Author Archive

Wise Woman

Sometimes this is a disguised image of the way you feel about your mother. It can also show how you are relating to your core self and what you are getting or learning from it. We each have a ‘wise woman’ in us, it is part of our mental functioning that brings together and learn from all our life experience; it synthesises our whole life experience plus what is held unknown in our unconscious. The results of this learning are frequently express by an old or wise woman or man in our dreams. See Core Self – Archetype of the Wise Old Woman – Archetype of the Self – Witch

Painless Childbirth

A mother of two children once told me the fascinating story of her youngest son’s birth. The birth was proving to be very difficult, so much so that she felt she could not go on any longer. Her contractions were such agony that she could bear it no more and she felt as if she inwardly collapsed. To her amazement, what had been pain became a feeling of great bliss. She said that a most wild and wonderful emotion came upon her. No longer any pain, but like the mounting pleasure of sexual abandon during intercourse, and her son was born in her ecstasy of orgasm.

From “Psychological Factors in Birth and Breastfeeding,” by Niles Newton, Ph.D.

“Pushing was absolutely incredible. It felt SO good. I loved the sensation of Ilana-Mahmea’s head popping out; and her body coming out was incredible. I made roaring sounds. KT later asked me if I was in a lot of pain and I said I felt no pain at all. I was reaching down into the depths of my being – I felt like I was reaching back through time eternal, into the Great Mother herself – and using my power to push her out. The sounds were sounds of power. And I felt awesomely empowered. It was I could say the best feeling I have ever had. Primal force of life coursing through me. Power of Woman, Power of Birth, Power of Carolyn! If I can do that, I can do anything I set my mind to. The sensation of Ilana-Mahmea’s body sliding out of my vagina was orgasmic. I still shudder when I think of how pleasurable that was.” -Carolyn Alton Siegel  See Archetype of the Great Mother

“A woman in California was giving birth at home in a portable birth tub and feeling very sexy and loving with her partner. Each time she had a contraction she would cry out, ‘Oh, baby, I love it. More…more!’ Her windows were open because it was July, and soon a crowd gathered outside her home. When the baby was born amidst shouts of ‘Yes!!! Yes!!! Oh, my God, yes!!!’ her neighbors gave her a great round of applause. They only realized that it was a birth after they heard the cries of a baby.” – From Gentle Birth Choices, by Barbara Harper, R.N.

“It was the ultimate climax. I felt open, loose and free. Words cannot explain the feeling as my baby’s body slithered out. To this day I can still sense that wonderful feeling inside. It makes me tingle.” -From “Unconditional Faith,” by Allison Scimeca in the book Unassisted Homebirth: An Act of Love , by Lynn Griesemer

Family, by Helen Wessel

“My first son was born by unexpected cesarian section. My second was a planned homebirth with a midwife assisting. He was posterior, so it was all back labor and he wouldn’t turn. There was a great deal of pain, but in the last few minutes, as much pain as there was, it suddenly swung the other way to huge waves of pleasure as his body came out – an incredible RUSH like nothing I had ever felt before or since. I said to my midwife, Dhyana, ‘Wow! What was that thing in the end!?’ She said, ‘That was The Gift. A lot of my ladies get that.’ I held that baby and instantly loved him with my whole being. Maybe this is the way that nature had intended it to be for us. Now, looking back, the only thing I can think is that he went ramrod over my G-spot…all 9 pounds of him.” From “The Gift,” by Susan Peer

So what was the turning point that led to ecstasy rather than unbearable pain?

Well, it is something most people know nothing about unless they have been pushed to the point where they could take no more and Gave Up. But it can be done without being pushed so hard – it’s called Relaxation.

Examples of this are many – “The feeling floored me and I sat there and gave up on any hope of finding what I had hoped for – a sort of wonderful welcome. But as I sat a deep quietness grew in me – I had given up! And that was when a quiet bliss grew in me.”

“Tired, I rested by a tree, stood quite still, and gave up my searching. Within a few minutes, what had seemed like a dead wood began to come alive. Birds flew to trees and settled, or moved here and there. Squirrels appeared in the branches and on the ground, and all was moving with life.”

“With enormous certainty, I realised that there was no cure for my sickness and I had struggled in vain. It was a tremendous blow – and I gave up. I mean I gave up hope, everything. Then it came to me that I had to listen in deep stillness – not think, not seek to understand, not struggle, just listen. My whole being entered into silence, gently listening as one might listen to the rain falling on a lake. Then suddenly it was known – the essence of human existence. I was healed.

The only thing I can see as my turning point was complete surrender, a total giving up. Then it was like an experience of enlightenment.”

How Can I Relax or Let Go That Fully?

We have to start with fundamentals so try this. Start by putting one hand on your lower abdomen and the other on your chest. Then you breathe out as fully as you can so you tense up as you do so. Now slowly breathe in which hand start to move first.

If it is the hand on your abdomen move first, you are doing well, but if it is the hand on your chest it shows you are suffering an enormous tension in the diaphragm muscle.

Example: 2 years ago I did a horrible thing to myself. I felt my belly a little bit inflated so I started to breath from my chest, hold my stomach in or hold my breath at some points to not show that I had a fat belly( I was so vain).

That took almost 3 or 4 months and I came in a point I wasn’t feeling that well my head didn’t have much oxygen etc. Then I tried to let go of that stupid idea, system, whatever, and let my breathing system to work normally as it knows. But unfortunately my body had forgotten how to breathe right…

Now I have a bad feeling in my stomach and in my chest, I have to take big breaths during the day and when I’m anxious things get much worse. My quality of life has changed so much. Why I was so stupid, why I did that? Please, I need your help; I don’t know what to do to fix me.

Many men and women have this tension that leaves them breathing inadequately. Here is what I suggested the woman to do.

Your story is a wonderful example (or in your case awful example) of the power of habits. Once we build such a habit it tends to stay in place automatically. But of course you can change it by creating a new habit by constantly practising the new one. You will need to put as much effort and time into it as you put into creating the awful habit.

Do this by standing and put a hand on your lower abdomen, and as you breathe in endeavour to raise the hand by letting the breath into your belly. As your belly raises your hand, allow it then to continue so it extends upwards raising your chest. Also as you breathe out really breathe out so your abdomen flattens.

