think you'll understand why. If you come to terms with the feelings you talked about, the weight on your chest, the sense of guilt, but what for, etc, you'll discover the key to this particular world-- especially if you don't think of it in terms of a physical location so much as a layer or type of consciousness.

You wrote:

I remember crying and the thought came over and over "how can I ever be forgiven" or some such thing...although forgiven for what? So thats where I seem to be stuck at the moment...and I can feel this huge huge weight on back and chest from being unable to forgive myself...not even knowing how or for what..

Also, remember how you wrote me that you somehow felt responsible for my being sick?

....when I heard you were sick I felt guilty like it was my fault..

The key to this world is in that feeling of being guilty, but not knowing for what. It's the feeling that's behind the idea of original sin, behind the idea of karma-- most especially the idea of gaining merit by doing good deeds and losing merit by bad deeds, and being able to more or less buy your way out of the world by accumulating enough merit. Most, if not all religions of the world are morality based because they are based on this notion of 'unconditional guilt'. This guilt does not belong to you--I repeat: THIS GUILT DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU. It belongs to the fabric of this particular world, this particular place of consciousness-- it does not belong to you, but belongs to and with this world just as much as the different species of plants and animals belong to this world. And just as you TAKE ON the identity of one (or more) animal forms--most notably the human one-- when you come here, you also take on the emotional and intellectual forms of this place, and that feeling of aimless guilt is just one of those forms. It does not belong to you, but insofar as you buy into it, insofar as you accept it as you and yours and what you are, you thrash around in it trying to resolve it so that you can be good enough, or meritorious enough, or holy enough, to be free of it. The only way you are going to resolve it is to see your own true face, the one you had before you bought into the package of this place.

I can remember the first time I realized this: I was standing in the middle of my cabin in Nelson, doing what I call watching the world being made-- watching things move from energy forms to 'solid forms' -- and I suddenly became incredibly angry, outraged, because I realized I'd bought into a ruse, a trap-- I realized that the whole notion of karma was a lie-- that there was nothing to work ourselves out of, that we were 'trapped' here because we bought into the idea that we were trapped and had to earn our way free. It was several years later that I finally saw the other side of this, when I realized that beings on many layers had an interest in maintaining the status quo of this world. I found myself going to 'negative worlds' quite a bit at one point, exploring them, not their physical makeup but their conscious makeup. I found that as I went into different worlds they would have different dominant emotional makeups, different flavors if you will-- anger, sadness, etc, and that the true residents of those worlds were committed to maintaining the status quo of those worlds with as much vigor as anyone in any other world, positive or negative. True, the residents of those negative worlds would moan and groan and complain of their plight, but that was also part of the inherent fabric of those worlds, and the way out of any one of them was the same-- finding your 'original face'-- following yourself back. On one occasion I came across a very strange scene-- I saw a man's head with a lot of light energy around it-- the head was horizontal, as though the man was lying down-- and beside the head was this very dark , even black, being, fairly featureless, who was sort of reaching into the light energy around the man's head and gathering it up. The being then took the light energy over to a 'table' to two other dark beings, and the three of them began to 'eat' the energy, for lack of a better word. Suddenly the first being became aware of me for the first time and it's mouth flew open wide and it leapt across the room at me. I immediately came back into my body-- and the first thing I noticed astounded me-- I felt this overwhelming sense of guilt, this overwhelming sense of failure at everything I'd ever done, this awareness of every "mistake" I'd ever made-- and I simultaneously realized that these feelings had resulted from my contact with these dark beings. I realized that these beings fed on the type of energy that was generated by those kinds of feelings, and that furthermore they actively promoted and encouraged those kinds of feelings in physical beings much as a farmer would encourage certain characteristics in a breed of cattle. I further came to realize that these kinds of feelings, the kinds necessary for these beings' survival, can be passed on from person to person like some kind of virus, and that this transfer is especially potent between members of the same family-- a sort of hereditary virus, only in this case it's an emotional virus.

I came to the realization that most religious institutions bought into this and were infected by this, and that even forces that appeared as 'light' against 'dark' or 'good' against 'evil' in the world were infected because they generated the suitable type of energy for these beings. I further came to realize that whenever I even think about telling someone else about this I get a strong sense of being 'under attack'-- that I shouldn't be talking about this because I'm upsetting the fabric of the world, and any increase in awareness in any one person means one less energy 'generator' for those beings. Further, they work quite hard to 'capture' beings with high energy output-- the more energy the stronger and more secure their world is. And they work quite hard to maintain their hold on someone if they think they're going to lose them.

The guilt doesn't belong to you-- don't buy into it-- it's a trap. It's how this world is made, but it's not you, and it's not yours. I think I said something somewhere about this world being a good place to develop an immunity -- what I've just written about is what you develop an immunity to.

(followup to above letter)

More about the black guys-- when I first started encountering 'them' I thought they were things like my own projections, or perhaps a sort of metaphorical way of thinking about psychological processes, like projecting my 'shadow' into them, etc. But then I realized I'd been seeing them with my eyes open, so to speak. I always see little blue 'sparks', lights, spheres, floating around-- these to me are people, some of whom I know on the physical level, some I don't. Sometimes I'll see a sort of flash from one of them and immediately think about someone I know. Some time back when I wrote you about "wanting to dance"-- you were sort of floating around in the room when I was writing you-- I saw you as a blue sphere about the size of a grapefruit that was dancing around in front of me and moving back and forth through my body. What I also see is these little black specks that I'd started calling 'the flies', but I didn't know what they were until I became aware of them as beings-- the black guys. What I'd noticed is that these 'flies' would gravitate toward trauma-- I first noticed this while watching TV-- if there was a real trauma on the screen-- a real war, a real murder, etc, I could see these flies sort of streaming toward the TV screen, but they seemed to be able to distinguish between real events and fictional trauma. I found that I could draw them toward me by changing my thought forms.

What I also realized is that you can't merely resist them by maintaining a positive attitude in the face of trauma, physical or emotional, if you have 'subconscious' weak spots--psychic bruises-- because these guys are masters at finding your weak spots and 'magnifying' them out of proportion, and exploiting them-- and the primary psychic bruise is all the stuff involved with the weight on your chest-- or on mine. The only way to protect yourself is to face the stuff head on, and realizing how you got it and where it came from-- your father, my father, your mother, my mother, etc. It's your awareness that will free you-- it's the light of that awareness that the "flies" can't handle-- they need to be invisible. I figured that I could "blast" them with love, because love conquers all, etc, but that's not true-- beings react to love according to their own purpose-- for a mosquito love would be your letting it suck you dry, for a great white shark love would be your letting it eat you without a struggle, for Saddam Hussein love would be your unconditional surrender to his will. Anything you send love to will grow and flourish, but on its own terms-- if you send love to a tumor it'll grow and be happy, send love to the HIV virus and it'll be fruitful and multiply. If you send love to the "flies" they'll be happy, but on their terms, or at best they'll want to make you "lord of the flies".

I've found that the trick to going into 'dark' places is that you always have to be able to find yourself--- I don't mean being able to know where you are, but being aware of yourself as separate from your location, even though you may be mirroring your location and the beings there, even though you may feel and think things AS your own that are not your own but belong to the location. Not all thoughts and feelings are necessarily yours--most belong to the fabric of your location. That's important because when you get into the 'dark' places you'll find that events, people, places in your life that have a 'resonance', if you will, with that darkness will sort of start to vibrate more and you'll become more aware of them in your memory, and more aware of your emotional responses to them, and more aware of the emotional and psychic bruises you've incurred as a result of interacting with them-- all your shit will start to surface. Remember the stuff about how these 'viruses' get passed on-- think about the chain of transmission in your own life.

This is all sort of an immunization program-- like being inoculated against small pox-- you get a little bit of the real thing in your system so you can develop an immunity-- the bits and pieces of the 'virus' you pick up from the world and from your family are the diluted strains for the inoculation.

Remember all the stuff I wrote about beings wanting to maintain the status quo of the world? When you effect things prior to creation it isn't just a matter of " causing the right people to appear at the right time etc". If you 'radiate' the light of the sun, so to speak, you will effect the beings who want to maintain the status quo of the world if you are in their world. Even a little baby sun/son radiates enough to upset the status quo when it starts to shine beyond the world's comfort level. Some of those beings will be attracted to you, and some will be repelled by you. Most will not know why in either case, and most will invent some reason for it, or will respond on their own level-- for example, women might be attracted to you but will interpret it in terms of sexual attraction. Someone else might be repelled, but will interpret it as not liking your tone of voice, or whatever. We value attractiveness in this world -- we like to have people like us and we like to be attractive-- we want the power to draw people to us, which is what being attractive means-- but you have to understand, and this is very hard to deal with sometimes, that most people don't know what's happening and that more importantly if you are radiating the 'sun' , your capacity to attract or repel is because of the 'sun', and is nothing personal. Most importantly, attractiveness is easy to deal with because it's a 'feel-good' thing, but you can get trapped in it; even more importantly, if you repel people because of your radiance, it's nothing personal-- it's not a personal rejection. I'll say that again-- IT'S NOT A PERSONAL REJECTION-- so be very careful if and when it happens that you don't take it personally and start overcompensating to win approval . I've learned this the hard way, believe me. When I was in the process of learning this I had this dream where Muktananda and I were standing beside this stream, and there were fish in the water and flocks of birds overhead, and he was pointing them out to me, and I saw that one of the fish was me, and the I saw that one of the birds was me, and I realized that I was a fish because that's the way fish saw me, and I was a bird because that's the way birds saw me, and I was a human because that's the way humans saw me, and individual humans see from their individual viewpoints, my cat from his, etc. Remember that we talked somewhere about how the 'sun' mirrors (I think it was in the context of backing into the sun?) This is the same thing.

A lot of spiritual traditions arise because of the attitudes of one person in a state of enlightenment who is speaking from his relative position (point of view), and then these statements are 'canonized' into a 'way of being' that, if followed, will lead to enlightenment. The idea of equanimity is one of these canonized precepts-- equanimity is a way of describing what it feels like to be in a particular state, but practicing equanimity won't necessarily lead to that state, any more than wearing orange robes will produce enlightenment just because someone who is enlightened wears orange. People see what they think of as high beings being indifferent to their physical surroundings, for example, and think that indifference is necessary to enlightenment and moreover use indifference, etc, as a standard to judge the spiritual 'development' of people (if he/she isn't indifferent than he or she isn't spiritually developed-- this is similar to an orthodox Jew's judging the piety of a person by how well he or she observes the 600 odd mitzvahs that are necessary to fulfill Jewish religious obligations-- if the person claimed to have 'seen God' but hadn't fulfilled the mitzvahs then the person obviously hadn't seen God because only people who had observed all the mitzvahs could see God.) True equanimity is an outgrowth of spiritual activity, not a cause of it, but in any case it isn't always present-- sometimes it arises spontaneously as an outgrowth of kundalini activity in the same way that people perform spontaneous yoga postures as a result of kundalini activity-- I suspect that the spontaneous postures came first, and then people began imitating them in hopes of achieving spiritual advancement. The bottom line is that you can't gain Pure Consciousness by practicing indifference, although some beings in pure consciousness may be indifferent-- due to the fact that they've 'anchored' their attention in their upper chakras to the extent that they can't sense anything (but of course that's the goal of yoga, isn't it-- to move your attention permanently to the upper chakras-- but my experience says this is incomplete--- I don't think this is enlightenment, but then I don't think the realization of Pure Consciousness is enlightenment.)

Maybe I should speak more from personal experience-- when I'm running around in the world being a person, being a carpenter, eating, talking, feeling tired, feeling energized, I feel that I'm somehow off to my left side, for want of a better way of saying it, and that my attention, my consciousness, is focused towards the left. On the left I feel all the polarities of existence as if they were in one body on one side of me-- male and female, good and bad, light and dark, Christ and Satan, satgurus and drug dealers, heavens and hells-- unless I'm especially anchored in one point of view I can feel myself flip back and forth from one polarity to the other-- first I'm male, then female, for example. If I move myself towards my right I become more 'aware'-- first of the relationships of the polarities (most people get lost in the polarities and have no awareness of being in one or another of them), and as I move further towards the right I move into 'spaciousness', at which point I become aware of the totality of the body of polarities on the left-- and feel that I'm the 'life' of the polarities; if I keep going I wind up on the right as Pure Consciousness with the body of polarities to the left, so to speak. If I move to the center between the two bodies, the body of polarities and the body of pure consciousness, then I feel that both are a part of me-- and if I merge the two bodies by moving both towards the center then I experience different levels of bliss as the two bodies merge, at which point I become the bliss and the qualities of both bodies-- the bliss of the union, the consciousness of the right and the 'beingness' of the left, and yet I also stay the same as a 'presence'. To me it's quite easy to think of the left body, the 'beingness' body as feminine and the right body, the pure consciousness body, as being masculine. When I look at the right body I see lots of guys, yogis, but almost always men, in meditation, and my initial reaction to them is that they are dry-- that's the word that comes to mind -- 'dry'-- as if the left side, the feminine, were wet, and these guys are dry, and out of touch with the feminine. They had no emotions, no heart. To me these guys are in a dead end, and if they are ever going to advance, ever going to get out of the dead end, they're going to have to integrate the feminine. And yet these same guys and the position of these guys, is the ideal and the role model for much of eastern spirituality. Of course their opposites are too 'wet' , too immersed in the ocean of desires. Most 'enlightenment' practices, most spiritual pursuits, come from one end of this polarity and are directed towards the other, but there's no integration and no transcendence of polarities-- both 'ends' feed off the energy generated by the polarity and so nothing ever really happens because on the overall scale the status quo needs to be maintained to maintain the energy that both sides need. On this level there's not much difference between mainstream spiritual teachers and those who 'need' to be taught.-- that's why nothing ever really happens in the world-- people talk about this and that major change, new age, etc, but things keep going (business as usual)-- just sort of change shape.

One dream of mine had a lot of impact on me--I was very depressed for a couple of months afterward when I realized the impact of it--I dreamed I was standing in the quadrangle of the university I went to, and was surrounded by this intense gold light-- I had just come back from 'higher' places and wanted to share what I had picked up-- the energy of the gold light-- across from me were just about everyone I knew-- people I hadn't seen in years, college friends, people I only knew in passing-- this one girl, Suzie something-or-other who I knew from college, came up to me as a sort of spokesperson for the group-- she said "we don't want your kind of love in our world"--it blew me away-- I said "fine", and made myself disappear. I woke up in tears, and stayed blown away for months--I kept wishing I could make myself disappear as I did in the dream-- until I realized what I told you about all life desiring eternal life, etc.