Actually it is learning to relax the tension you have created in your diaphragm muscle. It is the muscle that expands the lungs by pushing down into our digestive organs, and so making the abdomen rise the lungs expand. So, keep practising this and notice as you are going about the daily life whether you are using the new method and keep returning to it and you will have a new habit and better health.

Most women believe childbirth will be one of the most painful experiences of their lives.

And many who have given birth already can vouch that this is true.

But one obstetric expert says there is a simple way to overcome the pain: just don’t think at all.

Obstetrician Dr Michel Odent says the key to giving birth easily is to shut off thinking altogether.

 

“In fact, women ‘thinking too much’ in labour is the one thing that hinders the baby slipping out with barely any effort at all, said the renowned medical expert.

The part of the brain responsible for conscious thinking, called the neocortex, allows us to do mathematics, use language and answer questions, he said.

But this type of thinking hinders a woman’s natural, primitive ability to give birth to a child. Speaking to New Scientist, he said: ‘A woman in labour needs to be protected against all possible stimulation of her thinking brain, because giving birth is the business of the primitive brain structures.

If a women could turn off her ‘thinking’, her neocortical activity, a phenomenon known as the ‘foetus ejection reflex’ could occur he said. This where a baby slips out with no conscious effort, he said. Here the body does all the work and the woman simply lies back while it happens. Then there will be a short series of irresistible contractions, no voluntary movements at all.

He added that having her partner present is a new phenomenon in the history of humanity, adding that in the animal kingdom mammals give birth alone, away from their sexual partner.”

That is fine, but many need a step by step way to achieve that sort of non-thinking. Here are some suggestions.

But before we even begin an explanation of the methods however, it is as well to know a little of what confronts us. In the first place, learning non-thinking relaxation is not any easier than learning other things – musical instrument for instance. It demands our attention, our time, our devotion. To attain something in this realm may take practice for some weeks. At the same time a little practice, while it may not take us to dizzy heights, will give us enough facility to aid us through difficulties. In learning to ride a bicycle, we may never win races, but at least we can get about.

Having found a place where you will not be disturbed for half an hour, and having settled yourself, loosen all tight clothing. Collars, belts, under garments, should all be loose, shoes removed so the body is unrestricted. Sit for a few moments letting the thoughts and activities that have occupied you die down. Resolve firmly to keep your attention wholly on the practice during the allotted time, no matter what the distraction.

When that feeling arrives, bring your attention to your legs. Tense the muscles in the legs as hard as you can without discomfort or cramp. If you find this difficult, press your legs together, or against the floor, to produce the tenseness in the muscles. Hold the tension for a moment, watching the sensation it produces, then slowly let go of the tension. Allow the sensations in the legs to sink to the other extreme. While the legs are tense, there is a feeling of effort and rigidity. Now let those feelings be replaced by effortlessness and limpness.

When the effortlessness and limpness become distinct, tense the legs again, but this time not quite to hard. Hold it, noticing the feelings, then slowly drop again to the other extreme. As you do so, notice the feeling of dropping-that feeling of tension slipping away. Go through this about seven to ten times, tensing less each time. At the end there should be only the feeling of tension, and the feeling of relaxation. For a few times, hardly moving the muscles, let this feeling of tension and relaxation alternate. Then in turn, go through the whole process again with the hips and waist, chest, arms, neck, head and face.

Once you have reached the head, start again at the legs. This time however, instead of tensing the muscles, merely become aware of each part in turn, dropping away any tension that remains. In this way, become aware of the foot and its sensations of weight, shape, clothing, and tension. Then allow the feeling of dropping to take place. Thus go all over the body, time and time again, until your allotted time has elapsed.

For the best results, practice at least once, or if you have time, twice each day. Give yourself at least a month of practice before either passing onto the next method or stopping. After a month you should find that a fine degree of recognition of the state of tension exists. Usually you also begin to notice during this time, just how tense you are. The tension of the arms end shoulders while driving may be noticed for the first time, or else how stiffly we hold ourselves while sitting or meeting strangers. Do not be dismayed. Slowly these tensions can be dropped away until we are free of them.

In most cases however, learning relaxation will be like climbing a mountain. Sometimes the views are wonderful, and an elevated view of the world is gained, but it is hard work. Paradoxically, the hard work is in learning to do nothing, to give up effort and be still. Once there, there is no effort attached to it at all, but getting there often requires all we have. In fact Carl Jung the famous psychiatrist gave the advice, “Do nothing but let things happen.”

The method that follows is an extension of the last, and cannot properly be practised unless the other has been already used. It consists of very quickly passing the attention over the body, without the preliminaries of tensing and relaxing. Do this lying or sitting as before. The aim of this is to drop any obvious muscular tensions still in the body. Then, when one has reached the head, keep the attention there. Concentrate on the forehead, wrinkling the brow as much as possible but instead of making this simply a physical tension, make it an emotional one also.

This it quite easy to do when properly understood. We are doing it all day in fact, just as we are all day tensing muscularly. We find, however, that muscular tension is nearly always the follower of emotional tension. Thus, if we have not dropped our emotional tensions, we have not been able to drop our deepest physical tensions. The large muscle groups of the body may be quite limp while a nervous or emotional tension still exists so that the viscera, heart, arteries and vital organs will be operating under unconscious tension.

Getting back to tensing emotionally however, one uses the wrinkled forehead as a focus. Imagine that it is wrinkled because one is feeling apprehensive. Use any existing worries, (financial, sexual, or social) that one may have to deepen this experience of apprehension. Allow the whole face and body to be influenced by the mood one is conjuring. Then, when it becomes reasonably pronounced, gently drop it away from the face and the whole body, as if it were a muscular tension. Now, using the face and forehead again, express fear in a similar way. It will probably be found that whereas apprehension or worry wrinkles the forehead, fear pulls it tight and smooth, tensing the muscles at the temples hard (and that is one of the causes of headaches in this area).

Again, drop the whole mood and tension gently away into relaxation when it has been experienced, or made conscious. Next, see if you can similarly express anger, and then drop it away. Follow this with expressions of pain, grief, or any of the emotions that are commonly experienced.