About raising your own level-- you can't raise your own level any more than you can pick yourself up by your own bootstraps. All the good works and karma burning exercises in the world won't do the job-- what you need is what you've already got-- an active kundalini, which has its own mind and knows what its doing -- you have the grace that you need, you just have to learn how to work along side it, how to pay attention. Kundalini activity on the physical level shows that something is happening at a higher level-- it doesn't much matter that you understand what's going on, or how you understand it (you can understand from a cultural level-- Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, etc). Information, teachings, practices don't change things unless the person is already active and needs to know so they can cooperate with the process that's taking place on a higher level. If you have an active kundalini on the physical level it means things are happening at a higher level and that you are effecting beings at that level (you experience yourself as 'them' partly because you are effecting changes at that level)-- by just being you effect other beings who in turn effect others-- but this is done at a level prior to creation, so you effect the level at which the beings who create and maintain the world in fact create and maintain. Whether you actually teach, i.e., pass on information, etc, is not as important as being. And one of the hardest things is to be in the face of all the bullshit of the present level of creation-- you can look at it from your own level of 'comfort' and think 'who needs this shit, who would ever want it', and it's very hard not to either give up and 'terminate' yourself because you don't want what's here, or succumb to it and just go along with the 'norm' out of loneliness (or run around trying to save everyone from the world-- and so become a participant in the melodrama). At this point your being in the world becomes a sacrifice.

More on the matter of balance-- as the heart area balances, the difference/indifference, desire/desirelessness, emotion/emotionlessness quotient changes depending on the individual-- I went from being very detached and indifferent (I used to meditate up to 9 hrs a day when I was in Nelson) to being quite a bit more emotional, full of desires-- and yet not caring that I was more emotional and had lots of desires-- this is a balancing between male/female sides--I mentioned before about gaining weight, being more aggressive--this is part of same thing-- some people go to being less physical, less aggressive, some to more. Some to more grounded, some to less-- you can't go by mainstream expectations--you have to let kundalini do the job-- don't set limits on it, don't tie yourself up with expectations just because they agree with mainstream spirituality.

Ok, I'm going to start on this topic, but I don't know where I'm going to wind up because it's such a large and important area-- I may just keep writing until I run out of steam or then again I may make a bunch of general statements and observations and we can pursue them over a period of time. There is a direct link here between what you do as a medium and what you have and will experience in terms of 'higher awareness' or whatever you want to call it.

First, about the heart chakra. When your heart chakra is open (or perhaps too open, depending on your point of view) you will experience other people's thoughts, emotions, and sometimes physical sensations as your own-- you will not be able to differentiate you from them-- not know whose thoughts they are, whose emotions, whose physical sensations. When I get 'strange' thoughts or emotions I always have to check myself to make sure that I'm not mirroring someone-- that person doesn't have to be physically present-- and one way I do it is to see what my face feels like-- I check to see whose face I'm wearing. When I'm relaxed and, for example, lying in bed, if I think about someone I know and am fairly close to, I can feel my face change into their face, and I get the accompanying thoughts, emotions, etc. For example, I have a friend who's married to an RCMP officer-- she and I are quite close so she's easy to reach-- but when I get in touch with her and feel my face change, what I get is what I've come to call the 'police radio'-- I hear all of these police conversations, law enforcement phrases, etc-- because she so strongly mirrors her RCMP husband. Here's another example: some time ago, six years or so, I was in a relationship with a woman where I got stuck in the 'mirror' thing-- on one occasion I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes, and immediately started thinking about her-- where she was (she was out with some friends), how she was, etc. I lay there for a while, then decided I had to take a leak, so I got up and immediately began staggering around the room with my head spinning, bumped into the wall on the way into the bathroom and fell down. I lay there on the floor trying to figure out what was wrong with me and the best I could come up with was that I felt like I was piss drunk. As soon as I thought that, and then realized that I hadn't been drinking, the whole sensation went away and I was back to normal. The next day I found out that my lady friend had got herself totally pissed the night before, so much so that she was staggering, falling down drunk. (I'm just glad I didn't have the dry heaves the next morning.) This woman also had a depressive streak and on several occasions I got stuck mirroring her depression, to the extent that I was in tears, feeling suicidal, etc-- and had to call a good friend of mine who fortunately also knew this particular woman, who told me that I sounded exactly like this woman-- my voice over the phone, my choice of words, my phrasing-- it took me great effort to regain my own 'mind', and for some time after our relationship was over I had to be careful about my dreams-- if I dreamt about her in any way I would have to check my face when I awoke to make sure it was mine.

This sort of mirroring, in fact all mirroring, takes place at the heart level. Imagine what can happen if you're in an intimate relationship, or imagine what can happen when you're a newborn baby and you pick up on your parents' vibes just like a sponge soaking up water-- you don't even know you're doing it, you mirror them completely, and you're doing it because of your relationship at the heart level with them-- out of love. The expression 'you become what you love' is exactly true at that level. This is how we become enmeshed in the world-- we love the world and so become the world -- and then try to straighten ourselves out by trying to fix the world. We lose ourselves in the world and forget ourselves because of love. This is why it's so important to 'remember yourself', to be able to find yourself-- how many times have I said that-- because it's not just a matter of 'enlightenment', but of spiritual survival. Most spiritual traditions try to renounce the world, some try to embrace it, but they are all attempts to 'solve' the world--- you can't do that until you know 'you' first. You said that "I, or ordinary consciousness, was very AWAKE and looking on... I was a huge spaciousness.." -- you have to follow THAT one, that 'I' which is both ordinary and spacious. You also said you felt "totally whole... no "male, no "female" just whole..." (that's why I like to quote back what you've written-- so I don't have to type it :) )-- that's because you were viewing things from beyond that sort of duality. The resolution and integration of dualities takes place at the heart level when you are moving upwards in the kundalini flow; the creation and generation of all dualities takes place as you move downward in the kundalini flow. The resolution and integration gives rise to the experience of bliss-- nirvana; the creation and generation are samsara-- both arise from the heart area-- when you hear the expression that everything arises out of bliss and subsides into bliss, this is what it means. The integration of the heart area is the goal of classical yoga. Look at how you described your experience-- there was both the experience of yourself as a "huge spaciousness" and also as "ordinary consciousness". You find the term 'spaciousness' coming up again and again in Vajrayana and Nyingma writings (I'm thinking here especially of Longchenpa). But notice that ordinary consciousness stayed around. Both the spacious consciousness and the ordinary consciousness arise in the heart. (Now, go read Ramana-- not what someone else says he said, but his own words.)

If you look at drawings of chakras, etc, the heart area is always shown as containing two superimposed triangles like a star of David. These triangles represent the union of Shiva and Shakti, the divine marriage, the alchemical marriage-- the upward pointing triangle moves up from below, the downward pointing one moves down from above-- Yin and Yang. The most important mandala/yantra in Hinduism is called the Sri Yantra, and is a series of stars of David, if you will, receding into infinity one inside the other, and at the center of the yantra, at the point where all the stars would meet is a tiny blue point, a bindu. The yantra represents, among other things, how the world is made-- out of the continuous divine union of Shiva and Shakti. The Hindus say that the first thing to be manifest in the process of creation is sound, and the first sound is "OM" which causes vibrations to be set up which give rise to all things. (If you remember back in the 'resume' thing I said something about at one point breathing into the blue points and they started to vibrate-- at that point I could 'hear' the vibration as an 'om') Anyhow, certain schools of yoga have made a science of studying the sounds that arise after the 'om' (and as a result of the 'om') and have classified them and graded them (you hear this sound when you've reached this stage etc). You don't begin to hear these sounds until your heart chakra begins to open-- in fact they say that the sounds arise from the heart -- there are sounds like bells, flutes, wind, thunder, and so on, and they change as you move towards to 'om'. Another thing that happens with that kind of focus on the heart chakra is that you may experience physical symptoms such as heart palpitations or small pains over your physical heart, usually on the left side of your chest. You may also experience heat, either locally or all over your body. Sometimes the heat is so strong that people near you will notice it-- I've read accounts of people actually scorching table tops from it. You'll also find that if you have sex with someone your body may heat up so much that you feel you're about ready to ignite-- your partner will definitely notice it. Some schools of Tibetan yoga encourage the propagation of this heat, called Dumo in Tibetan, and use the strength of it as a gauge to measure spiritual progress. It arises as a byproduct of the 're-union' of Shiva and Shakti (the physical act of sex mirrors the spiritual act of 're-union', the physical act is a sort of 'acting-out' of the 're-union'-- this is the foundation for tantric practices-- so the heat is generated in the physical act, but after a while you don't need the physical act for the 're-union', or the heat, to take place)

I've just realized that I'm sort of jumping around to different areas, writing things as I think of them. So, here's another jump-- you mentioned that you had found yourself at someone's feet, but that you couldn't see whose they were-- if you had merged with that someone and seen through 'his/her' eyes, you'd have seen the ocean of blue stars that I talked about in the first thing I sent you, the 'resume' thing-- the blue stars are the same as the blue bindus at the center of the Sri Yantras-- each one of the infinite multitude of them is a yantra.

Now, back to the progression through the heart space. At the outer layer you will do the 'my face is your face' thing with people in the world, or near the world, you will mirror them-- channel them-- in effect I was channeling my friend and her depression when I was talking on the phone and the other person recognized the change in voice, etc. You can do this at any level-- channel non-physical entities, etc. On a broader level we mirror the world, we channel the world and become it and if we don't know ourselves, we get lost in it. So, the first step is to find our own mind-- our 'original face'. If you go deeper you begin to experience yourself as dualities-- male/female, life/death, the desire for life/the desire for death, light/dark, good/evil, and so on. If you don't get lost in these you wind up at the spaciousness. Once you can maintain the spaciousness (ie, are comfortable) you can begin to experience the things I talked about in the 'resume'-- the ocean of blue stars, the large figure looking in all directions with the ocean pouring out of his/her mouth, etc., and you can begin to experience them as further progression of 'forms', for want of a better word, that give rise to still more forms, all of which you give life to (including the one at whose feet you found yourself).

So now there're the forms and there's the spaciousness-- is that one or two, is that another duality? Go find out. Follow yourself back and see....

(To a friend, who's a trance medium)

You wrote:

what if there is no "normal" and you no longer "return" to it? when consciousness of some "body", some outer skin between "me" and the "environment" falls away...the happy delusion of me and them or it or other that calm happy separateness that we all meditate to go beyond...and then there is no control...I suppose that is what frightens me...no control over what is happening...

In one of his songs Milarepa said something to the effect that "psychic illumination isn't transcendental illumination". It seems to me you have a couple of things going here-- one is that you have the ability to be a trance medium, and the other is that you've had glimpses of transcendental illumination (that sounds way to pompous to my ears, but that's the translation). If you have the tendency towards trance mediumship it means you have the capacity to dislocate from yourself, and to give control over to another entity, or to another part of yourself. If you do this with chosen entities that you are comfortable with you can feel safe in relinquishing control. It's as though you're on a locked-in frequency with another entity or part of you. However, if you take the same capacity to dislocate and do it on a 'general broadcast' level as opposed to a specific locked-in frequency, you will become a sort of receiver for anything and everything that's 'in the air', so to speak. Most people, when they begin meditation or spiritual practices, can barely receive their own signals and are utterly amazed that someone can actually pick up someone else's, so most meditation practices are designed to deal with most people and most people's barriers. If someone with an innate capacity to dislocate, with an innate capacity to receive, does the usual exercises and sets the usual targets and goals that are prescribed for most people, that person will most likely be thrown off balance because he/she will be on too wide a broadcast beam. It seems to me that what many trance mediums do is to un-ground themselves to be able to go into trance, and many do it automatically and unconsciously, so that as soon as they begin to do a meditation practice they automatically un-ground themselves as a matter of course because they see themselves as 'going to a higher plane', 'being spiritual now' or whatever. If you have this tendency towards trance mediumship, and if you unground yourself as a matter of course as a prerequisite to spiritual practice, or as what you see as feeling more spiritual than the way it feels to be grounded, and if you go into a general receiver mode, then you may run the risk of feeling like you're losing control, and the 'terror' sets in. If you associate this feeling of loss of control with approaching the boundaries of a transcendental experience (because you've automatically ungrounded and dislocated yourself as a regular part of your practice), then it's no wonder you back away.

Transcendental illumination (that phrase!) is like experiencing yourself as water, the ocean-- the ocean can be seen as a solid seamless whole or it can be the sum total of all the drops of water in it. 'Normal' perception is to see yourself as a drop of water experiencing other drops of water (usually with no recognition that there's such a thing as the ocean, or perhaps the ocean is 'God' or 'Buddha' or whatever, but you just figure it's there because you are and others are). You may then perhaps consciously experience yourself as a drop of water in an infinite expanse of drops, or you may experience yourself as the totality of the drops of water, or you may experience yourself as the seamless ocean with no drops-- and say that separate 'dropness' (drophood?) is an illusion (and tell others that they have to overcome their illusion of 'drophood')-- or you can experience yourself as the seamless ocean, the totality of drops, a drop in the infinite expanse of drops, and an individual drop-- at the same time. This last one is transcendental illumination. Transcendental illumination includes 'normal'-- it's not someplace else.

You wrote:

what if there is no "normal" and you no longer "return" to it?

Transcendental illumination includes 'normal'-- it's not someplace else. Is the ocean a seamless expanse or a collection of drops?

(More to a friend, who's a trance medium)

You wrote:

I suppose I'm distracting myself with the Heart Sutra (from the fear of Non-Being) but also learning to relate to compassion which is the only way of dealing with the terror. That was/is the worst of it all...how to describe...the sense of the total indifference of the universe (as if we don't exist) which we don't..

What does 'Non-Being' mean to you? Are you talking about death? Do you feel the 'terror' on a bodily level? When you're out of your body do you still feel the terror? When you had your initial experience was the 'terror' there, or was it only later, when you came back to 'normal' that you felt it? Is the one who experienced herself in your initial experience different from the one who feels the terror-- how do they relate, how do they connect? If you experience yourself as the ocean, and then experience yourself as the water that's filled up a bottle on the bottom of the ocean, aren't you the same water, the same ocean? What would it feel like to be the water in the bottle looking out, as it were, at the ocean? How would the bottle determine and influence how the ocean looked to you from inside the bottle? Is it YOU that initiates and produces the terror, or is it your body? Your body has its own consciousness, and the primary drive of that consciousness is to survive at all costs-- to survive as an individual, to survive as a species through reproduction-- all life wants to live forever-- all life wants eternal life-- all the sexual politics, all the species adaptation, all the territorial disputes, all the inter-species competition (including competition among human sub-groups and the 'negative' tendencies of greed, selfishness, theft, etc, etc)-- all express the desire for eternal life. Anything that is SEEN as counter to that desire (note the emphasis on 'seen') will induce 'terror'. The irony is that even the experience of eternal life will induce the terror because it means the end of the pursuit of eternal life-- the end of 'normal' life. Isn't that how you experienced yourself in your initial experience-- as eternal life? When you experienced yourself that way, aren't you also the same as the one who experiences the 'terror'? Aren't YOU the continuity between the two states? Aren't YOU the thread that links them?