When this has been done there may be time left of the allotted period. This should be used by still holding the attention to the face and dropping away any and all emotions expressed on it. Some emotions are so much with us that they have become graven upon our face and body. This is like an emotional dirt that has become grimed into our form. Whereas `we usually wash ourselves daily to clean away physical dirt (or even several times a day on exposed areas) we seldom cleanse this inner grime of fears and feelings. Here is one of the practical issues underlying the origins of daily washing and daily praying. It makes us clean again, and puts us in harmony with the sources of our life.

As before, pass the attention quickly over the body dropping obvious tensions. Then bring the attention to the hips and abdomen. Now realise that in this general area we focus our passions and physical hunger. The yearning for food and sex

Call to mind any difficulties one has with this area of one’s feelings. Do not attempt to decide the wrongness or rightness of such feelings. No attempt is being made to decide what is proper or improper. Merely call to mind as clearly as possible one’s sexual and physical hungers, in whatever way they express, then drop them as if they were muscular tensions. In fact tense your genital area and slowly relax it several times

Bring the attention next to the chest and throat generally. This area of our body we can take as representing our feelings. By this is meant the way we feel about our job, our situation in life, our capabilities, friends and enemies, parents, health and so on. `Think of all these as a great bundle of feelings, and again let go as if they were muscular tensions. Again tense this area and slowly relax it several times

Once more, no attempt is made to decide whether or not one is justified in feeling such, or whether right or wrong. In fact the right and wrong, pleasurable and painful, are all dropped, together. Neither should any feeling be thrust aside or pushed down out of consciousness as if being fought off. This is decidedly against the aims of this practice and such methods will not result in relaxation. They may produce a mental or emotional silence, but certainly not a peace of mind or experience of inner silence One cannot push tensions away, physical or emotional. The effort to push them away only produces a further tension.

It can only be done by a letting go. If a tension remains after one has let go of one’s effort to maintain it, it is only because there is good reason or cause for it. In our practice, as already explained, first the emotion then the cause come to consciousness. Once the cause is realised in this way, the emotion naturally ceases, whether it is restlessness, constant desire to eat, fearfulness, a trauma or irritability. To stifle such feelings is like stifling our natural warning system of pain, or muffling a fire bell.

After the chest, bring the attention to the head. This part of our body we can associate with our ideas, our thoughts, our opinions about things, our reasoning. Bring to consciousness some of one’s opinions about oneself, about life, and so on. Bring up one’s religious beliefs or lack of them, examine thoughts about ambitions, tense the fac and let go of all the attitudes and expressions we hold there, then let go of them as if they were muscular tensions. Drop them alt away, good or bad, true or false.

Now we come to the climax of the whole of these series or practices-the full-blooded launching into the unconditional. Remember that the ego, or self-awareness is the result of many factors. To think of it as us in the most permanent sense is an illusion. The light from an electric bulb is the result of the electricity interacting with the bulb. The light can disappear if switched off or the bulb damaged. Similarly, our awareness of self is the result of the biological interaction of matter and energy, life and our body. But in gradually dropping away all the images, the results, we are left with only clear consciousness; we come to know what IS – the basis of our being and all life. Life itself.

Remember Life always moves us without any effort from us – it breathes us constantly in spontaneous movement; it beats our heart, digests our food and does the thousand and one other unknown processes to keep us alive. So if you actually fully relax you must expect spontaneous movement to appear at some time. To really appreciate that remember that Life always moves us spontaneously in its most important ways like breathing and heartbeat. So observe how gently it works and how it happens even when we are completely ‘out of it’. Read People’s Experience of LifeStream

For those who want a master class of learning to ‘let go’ read these links – LifeStream and Opening to Life

What Happens When We Die?

Links to main sections: Memory of Past Life – What Happens When I Die? – People’s Experience of Dying – It Isn’t So Difficult To Be in Touch With Our Dead

I personally think we reincarnate and learn new things in each new life, but am wondering what you all think and if any of your OBEs or lucid dreams have altered your original view of what you think occurs after our bodies die? – Mithokey

Mithokey – Yes I know we do reincarnate – but I think my thoughts on this are seen better in https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/reincarnation-and-dreams/ And in https://dreamhawk.com/interesting-people/rudolph-steiners-philosophy-of-life-and-death/ and also in https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/near-death-experiences/

 You asked whether my recent experiences have altered my views. Well yes, they have been deepened. Here is something I experienced, not in a dream but while awake.

I started by imagining myself standing in the shadows of The House of the Ancestors – a great dream I experienced.  Then we walked together into the darkness.  The subjective images took on a life of their own and I saw we were walking in a large underground space like great catacombs.  The light was dim but we could see our surroundings, and not very far into the cave like space was a tomb on our right.  It had the form of a low wall about a foot high in an oblong, and the wall surrounded a long stone in the centre, which was roughly body shaped.

As we drew level with the tomb an enormous change occurred in me.  Suddenly I became a woman.  It was no longer imagination.  I was now completely experiencing myself as a woman whose tomb we had approached.  As such I was torn by an immense pain of loss.  As my complete identification deepened my body curled up with the pain as I was torn by wretched crying.  Suzanne told me my voice changed as I cried out again and again for release from the pain of losing all my children, my husband, even my parents.  My hands were clawing my legs in an effort to express the misery, and I was screaming that I could not bear to live any longer with such pain.  I cried out to God to take me, for there was nothing left for me to live for.  “Why?  Why did this happen to me?  Why has everything I loved been taken from me?”

There was no response to these awful cries and tearing sobs.  But slowly a shift began.  It seemed to me as an observer witnessing this awful pain that by entering this place the spirit of that woman had woken in me.  But as she had died in such unresolved agony of loss, that is what was met when she was awoken.  But gradually she realised she was alive again in a new way.  She began to recognise that I was holding her within me.  Because I was not frightened of pain and emotions, the misery could play itself out in me.  And because my understanding of what was happening flowed into her awareness, she slowly saw and felt her loss in a different way.  In fact, we were both realising she was experiencing resurrection as she was now aware pf being apart of my consciousness, and that in turn meant there was no final death as believed by many.  Therefore, there was no loss as she had originally felt it.

At this point, something truly incredible occurred.  She and I both realised she was one of my past dwelling places.  But for her the viewpoint was slightly different; for she saw me as a continuation of a life that she had failed to be a part of because of the awful pain of loss. It had kept her from flowing into what was her future as part of my life.

From my perspective, she was one of the past dwelling places the spirit that was at the core of my present personality had lived in and as her.  She was not one of my lives, because the personality that I am was unique and had not lived that woman’s life, but my spirit – the underlying creative life  had. Because she was now part of me and me of her I asked her what she had brought into my life. Her reply was, “A woman’s love”.

But it is worth remembering that a single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does  so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I,  are the result of gathered experience.

So no plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb was as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self. To explore it see https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/   

 What Happens When I Die?

A huge mistake many people make when considering death is that they are certain the body is them. We have been taught that the basic part of us is atoms. So as such we were just physical bodies with a physical brain, and of course as a physical body we know it can be destroyed or die. But in 1900 an amazing new science was born – Quantum Physics. It said that our basic being is not atoms but sub- atomic-particles, energy, and energy can never die, so that questioned much of past statements.

It is often quoted at funerals, Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” But that is only what was put together by what moved that heap of material substance – the body. But we are that mystery that is not lost with the body’s death, consciousness.

People usually forget that their body had a beginning and was formed or created by something other than their body or their mother. For no mother could orchestrate the enormous changes a fetus go through from simply cells multiplying on to a creature with gills as fish use and again onwards to a human body ready to emerge as an air breather. Only the Life Process has such skill to creative a miracle – for every lifeform even plants are miracles for no human can even create such things, copy or clone yes, but create no. So what created your body and consciousness?

Example: I started by considering the recent nightmare of the ‘thing’ at the foot of my bed. Gradually I began to feel tense throughout my body, with difficulty in breathing. The ‘thing’ seemed at first to be a woman’s vagina. There was a little feeling in this but not much. Then it slowly grew in intensity and I realised the ‘thing’ was death. Recently it is obvious from the mirror that my body is going through another period of rapid ageing. The dream was a dramatic representation of my feelings about this. Death was gradually creeping up on me, gradually overwhelming me and I was fighting it. As the feeling deepened I saw that in my feelings I felt that death had put its finger on me. The touch of death was like a disease though. Once touched the disease was incurable and gradually took over one’s body. I could hardly breathe as I experienced this, and I understood the sort of emotions that might lie beneath asthma attacks. This struggle with death went on for some time. It was not terrible but was felt strongly. I also recognised that my wife. Deb, has similar feelings about her ageing, and is communicating to me that her body is dying and unclean, especially her genitals, and this is off-putting. I see that when I shouted in the dream,  ‘I will destroy you!’ in a way it is my fear of being destroyed that is behind the emotion.

I began to wonder what to do about the situation. The feeling was that death was claiming me. So, I wanted to face the truth about death, whatever it was. I wanted to walk right up to it and look it in the face and know whether death meant a final end. If it did I would rather know. As I approached death like this by imaging walking toward the THING, my feelings went through an amazing transformation. All the tension left me. I felt good, positive, easy to breathe and with a sense of hope about life and death.

This was so surprising and sudden I wondered what had produced it. I needed to be aware of how this change had occurred. So, I retraced my steps to look at death and try to understand why it had lost its power of fear.

At first I saw that my tension and sense of death being or giving a disease was due to a view I had of it. When we look at the world only through our senses, death is obviously a terminal sickness that claims everyone. Someone said on TV the other day – Life is a sexually transmitted disease that produces a 100% mortality. Seen in this way death is the rotting corpse, the skeleton. The path to it is disease or breakdown. But in looking it in the face I saw another view of it. I saw the dead body, the corpse, the skeleton, as a form left behind by the process of life. I saw that our body was not created by our mother, for no human mother could perform the miracle of being able to create a human baby.

so what was the creator of our body? When I looked at myself to see what ‘David’ is – I cannot separate myself from the process of life. That process is the great Creator and leaves behind shells, bodies, tree trunks, but it goes on creating other forms. So I am the Creator and the Created, I am Life.

Another example is how we tend to take in information and totally believe it. For generations people thought light was the fastest one could achieve; so the fantasied space craft as flying metal containers we named saucers, but later it was discovered that sub-atomic-particles were seen in quantum experiments to be everywhere at once. Also it was seen that a human observer could change the sub-atomic-particles, suggesting that we in some way create the world around us. Also the term quantum ghosts was defined, because quantum phenomena can pass through any solid object – just as we can do when experiencing a so called out of body experience. The implications of the theorem are enormous. Something can be in two places at once. Apparently distant objects, or people, are intricately linked in an immediate way. There is no separate existence as we previously thought. Our view of the world is not one supported by the facts of physics. Time and space are transcended. David Bohm, an eminent physicist, goes as far as to say that all things in our observable universe are inextricable linked. Nothing has separate existence. See This wonderful video talk by a doctor observing many people death – https://www.facebook.com/WarpedElements/videos/851300485357019/

Death of the body occurs when the body is badly injured, has suffered a bad illness or is dying from old age and so cannot support the intricacies of consciousness, then consciousness can longer function in the body. Consciousness, from what I now understand it to be, was never fully in the body so never left it. That because consciousness exists at another dimension and so simply uses the body, acts through the brain and nervous system to gain experience of the three dimensional world and its joys, pains and difficulties. And because we see life and death mostly through our three dimension view we believe we ‘leave’ our body in so called ‘out of body experiences’. As I say, simply a three dimensional view.

To quote the recent view of quantum physics, “This suggests that the fundamental particles of our body exist beyond time and space, and if a dream touches this level then it expresses a very different experience of time. Yet we still hear scientists talking about the boundary of  the speed of light. This difficulty in crossing the boundary of knowing into the unknown is a sort of general blindness most of us suffer. The implications of the theorem are enormous. Something can be in two places or conditions at once. Apparently distant objects, or people, are intricately linked in an immediate way. There is no separate existence as we previously thought.”