Again, you wrote:

(as if we don't exist) which we don't..

Existence is an illusion? Who says so? I mean WHO says so? Does the one who says that exist? Is that like putting your hands over your face and pretending you're invisible? Whether existence is an illusion, or is illusory, or is 'real', aren't YOU the same?

Actually, my 'model' isn't Jungian, but from alchemy and the Kabala-- the spiritual, or alchemical marriage, which surprised me because I hadn't seen any of the drawings or diagrams of the alchemists or Kabalists, either Jewish or Christian, until well after I had had the images become part of my own thinking-- and both forms of Kabala come from a common ground that goes directly to the Sufis. The Taoist meditations you're doing are the oriental form of alchemy, with the same results-- I did them for quite a while back fifteen years or so ago. Doing the exercises is really good 'Kriya' yoga- - it does a really good job of clearing the nadis, the meridians-- it's really interesting because most people think that their thoughts are 'in their head', that their thought patterns are 'mental', but when you get into the clearing exercises you find that your thought patterns are all over your body in the energy centers and meridians connecting them-- everything from gross physical blocks to emotional blocks to mental patterns to personal identity. I don't know if you've ever done any body work-- Rolfing, etc-- when I moved to Nelson it was to build a house for a Rolfer I'd met in Edmonton, and we traded carpentry for Rolfing sessions-- somebody works on the muscles under your shoulder blade and you start having memories of things you'd completely forgotten from your childhood. So, I'm glad you're pursuing that because it's really effective and productive. In some schools of Zen and Chan meditation there are three stages, three 'enlightenments'-- 'earth rises to heaven', 'heaven descends to earth', and 'the union of heaven and earth'. The first one, 'earth rises to heaven', is what you experienced with the energy going up your spine (doing the hollow tube meditation, etc)-- that's the classic model of 'enlightenment', and most people stop there. The second , 'heaven descends to earth', comes from a reversal of the flow, so to speak, as if it were coming down on you from above, like grace, like the descent of the dove in the New Testament-- sheer peace. For that to happen you, as a vessel, have to be able to handle the inflow, which is where the purification exercises come in. This can sometimes be quite scary because things will happen to you that are definitely out of your control-- from physical movements to emotional things (crying for hours on end, for example), to finding yourself in life situations you wouldn't have dreamed of. Part of what you get with the descent are periods of being immersed in overwhelming love-- if you don't know what it feels like to be loved like that, or if you don't think you're worthy of being loved like that, you can have a rough time until you realize that the 'rules' for that love are that you don't have to do anything to earn it, or get it, or deserve it, and when you go through all the bullshit motions that we go through on earth in order to be loved on 'earth terms' , the very act of going through those motions is a turning away from the love you experienced with the descent. (Maybe I should add here before I forget it that part of process of the descent is sort of like pouring clear water into dirty water in a glass-- at first the dirty water sort of swells up and overflows the glass and all you see is dirty water pouring over the top even though you can see the clear water going in; sooner or later the dirty stuff starts to wash away and the clear takes over-- sometimes the transition areas can be a bit rough). Perhaps I should also add that the clearing process takes place in both you, the physical embodiment, and your 'other part', the missing side (another addition-- I think both men and women have 'animas'-- female for men, male for women-- they appear to be different because of the perspective from which they're seen, because we identify with one side of a polarity, male/female, and so see our unmanifest side as being the opposite pole, and being what we need to be complete). When both sides, manifest/unmanifest, are clear is when the spiritual marriage can take place because it's only at that time that both 'sides' can see each other, so to speak, for what they are without the interference of subconscious projections, etc. (That's why the stuff about your father is important). To me it's at this point that real spirituality starts.

The ocean-- if I look at the ocean in your beach scene, I see an ocean full of things-- TV sets, cows, gurus, garbage trucks, saints and slum lords--- all the things of existence, the ocean of existence, full of polarities. If you dive in and get lost in one side of one of the polarities, you keep going back looking for the other side of the polarity in order to make yourself whole again, in order to find yourself. You try one polarity after the other until you can't remember who you are-- that's karma-- the left over identities of polarities that you keep trying to resolve in order to find yourself. You can get back out by remembering yourself-- by remembering your original face, as the Zen guys say-- by following yourself, like following a rope back out of a cave, except that you're both the one following the rope and the rope itself; or you can get back out by doing 'drying out' exercises to get the water out of your eyes and ears so you can get your bearings; or, most often, you can do a combination of the two. Just don't stop until you can feel the heat of the sun.

(To a female friend)

OK, now let's see if I can write in the morning. I've had to spend a lot of time and energy on the male/female thing because I needed to figure out my own balance. Perhaps it's best if I give you some of my own experiences so you can see why. In the quotes I sent you last night I said something about being balanced male/female and then projecting the female onto a woman to work out my own inner balance. There's more to this, much more-- like how subconscious that is for most people (women project their male half onto men to work things out-- if you haven't had a father all you have is a big emptiness to project, so you don't have any standards of measurement; similarly if a man hasn't had a mother, he has nothing but an emptiness to project-- he has no standards of measurement- -- because most people subconsciously select their mates, their 'other halves' based on their parents-- a man's mother is his first female 'other'; a woman's father is her first male 'other')-- you also have to deal with your own perceptions of what it means to be male or female based on the role models you've had (or haven't had). That's just a sketch-- therapists make a good living dealing with all that. The entire structure of the world runs on that projection mechanism.

Anyhow-- experiences-- like meditating one time and feeling myself moving up and to the left, then coming back down with the distinct feeling that I was a woman in a man's body. I spent the next two weeks being a woman inside a man's body-- and since I was working as a construction superintendent running a job building a new hotel this was very interesting. I couldn't get my voice to come down into it's normal range, I was hitting on any cute guy I saw, mud and grease and dirt were suddenly 'icky' (the word I used in my head at the time), my hair changed to being quite curly and I liked the feeling of being 'cute'. After a while I started thinking that this was all very nice but it was a nuisance so I sat in meditation and consciously decided that I had to change back, at which point I went up and came back down 'male'. I learned a lot about why and how people are gay from that experience.

After this I had a growing awareness of my female half sort of coming into consciousness on her own-- I would be looking through my (male) eyes, my (male) emotions, and then switch to her eyes, her emotions-- it was like I had two heads and two hearts and two sets of genitals. My first reaction was to make her conscious by projecting her onto the woman of my dreams-- trying to find a woman that was 'her' in the flesh-- and I'd go around looking into women's eyes thinking 'is this the one, is this it?' I went through a couple of very intense relationships trying to work this out-- basically because I wanted my other half to be fully present 'right in front of me'. You may recall I told you about my staggering around the room because a woman I was having a relationship with had gotten herself drunk-- that was one of the relationships. And yet whenever I was in a relationship I had to endure the problems of projection that I told you about (empty left side, etc)-- one of the problems of that projection was the ability to feel her as me so I couldn't tell the difference. I finally realized that my 'other half' was nowhere in the world, but was part of me already, and once I had learned about how we project like that (I had to sort through my relationship with my mother, with societal expectations about getting married and what that meant, with women's and men's perceptions of me and the social pressures involved, as well as the issues of self worth and place in society, etc, etc ). Once the problems of projection were more or less resolved I realized that what I was really dealing with was spiritual union and that the foundation of that is the balancing and awakening of both male and female sides in me and their conscious union, their marriage. (One of the things I did along the way was to watch tv for hours on end-- I'd watch anything and everything and feel my reactions and preferences change and flow as the type of program I watched changed-- going from a soap opera and crying during the emotional scenes, preferring 'relationship' movies, to watching football and action movies (Top Gun stuff), and getting into what I call 'moose mind'-- bull moose will charge fully loaded logging trucks or even trains during the rutting season.) What surprised me is that the change in balance went in directions I hadn't expected-- the more I balanced I became the more I came to deal not with my 'feminine' side but with my 'masculine', to the extent that my body changed (I think I said something in the Chris stuff about that -- gong from 160 lbs to 190 in a month and a half, etc) and I realized that I had been fighting my identification as a 'male' for most of my life-- especially the power aspects. There other interesting things-- for example, I've always been aware of people's hands, I like hands, and because I work with mine I'm very aware of my own (like how they have a mind of their own when I'm working-- they know what to do-- they know when a board is smooth (or still rough) long before my eyes do, or when a curve is flowing and right-- anyhow, at times my left hand feels and acts and moves and touches like as woman's hand, while my right moves and touches like a man's.

All of this is the process of the 'spiritual marriage', the 'alchemical marriage' in western spirituality, the 'union of red and white' in tantra. The most important 'dream' of my life is the one that explained all this to me when I was in the midst of it-- perhaps I should say the 'throes' of it, because a lot of it was definitely a descent into hell. In the dream I was sitting with some people in a sort of court yard in an old Romanesque church -- at the same time I could see the scene from overhead and I could see that there was a wing of the church that could only be seen from the air-- you couldn't tell it was there from the ground. So, on the ground, I decided to see if I could find the wing and I wandered around until I came to this descending passageway which I followed. I came to the end of the passage and there was a door at the end and I started towards it when this large 'dragon' suddenly appeared as a sort of guardian of the door and it started toward me with menacing gestures. I suddenly realized I had a large key in my left hand and that I was entitled to go through the door-- I held the key up to the 'dragon' so show it to him, and then I walked through him as though he had become a hologram and went to the door, unlocked it and opened it and went through. The door led to the hidden wing of the church-- I went down a sort of hall way and into a large round room with large pillars around the edge forming large open portals looking out into a vast blue space. In the middle of the room was a large round table. As soon as I saw the table I realized that I'd been here before and I realized that I had made it back from 'something'. I suddenly felt quite lonely and remembered that there had been others there at one time--- my first thought was 'where's everybody else', and immediately I heard this voice say "they either got married or succumbed to self-inflicted wounds". I said 'I don't get it' and immediately remembered a dream I had had a couple of months earlier, and then I 're-dreamed' that dream as if it were for the first time . In that dream I was once again going down a long passageway and came to a door at the end-- as I approached the door I became more and more anxious but I sort of willed myself through it. The door was very ancient, studded with nails, and I thought 'man, I haven't been in here for a long time'-- I finally forced the door open and went into the room, which was very dark and musty and I was still anxious so my first inclination was to make some light , so I started pulling off all these old worn out tapestries from the walls and the walls underneath were bright white. The more tapestries I yanked down the brighter the place became until finally I could see a rough rectangular table in the middle and I realized there was an opening in the ceiling of the room. I had no sooner seen that than a shaft of light came down from above the ceiling and shown on the table. Immediately in the shaft of light there was a sort of holographic image of a large chalice or cup and as soon as I saw it I said "that's what I've been looking for" and jumped on the table and grabbed the image to my chest. As soon as I did that I started to go up the shaft of light with the image clasped to my chest, and the farther I went the more solid the chalice image became. Now I flipped back to the church, only I was both in the room and looking at the scene of the room on a large tv screen and there was a small blue person standing beside me and he said "now do you understand" and then reached out and fiddled with the tv image to make it sharper. As soon as it was sharp, I stepped through the screen and into the scene again. I looked out through the portals at the blue light and began to realize what I had done, and suddenly the blue light changed to this intense white and the scene began to dissolve and I dissolved with it into this overwhelming love. The end.

If you were to ask me where I got the key to unlock the door, I'd have to say that I took it from my mother when she was asleep-- it was mine, and I gave it to her when I was born, but I forgot about it and thought it was hers. Your father has your key.

(More to the same friend on the same topic)

About the key in the dream I told you about-- if you don't have the key then the dragon appears to be real and threatening and resides in a place where you definitely don't want to go, so you can't even imagine that there's a door, much less that the dragon is guarding the door. The dragon is like the wrathful deities in Vajrayana-- they're only wrathful and only inspire fear if you're not aware enough to see them for what they are, and not intent enough to want to see what's on the other side of them-- usually you get intent enough when you've got no place left to go. The trap of being able to reach subtle planes, or of being able to abstract or detach oneself from the 'normal world', is that it's usually easier to bliss out or space out, or tell yourself that the world is an illusion (it's funny how that gets translated-- I think 'illusory' would be a better word-- like a hologram, or the image of a stained glass window on a floor) and go into denial ("when things get tough, I can always take consolation that the world is an illusion"-- that kind of attitude). When you feel you have to option to 'leave' and yet know that you have to face the dragon, and to do that you have to find your key-- is very hard. If you follow most traditional, especially Eastern, spiritual paths, you renounce the world and you move off into the subtle realms and possibly to the space I talked about when I said I saw these guys meditating on the right who were completely out of touch with the feminine (or something to that effect-- I can't remember how I said it)-- but these are dead ends. To find the key you have to go where you don't want to go, you have to go into the very things that made you want to find 'a better place' or to escape the wheel of birth and death-- you have to go into the heart of the world, not away from it.

For any man, finding the key begins with his mother, for any woman with her father-- because the first projection from the left side (for man or woman) is toward his mother for a man, and toward her father for a woman. Men frequently wind up marrying their mothers and women frequently wind up marrying their fathers because they simply and automatically replace their mothers or fathers with the next closest reasonable facsimile-- and then call it love. If you don't have anything to act as a template you can't find a facsimile, there won't be any, and you go around trying on everything hoping it's the one you're looking for.

The love and the wholeness we keep looking for in the 'perfect partner' is really a search for that wholeness in ourselves. There's a story in Plato about how men and women were created: how at one time human beings were spherical in shape and were both male and female at the same time and were extremely powerful; and how the gods were very fearful of the power of the humans so they devised a way to split humans into male and female beings who then spent all their time and energy running around looking for their other half so that they could return to wholeness.

1998

I'd like to write about my experiences and changes in a more direct mode than I had in my previous writing of 1995 (if you want to jump to those letters, they are here.) In those letters I sometimes intentionally didn't elaborate and sometimes suggested things or used metaphors because I felt it was important for the people I was writing to find their own ways of thinking. Metaphors are excellent because they tend to change shape and meaning along with and according to the perception and growth of the person reading them, and they give the person a strong "ahhah!" boost of discovery so they can see their own progress and growth. The last thing I wanted was to have someone memorize what I had to say and ingest it as some kind of final word or gospel truth. What I did want was to act as a prod, an encourager, a reinforcer, as someone who gave someone else the permission and encouragement to be themselves, and perhaps at times to be a midwife assisting in someone's rebirth. The Greek word "metanoia" is appropriate here: it means "spiritual rebirth". I've had the privilege to attend a few metanoias: some are quick and easy, some are slow and painful, but they always result in "oh thank God" and sheer joy. So, in that spirit....