After the death of the body you are now fully in the dimension of the dream. As such you experience, as in dreams, surroundings and people and animals that appear as external and solid. You will usually see yourself in the body you experienced in the last life, but it may be younger without any illness, and you may feel as if you have woken for the first time because your mind, your awareness, is super alert. Also, sometimes, people who had never known that you survive after your body has died feel as if they are still alive in a body, and create dreams in which those people they know that are still alive in their body are visible to them, but because the living people cannot see or respond to them, which slowly leads the dead person to gradually realises a huge change has happened to them.

We are in the dream world because our physical life is now gone and so we are left with our consciousness – no body. When we lose awareness of our body in sleep we dream. because dreams are the next level of consciousness we have developed apart from our body senses, unless we have done so in other ways. We actually have a huge range of levels of awareness, the swing between waking and sleeping can be seen as the extremes within the possibilities of our experience. For in waking awareness we have the sense of being in a body with only  a small range of perception, and feel we exist as an individual. But in sleep, apart from dreams we now longer are aware of being an individual with a body, but are  a bodiless consciousness. See Dimensions of Human Experience – Bodiless

Are you a stranger in a strange world or an experienced traveller?

But usually just after death we often go to the next level we have developed – dream imagery. In this dimension we are in a wider awareness, in this wider awareness you leave the limited view of the three dimensional world most of us are trapped in, and enter a world beyond time and space, but being unused to it we mostly continue as in dreams creating a world we knew in the body. But we are capable of experiencing many other wonders than being trapped either in bodily limitations or bodiless consciousness.

You are a shapeshifter in this realm, and can be any of the characters you know or dreamt of. That is how you get their power and wisdom. The femaleness or maleness we usually feel ourselves to be must not be confused with personality. The conscious personality is a very flexible and shape shifting thing. It can be male, female, animals or any thing, a tree or just Life itself – for here in shapeshifting we can get to know our whole range of experience. See Archetype of the Shapeshifter

But maturing into a real shapeshifter is not done by acting it out by trying to be the opposite sex. Integrating our opposite does not mean dressing up in male or female clothes, or even having an operation. That is further developing an unbalanced self. Integration means having both the female and the male self equally developed. That is wholeness. So, being firmly male, female or homosexual are all unbalanced. It takes courage and hard work to achieve being the being without form.

Example: The top of the tree was like a massive bell of a flower, like a crocus shape. And it was light and colourful. Suddenly I saw a spirit, a beautiful female. It was the spirit of the tree. At this point I wanted to hold the beautiful spirit, but realised that the tree was a representation of my life, and so was the spirit of the tree. The spirit sat on me in a sexual position, but there was no movement as in sex, so I was lying on my back and she was upright. She slowly took me into her, I mean the whole me, as if she was sucking my whole body into her. I realised that I had to let it happen because she wanted to take all my experience of life and endeavour into her and fertilise herself to form a baby. So, I was ready to do that and watched her form a new baby, a mixture of her and me.

We enter this dimension when we are able to allow the unconscious to be known consciously and also when we die. In death we are all the time – unless trapped by our attitudes and beliefs in the old view – so we are all the time aware of those we love and care for as this woman’s experience describes – “Evening draws to an end along with her singed teenage years. She has no place to go, and nothing to do, so she crawls away towards her room. The Victorian staircase casts a shadow, becoming a stoner’s (not Homer’s) odyssey. Pulling herself on hands and knees, one stair at a time, she eventually surmounts the steep incline that leads to her private place of recline.

Steps now feebly conquered, she enters her room tired. In too poor a state to undress for bed, she stands and totters in indecision: “I’ll pause for a moment and later disrobe.” Exhaustion has beguiled her will and brick propped, sagging bed temptation finds her lying back fully clothed. She lies awake, she lies awake, she lies awake. Books line the floor of the shelfless room. She lies awake, she lies awake, she lies, but then a new, other world she espies.

Unlike any dream environments she’s known, her mind feels clear, alert, and free. Is she awake, asleep, or somewhere in between, in this place that’s more vivid than previous reality? Her surrounding is cylindrical, vibrant, and vast; white light emanates with a strength that almost hurts. The only route is up the helter skelter stairs of this lightening bright, snow blindness light-house. Tentatively, so unsure she starts to ascend; round and round she coils windowless walls forlorn, until she reaches the top and it’s sacred platform.

Relief from the piercing light is achieved where windows open on to darkest space. Her anxiety easing, she approaches the central display: an exceptional, universal camera obscura. Far from static it reveals the whole world and with just one thought from the viewer’s mind, a place and a loved one instantly appear presented real time for one to observe. Standing mystified, a presence then joins her and informs her with seemingly no external voice at all: “This is the place where people come after death’s fall.”

With instant recognition of her self-mortification, she spontaneously utters: “Oh, so I’m dead!” The presence inwardly sighs: “No, you’ve misunderstood my intention: I’ve brought you here to show that each of the dead choose someone to guide and watch over on earth. And that you have a someone still loving you. Your self-destruction is unnecessary; you just need to give life a reasonable chance. Please think on this experience and what I have said; your duty is still to life, it’s not yet to death.”

Wide awake and bed room returned, she shakes her young head in disbelief. If it were but a dream, would she not be drowsy? But she feels as alert, as she was in the lighthouse.”

At this stage many people see themselves going through  a tunnel to the light. I see this as the difficulty many dying people have with bodiless consciousness, so they see themselves still with a body struggling to the light because that is all they have known. They often then see an image of God or a holy figure of light, for they are still in the level of dreams. If the had moved beyond bodily awareness they would know their journey beyond death directly and not in images.

In quite a real sense we can say there is nothing beyond what is included in those polarities. For without consciousness there is nothing. There is no world, no love or hate, no body, no activities without consciousness.

So, what we are not capable of being personally aware of does not exist for us. In a very real way nothing exists for us unless we can be aware of it in some way. There is nothing outside of consciousness. Or to put it another way, without personal awareness nothing exists for us. If you have no consciousness the world, other people do not exist for you; so death is an exploration of consciousness. If you are still stuck at the physical awareness level of what you are aware of, have never explored the dream world or have broken through to the inner world, then you are missing the amazing depth of your consciousness. For a view of these levels see https://dreamhawk.com/interesting-people/rudolph-steiners-genius-life-after-death/and https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/dimensions-of-human-experience/ – Exploring Inner Space

But you might be awake in a nightmare world – often called Hell. The reason for this is the same reason people live a hell of a tortured life –  they have not managed to deal with their hate, jealousies, traumas, terrors, fears and anxieties. Or some people who died suddenly do not realise they are dead, and need help to meet the change. See https://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/masters-of-nightmares/

But a huge change has occurred at death – because you are living in a world that is created by your own habitual fears or wonder, you carry nightmares or wonder with you. But because your body is now gone and you are in the dream world full time, you have left the physical body behind and are faced by an enormous change. You have entered the universal – in other words you are a creature created by the universal laws or processes of the universe.

It is a matter of survival, because to survive the switching from your three dimensional life in a physical body to the full time infinite, universal life of the dream, you could not survive with all the viewpoints many people carry with them. So a form of harvesting takes place – often straight after the experience of dying. It is experienced as a full life review.

 An Example

In her book Coming Back to Life, P. H. Atwater gives the following account of her own experience during an NDE. “For me it was a total reliving of every thought I had ever thought, every word I had ever spoken, and every deed I had ever done; plus, the effect of each thought, word and deed on everyone and anyone who had ever come within my environment or sphere of influence, whether I knew them or not (including unknown passers-by on the street).”

Example: My husbands 21 year old son died in a car wreck 5 weeks ago. He came to see him in a dream last night. Complaining that he wrecked his truck and he had to call the insurance company. My husband said he looked at him and told him that he died in the wreck. He said he seemed very confused by that. He said sitting at the kitchen table with several people he didn’t know and they told him he could only see them for 30 minutes at a time. He asked them if this was an intervention and they said yes. He sat down with them, he then awoke went into the kitchen and prayed that he could see him again. When he went to sleep his son appeared to him again, told him he loved him gave him a hug and disappeared again. Can you make light of this for me. Thank you

Anna – Tony’s Assistant
Dear Carla – The experience of death is to swing over into the dream state fully, which means there is no waking up physically anymore to realise that it was all “only” a dream.

Because your husband’s son died a sudden death, he had no time to prepare for this and it becomes clear that he thinks he is still alive; “Complaining that he wrecked his truck and he had to call the insurance company.”
Your husband’s part of the intervention consisted of telling his son that he died in the wreck and the second dream may express that his son is grateful for his father’s openness and honesty, which must have brought understanding and acceptance; “his son appeared to him again, told him he loved him gave him a hug and disappeared again.”

It reflects a wonderful and touching way of a father guiding his son.
Anna ????

In this dimension of the universal we are in a wider awareness, in this wider awareness you leave the limited view of the three dimensional world most of us are trapped in, and enter a world beyond time and space. Some people remain so stuck in the view of themselves as they were in the three dimensional world of the body that the remain in the limitations of it. But many will begin to explore the life beyond limitations and see that they can know the lives of all their loved ones and share them, because if we do not identify with our body as US, we can go beyond our three dimensional world in death. When we realise this aspect of death, the way ahead of us is infinite in scope. See https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/secrets-power-dreaming/

Example: There was part of the music here that left a wonderful image in my mind of a great central flash of light radiating like crystals in patterns like a great cross with spokes. At the centre was the transcendent reality of life. As a transcendent reality life simply exists and shines out its being. It is forever beyond definition, yet is ever being enshrined or embodied in some form by the various religions of the world. They point to something beyond them shining forever. They collect around the central radiance like spokes or shapes that are not the reality of life, but which do take form from it.

 People’s Experience of Dying

A full account quoted from her book Coming Back to Life, by P. H. Atwater. But as everybody’s experience is slightly different these are nevertheless good examples.

Any pain to be suffered comes first. Instinctively you may fight to stay alive. That is automatic.

It is inconceivable to the conscious mind that any other reality could possible exist beside the earth-world of matter bounded by time and space. We are used to it. We have been trained since birth to live and thrive in it. We know ourselves to be ourselves by the external stimuli we receive. Life tells who we are and we accept its telling. That too is automatic.

Your body goes limp. Your heart stops. No more air flows in and out.

You lose sight, feeling and movement – although the ability to hear goes last.

Identity ceases. The “you” that you once were becomes only memory.

There is no pain at the moment of death; only peaceful silence. Calm. Quiet. But you still exist.

It is easy not to breathe. In fact it is easier, more comfortable, in infinitely more natural not to breathe than to breathe. The biggest surprise for most people in dying is the realisation that dying does not end life. Whether darkness or light comes next, or some kind of event, be it positive or negative, or somewhere in between, expected or unexpected, the biggest surprise of all is to realise you are still you. You can still think, you can still remember, you can still see, hear, move, reason, wonder, feel question and tell jokes – if you wish.

You are still alive, very much alive. In fact, more alive when since you were last born. The only way all this is different, different because you no longer wear a dense body to filter and amplify the various sensations you regarded as the only valid indicators of what constitutes life. You had always been taught that one has to wear a body to live. If you expect to die when you die you will be disappointed.

The only thing dying does is to help you release, slough off and discard the “jacket” you once wore (more commonly referred to as a “body”).

When you die you lose your body. That is all there is to it. Nothing else is lost.

You are not your body. It is something you wear for a while , because living in the earthplane is infinitely more meaningful and more involved if you are encased in its trappings and subject to its rules.

Another example. Although people think of death as a huge, scary and often life threatening experience I found how it can be provoked by normal life experiences. For example anaesthetic can often lead to a ‘near death experience’. Also the lives of some of the people who have extended their awareness proves tha our mind can sometimes reach completely beyond the body senses, and so are aware in the after death state.  Children too are often misinterpreted as being over imaginative or fanciful because they often have already gone beyond normal awareness without any unusual experiences being the cause. So, we should never criticise our children for telling us such things. Even if they do not come about, children’s imagination is a powerful and useful thing to have. But any experience that uplifts us can lead to what is often know as NDE.