Much of what follows is going to be in the first person, and will be only about experiences. Grand spiritual theories or systems don't really do much for people in the throes of metanoia any more than theories about the biochemistry of digestion do much for hungry people, so I hope this will give those who need it something substantial to chew on.

In 1978 when I had my initial major experience my reaction to it wasn't one of surprise, bewilderment, or panic. On the contrary, I felt as though I'd been waiting for it to happen all my life and it was about time. Finally! It was the first time in my life that I felt "normal", that I felt like I knew who I was and what I was doing. When I looked at the world and saw the "central sun" shining through it I knew I was seeing myself; and when I sat in the rain and saw tiny Buddhas in each raindrop I knew I was seeing myself. When I read accounts of "enlightenment" that talked about kundalini rising to the top chakra I knew I'd been there and done that for many life times, but what I didn't know was where to go next because I knew that those accounts and descriptions of "enlightenment" were only partially true; in fact they were descriptions of views seen from false summits. For the past twenty years I've explored and grown into the "next".

After the 1978 experience I began meditating regularly and sometimes intensely, and a fairly regular sensation would be that I'd start off being in my physical body, sitting there meditating, and I'd feel the energy change-- sometimes as if rising up my spine, sometimes just as a sort of blip, after which I would distinctly feel as though I had a body inside my body, but not as a second body that you might use in out of body experiences. Rather, it was as though I was in a large body with my physical body extending from the tailbone of that body to the solar plexus, and I would experience both bodies simultaneously. From the larger body I could see the smaller body, and could see all the classical signs of kundalini rising in that body-- I would experience the crown chakra of the small body, my physical body, at the height of the solar plexus of my larger body, and see the energy rise up the spine of the smaller body to reach the crown chakra of that body (at the solar plexus of the larger body). (I think I should say here that while I'm using the term "physical body", that term actually includes the whole body-mind continuum-- physical body, thoughts, emotions, etc.) Sometimes, instead of either experiencing the kundalini going up my spine and then going to the larger body, or "blipping" to get to the larger body, I'd experience myself as moving with the kundalini up to the crown chakra and then I'd move to the larger body. When this happened I'd usually experience myself to be moving through a tunnel of lights, or rings or wheels of lights, or spheres of lights, with a very bright light at the end of the tunnel. This latter experience directly parallels accounts of near-death experiences, except that I've always experienced myself as moving inside myself and into the larger body.

I've taken to calling this larger body my "universal" body because I tend to experience it as filled with stars and space, as filled with the universe. I can also expand and contract myself inside this universal body in much the same way that we become conscious or unconscious of parts of our physical bodies by paying attention to them, by being in them. This is a body I enjoy very much -- I enjoy the feeling and sense of complete expansion, and find it a huge relief from being focused and located in a physical body, which I'm coming to regard as more of a nuisance than anything else. In this universal body I can feel myself moving through the universe, and physical life more or less springs up in suitable environments as I pass through those environments and interact with them-- an example of this: I'm moving through open space and find myself sort of rising up through a planet from underneath it; as I finish my pass through the planet I see a small organism on the planet's face, a sort of sea anemone creature, but on land, and half covered with a coating of ice. I realize the planet can only support life to this level and that the ice coating helps to preserve the organism's core temperature during the planet's night. I also realize that the organism is there as a result of my interaction with the planet-- the organism is the best life that I can produce in that environment. I love the little ice covered anemone intensely.

(This has caused me no end of grief being physical in this world because I basically have to make myself very numb to my feelings about the beings here if I want to participate in this life. Beings here survive by eating each other, either directly or indirectly-- directly by literally swallowing and digesting each other; or indirectly, consuming each other's money, property, and so on. When I participate in this and allow myself to feel much of anything at all I distinctly feel as though I'm eating my own children, and that my own children have been reduced to eating each other in order to survive on this planet. And I don't know what to do about it, I don't know how to change it.)

Some corollary experiences to the universal body in the physical world are that I frequently feel other people's emotions as my own, and in very many cases also feel their physical sensations as my own. In some cases, usually with people that I am particularly fond of, I can look at them and have the very distinct feeling that when they are looking back at me I am actually looking at myself looking back at me-- not that I am in two places at once, but that I am in both them and me, like the ocean being in two underwater bottles at the same time.

Another example: I've just completed an out-of-body experience and I'm above my physical body looking at it when I suddenly realize that my relationship to it has changed drastically-- instead of the normal sensation of looking at a sleeping organism I realize that I'm looking at a shell, a husk, much like a cicadas shell or a shed snake skin, and that I've "downloaded" all the information stored in the DNA of that body into me. I know that I can recreate all of the life stored in all of that DNA information, and that I can do it by making that life out of myself.

Still another example: when I was living in the cabin in Nelson I once heard a small squeaking sound and followed it outside the cabin to a tiny baby mouse who had fallen from a nest and landed on a window ledge. The little guy would have fit in a teaspoon and had obviously been out there for some time so I carried him/her inside and just sat there holding him in my hands trying to warm him up. It became obvious that he wasn't going to last long and he eventually died in my hands. When he died there was a sort of tiny explosion in my hand, a flash of light and a release of what I can only describe as joy, and the light rose up and disappeared into me, directly into the center of my chest. Some years later I had a distinct dream in which one of my dogs was running toward me and then jumped into the center of my chest. Two days later my dog died and returned into me just as the baby mouse had.

When I move beyond the universal body I experience another distinct "octave" change, as I call it, much in the same way there's an octave change between the physical body and the universal body. This time, however, it's a bit more difficult to describe so I'll resort to an analogy that I use to think about it: what comes to mind for me is the image of a tennis ball turning itself inside out so that the fuzz is on the inside, without the ball splitting or deforming in any way-- just "pop" and the fuzz is on the inside, or maybe "pop" and the fuzz is on the outside. In any case, what I experience is the "pop" and then being in front of a huge white luminous sun, the same sun that I saw shining through everything, and I'm this huge white luminous face that's the other half of this huge white luminous sun-- the sun and I are the same, we are the same "entity", the same being, there is no difference between us, except that as this face I'm "sweating", for want of a better word, in the presence of the sun, and the beads of sweat roll down my face as brilliant blue stars, blue-white pearls. And I experience each blue star as a creation, each blue pearl as an "everything", and there are drops of my sweat as numerous as there are grains of sand on the beach, there are oceans of blue stars, there are seas of "everythings". During the "tennis ball pop" I have jumped from being the universal life of one of these stars (and all of these stars) to being the source of these stars. And yet I'm continuous from the presence in the physical body to the universal body to this first body-- I am the same all the way through because I am the same as the central sun.

When I move beyond this first body giving birth to creations I do so only because I am continuous and the same as the central sun -- and I become ONLY "presence", again for want of a better word. When I wrote in the original letters about following yourself back, this is what I meant. At any point, from physical body to universal body to first body, you can always, always follow yourself back because first and foremost we-- you and I -- are "presence".