Another Example

The following was told me by an ordinary but who was also an unusual woman Jane Armitage.

‘I was desperately ill at the time, dying in fact, and I heard a voice counting, (the woman was having an anaesthetic) and knew that when it reached five there would be sweet oblivion, release from the pain and confusion.

The voice reached five. For a time there was a great noise and flashing lights, as if every cell in my body was exploding. For a few moments I knew nothing, and then there was awareness, but no pain, no confusion.

It was very dark, very quiet, very still. I could not speak, nor hear, nor see, nor move. At first I thought I must be asleep, and I made a great effort to wake up, but I could not. Why doesn’t someone wake me? I wondered; Perhaps I was dreaming, but no, I knew I was not because I was conscious of my thoughts. I became aware that I was not breathing, nor did I feel any need to breathe. I could feel no part of my body.

I’m Dead!

Suddenly, the truth hit me. I was dead! Can you possibly understand how I felt? It was such a huge unacceptable truth. DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! The word pounded on my consciousness. No – No, I cannot be dead. I cannot accept it. How can I think if I am dead? I put the thought away from me.

Then I thought of my family. I felt a deep regret that I hadn’t told them more often how very much I loved them, and I felt a deep sorrow that I would not see them again. I thought about my life, about the things I had done and seen; about the people I had known, and the places I had been. I thought about everything that was worth giving a thought to. How long had I been ‘dead’? Time seemed to have ceased to exist. Was it hours, days, years, or even centuries?

So far all my thoughts had been outwards. I had not dared to dwell on the thought that I was dead. But now I knew I must search deep into my mind, to find help for the panic which threatened to submerge me.

Who am I? What am I? Where am I? Have I always been like this? Perhaps this is my natural state, and if so, my life must have been a dream. But if it was – and suddenly the full implication hit me – neither the world nor mankind, really existed. I thought again of my ‘life’. Had it only been a dream, not real? But surely that was impossible!

It took ages for this possibility to sink in. It seemed an eternity before I came to the next inevitable thought. I must be God. But no, God and any kind of philosophy was of man’s creation; therefore, if mankind was only a large figment of my imagination, God would not exist.

I was alone. So utterly and absolutely alone. There was no space, no time, no anything. Even I myself did not exist except as a mind, a lonely consciousness, a still quiet awareness. I had come to the very beginning of thought, the birthplace of the soul. My mind had gone round and round in ever decreasing circles and had at last come to this void where there were no more thoughts, only awareness.

My soul cried out in utter despair and loneliness. “Is there no other consciousness, no love, no comfort? Please God, help me. ”Then I heard the words from another Being, another Mind. “I am the Creator. The world was my Dream; Come!”

I was lifted up into the arms of God, a God whom I had thought could not exist. I knew then the “Peace that passeth all understanding”: that supreme joy, that Knowledge of the Ultimate Truth, that Absolute Ecstasy which I cannot begin to describe. There are no words for the complete Love and Light which enveloped me. I was a thought in the beautiful mind of God. I was in Heaven. It would be like this for eternity. But then I heard the words – “Go back now and tell them all about it.”

Slowly, very, very slowly, my senses returned. I was very dazed for a while. The doctors thought I would never come out of the anaesthetic. This happened three years ago, but I have never told anyone before because I suspected they would think me mad.

 It Isn’t So Difficult To Be in Touch With Our Dead

Although the dead can be in touch with us easily, it is not so the other way around, for we the living are almost blind and deaf compared with animals, so cannot see our dead or easily communicate with them, except sometimes in  dreams. Tony explains an experience of his projection of himself from Germany to his mother in London.

“I saw that because I was present without a physical body my mother couldn’t hear me. She needed physical sound to know I was present, but yet another part of her knew and responded. So I saw that if she had thought of me and spoken to me I would know, even though she might not be able to hear my reply – unless she was a medium or learned to listen to thoughts. There was no obvious sign that she had heard me, but two things did happen. One was that I saw or realised that she had an upstairs side of her and a downstairs side. Her upstairs (conscious) side had no awareness of me, but her downstairs side (unconscious) gave me a wonderful welcome and I had the awareness of us knowing each other in a formless love.”

To be able to communicate with the dead we need to be able to enter their world. When a body experiences death, and I have watched many deaths, something leaves them immediately. It is their consciousness and motivations that are gone. So to enter their realm of bodiless consciousness we must be able to allow ourselves to become little children, naked of our adult thoughts and emotions, especially those we have within us to do with the person who has passed.

“Then I entered the realm of death and so had to face and go beyond the fears and images people have of death, and I was shown my father. ‘I have fathered you my son”. From this I saw my father in quite a different way than when he was in the body, because in life he always seemed to be holding himself back. He looked as if he was now a person of importance because of the knowledge he was communicating.

Then I asked to see my mother. It was an amazing experience. I had the experience of finding myself sinking deep beyond my personality, my conscious self, and facing enormous forces or beings I had never been aware of. It started with a feeling of experiencing the presence of my dead mother. I saw her face as a young mother, my mother, her face was young and full, but as I looked at it a change happened. But then with fascination I saw her face was one face amongst countless others. I began to realise that I was confronting something difficult to explain, something that was a reality at a level or a dimension I had not met or experienced before. It was a huge being which I began to see was capable of taking in and holding every mother’s experience and person, and was itself a complete synthesis of all mothers, in fact She was The Mother of Everything. The Great Mother – She is Mother – the Holy Mother. In this realm of death, she is all females. And every woman I have sex with I am having sex with Mother. “Thank you so much” – I said – in a whisper.

See https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/archetype-of-the-great-mother/

Concrete

Concrete in dreams represents how  you can mold yourself in different ways, for concrete can be a floor, a wall, the strength holding things together, a statue, barrier or a viewpoint that becomes a concrete reality.

Another way of seeing concrete in dreams was “it felt awful and I tried to move but couldn’t. The only way of describing it was as if we are all made out of the same stuff – as an example concrete – and as such we filled all space. So, the little space I filled could not move because all around was filled by others. I felt really stuck and wondered what I could do, but there seemed no way out of it. Yet I could not believe this was really how things were. This led me to thinking about my cousin Sid again, and his situation of being constantly linked with his mother. Then I realised that I was linked with Ros, and in feeling that I realised that I could move in at least two positions – me and Ros – because of the loving connection I felt.