A lot of my energy and focus in the past fifteen years or so has been to come to terms with and try to heal or at least integrate life here on this planet, bearing in mind what I wrote above about life arising on planets and my feelings about life here. In the past few years I've been doing a huge amount of "house cleaning" and sorting-- much of what I said in the 1995 letters about sexuality, male/female polarities, the spiritual marriage, and so on, have to do with that. When I first started doing the house cleaning I realized that it was entirely voluntary, and I really didn't have too much sense about where it would take me. In hind site it has been a huge ordeal, a major gut wrenching undertaking, and I seriously doubt I would have been able to do it if I hadn't first been able to follow myself back at least to the level of the universal body simply for some relief.

I want to write about that next.

A dream: I'm looking at an ocean of stars and I can see the ocean narrow down and turn into a river, and I follow the river until it comes to a place where it's narrow and congested and most of the river of stars doesn't get through, only a trickle. I follow the trickle down until I come to a town. The main street of the town has all kinds of buildings and stores with their names on the fronts, but any building or store I go into only seems to be a barbershop and all the barbers are women. They all want to give me a haircut, but I say no thanks.

For the longest time I thought this dream was about life on this planet in a planetary sense, and in that context I could make sense of the river of stars turning into a trickle, but the barbershops, women barbers, and haircuts didn't really fit in. What I immediately associated with the haircuts was the story of Samson and Delilah, but I couldn't integrate that into a planetary scenario. Later on, after I had gone through the whole process of the "spiritual marriage", of reclaiming my left side, and so on (you'll have to re-read parts of the 1995 letters for this), I came to realize that the dream was personal rather than planetary although in most instances it applies to most people on this planet.

This how I understand the dream now: the ocean of stars is my universal body, as I wrote about above. The ocean turning into a river is the interface, if you will, between my universal body and my individual existence. The river should have been flowing freely all the way into the town, but it had been congested at a certain point and reduced to a trickle. It had been reduced to a trickle because of my relationship with women, because I saw women as other than me, because I gave myself away to women because I wanted to be loved. I wrote this to my brother:

"Remember we once talked about giving away your left side to someone and then having your life revolve around them? Or WANTING to give away your left side and not finding anyone, and not feeling complete until you've given away your left side? After you've been in a relationship for awhile, especially a long while, you forget what it feels like to own all of yourself -- the very first relationship, the very first time you give away your left side, is to your mother. Most men try to recreate that, continue that, or fix that relationship in the women they meet and have relationships with.

The pain of the emptiness of an empty left side is all the stuff you've been feeling, and all the stuff anyone feels after a broken relationship. In the end, everyone wants to find a relationship that will be permanent, eternal, and that will forever end that emptiness. You can only do that by reclaiming your left side and your own other half (feminine in this case). No mother and no other woman can do that for you, but they can all be vehicles on the way since they'll contain and mirror your projections of your relationship with your (supposedly) missing side. Note "supposedly". That entire process of reclamation is the "spiritual marriage", the whole thrust of alchemy and kabbalah and tantra.

The left side thing-..... do you remember the dream I had that I describe in the stuff I wrote-- about going down into the cathedral? Here it is again-- note the line "I suddenly felt quite lonely and remembered that there had been others there at one time--- my first thought was 'where's everybody else', and immediately I heard this voice say "they either got married or succumbed to self-inflicted wounds". That's what happens a lot (most) of the time when people come face to face with that left side pain and emptiness-- but there are other choices than those two-- unfortunately the world runs, recreates itself, and maintains itself through the coming and going of that pain, so if you really want to make those other choices you immediately find yourself at odds with the world. I personally prefer to be at odds...

(here's the dream again:)
All of this is the process of the 'spiritual marriage', the 'alchemical marriage' in western spirituality, the 'union of red and white' in tantra. The most important 'dream' of my life is the one that explained all this to me when I was in the midst of it-- perhaps I should say the 'throes' of it, because a lot of it was definitely a descent into hell. In the dream I was sitting with some people in a sort of court yard in an old Romanesque church -- at the same time I could see the scene from overhead and I could see that there was a wing of the church that could only be seen from the air-- you couldn't tell it was there from the ground. So, on the ground, I decided to see if I could find the wing and I wandered around until I came to this descending passageway which I followed. I came to the end of the passage and there was a door at the end and I started towards it when this large 'dragon' suddenly appeared as a sort of guardian of the door and it started toward me with menacing gestures. I suddenly realized I had a large key in my left hand and that I was entitled to go through the door-- I held the key up to the 'dragon' so show it to him, and then I walked through him as though he had become a hologram and went to the door, unlocked it and opened it and went through. The door led to the hidden wing of the church-- I went down a sort of hall way and into a large round room with large pillars around the edge forming large open portals looking out into a vast blue space. In the middle of the room was a large round table. As soon as I saw the table I realized that I'd been here before and I realized that I had made it back from 'something'. I suddenly felt quite lonely and remembered that there had been others there at one time--- my first thought was 'where's everybody else', and immediately I heard this voice say "they either got married or succumbed to self-inflicted wounds". I said 'I don't get it' and immediately remembered a dream I had had a couple of months earlier, and then I 're-dreamed' that dream as if it were for the first time . In that dream I was once again going down a long passageway and came to a door at the end-- as I approached the door I became more and more anxious but I sort of willed myself through it. The door was very ancient, studded with nails, and I thought 'man, I haven't been in here for a long time'-- I finally forced the door open and went into the room, which was very dark and musty and I was still anxious so my first inclination was to make some light , so I started pulling off all these old worn out tapestries from the walls and the walls underneath were bright white. The more tapestries I yanked down the brighter the place became until finally I could see a rough rectangular table in the middle and I realized there was an opening in the ceiling of the room. I had no sooner seen that than a shaft of light came down from above the ceiling and shown on the table. Immediately in the shaft of light there was a sort of holographic image of a large chalice or cup and as soon as I saw it I said "that's what I've been looking for" and jumped on the table and grabbed the image to my chest. As soon as I did that I started to go up the shaft of light with the image clasped to my chest, and the farther I went the more solid the chalice image became. Now I flipped back to the church, only I was both in the room and looking at the scene of the room on a large tv screen and there was a small blue person standing beside me and he said "now do you understand" and then reached out and fiddled with the tv image to make it sharper. As soon as it was sharp, I stepped through the screen and into the scene again. I looked out through the portals at the blue light and began to realize what I had done, and suddenly the blue light changed to this intense white and the scene began to dissolve and I dissolved with it into this overwhelming love. The end.

If you were to ask me where I got the key to unlock the door, I'd have to say that I took it from my mother when she was asleep-- it was mine, and I gave it to her when I was born, but I forgot about it and thought it was hers."

I simply cannot describe to anyone how hard it has been to navigate between the two usual choices of getting married or succumbing to self-inflicted wounds, as well as to maintain a physical existence that basically requires me to numb and disassociate myself from my true feelings and even from what I know to be true about existence. However, I seemed to have survived.

Now I find that the river of stars goes clear down to my toes. When I go to bed at night and relax my physical body I can feel it's outline changing into the earth, becoming a body-shaped line of hills covered with green growing things of all sorts. Then it becomes open and spacious and fills up with stars and the dark blue-black of open space and the stars and the space fill my body. And then I do the "tennis ball pop" and my body becomes the first body, white and luminous-- only now the blue stars pour from my whole body from head to toe instead of just from my face. And then I fall asleep.

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