Then came a flood of realisation, every person I had loved was another position I could be in; and then I knew all the animals I had loved and even people I had a casual relationship with. But there was even more because in dreams and sessions I had become or encountered amazing things, people, creatures, the Star Beings and others. I knew then that I was FREE to go anywhere and be almost anything.”

Concrete floor: This suggest you feel secure and supported by the floor, it points to your basic attitudes, principles and confidence; what supports you and you may take for granted, such as health, good will of others, the house you live in.

Potholes in concrete: The suggestion is that your present life is hitting some difficulties that are to do with a lack of basic support in your life. See Floor

Bad Dream or Nightmare – Change It

Experiment with changing your dream by using your imagination/visualisation:

(The above picture is from the film NextGen)

You can always try to build a different ending to a dream that was not satisfying or not understandable by imagining a different end or a different direction. Do it while wake and relaxed and without interruptions.

Imagine yourself in the dream and continue it as a fantasy or daydream. Consider what it is that troubles you or is not what you want in your dream. Now take time to think how you would alter it and how to have an ending that would satisfy you. Now you can, in your imagination, enter your dream and alter the dream in any way that satisfies. Experiment with it, play with it, until you find a fuller sense of self expression.

It is very important to note whether any anger or hostility is in the dream but not fully expressed; or if feelings come in or something makes it hard to change the dream; if so, let yourself imagine a full expression of the emotions, the feelings, or the interruption, and keep on experimenting until you find satisfaction. It may be that as this is practised more feelings or insights are openly expressed in subsequent dreams. This is healthy, allowing such feelings to be vented and redirected into satisfying ways, individually and socially. In doing this do not ignore any feelings of resistance, pleasure or anxiety. Satisfaction occurs only as we learn to acknowledge and integrate resistances and anxieties into what we express. This is a very important step. It gradually changes those of our habits which trap us in lack of satisfaction, poor creativity or inability to resolve problems. See Secrets of Power Dreaming

How can you find your way through the good dreams and bad dreams you meet while you sleep? What can you do to move on from anxiety dreams and nightmares? How can you open up the possible wonders of dreaming?

Things to realise:

Nothing can hurt you in your dreams, of course you can dream of being hurt or even dying, but dreams are virtual realities we create in our mind, and like computer games, we wake unhurt, though some people or so scared they carry the feelings with them.

 

Research and human experience over many years have shown ways we can work with the wonder of your dream process. From such research Dr. Nielsen and Levin suggest that dreaming attempts to create ‘fear extinction’ to deal with painful or fearful past experience. The dream process succeeds at this when we do not wake from a fearful dream. When we wake from a nightmarish dream it has failed. As Dr. Nielsen points out, ‘If you feel yourself falling spread your arms and learn how to fly’. See Example 15 – Life Changes

You Can Contact the Big You

This is not a crazy suggestion. Dreams are simply feelings put into images. Nothing can actually hurt you while you dream. If you really take that in and decide to confront your dream fears – don’t confuse this with externally dangerous things – you can transform your inner world of anxieties, heal past hurts, and open up the treasure house of your potential. When this happens it flows into confidence and pleasure in daily life.

Remember that in dreams you cannot be hurt or die. Whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen, so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so, all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind.

Your dreams are a unique area of self expression. They are a safe area to experiment and experience things in any way you wish. Often we introvert, or take into our dream life, rules and fears that have no place there. For example, while dreaming, you may fall into the sea and be terrified you will drown. But that is impossible because you are only experiencing images of your feelings and thoughts. All you can do is to feel fear. You can easily breathe underwater in a dream, or fly, or die and be re-born. So remove such limitations from your inner life by visualising such changes into your dreams when awake. Imagine yourself being what you can in your dreams. Even passive people who couldn’t stand up for themselves can change as they do this.

Follow Me Up The Inner Mountain

WHAT ARE DREAMS

When I was working on the new site design, the designer said to me, “What’s the point of dreams – they don’t mean anything do they”. I noticed he had a T-shirt on that looked as if had been used quite a lot. So I said to him, “What about that T-shirt? If you dreamt of it what would you think it meant?”

He said it wouldn’t mean anything. So then I asked him where he had got it and what memories were attached to it. He said he had got it in America, but when pressed to explain his memories he refused to answer, looking embarrassed. I felt he had an affair while in the USA and T-shirt was tied in with memories of it.

If you have watched the video there are things mentioned you maybe would like more information about things like ‘self regulation’. Here are some things to explore.

The Whole Thing – https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/features-found-on-site-2/

Self Regulation – https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/ and https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/transformation/

Christ – https://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/meetings-with-the-christ/

Tony’s Biographical Notes – https://dreamhawk.com/tony-crisp/biographical-information/ 

Going up the mountain

 

Then we Reached the Top

The Worker in the Vineyard

I am a simple yet sacred worker in Life’s gardens.

I tend, uphold and increase all I touch,

I do this service not only for life but for myself

For I too am Life and so without care for

Living things I too would die.

The Inner Path To Christ 22

Ascension 

Some of the great explorers of human consciousness have said that:

“We forget that just as sleep claims us, so God claims us, not we it. You cannot think sleep, imagine it, meditate it, contrive it, chant it or concentrate it. You can only be it. So, you cannot think, imagine, contrive, chant, meditate or concentrate the Life you are, you can only be It. To take up this attitude we have in regard to sleep, and do it consciously, while staying awake, is the story of the whole journey from Anna and Joachim to Resurrection and Ascension. But just as there are depths of sleep, so there are landmarks in this nothingness we experience in sleep.”

In making our surface consciousness open – we do not fall into the deeps – the deeps rise up to us! Put another way, during surrender, consciousness does not drop into the depths and lose itself. The depths rise to consciousness and become aware to the individual self. But the surface has to be open to allow the process to go on and on. Thought after thought, fear after fear, level after level will rise and hit consciousness. And Jesus upon the cross lets it, and yields. ‘Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.’ For this openness must be maintained throughout this rising of the depths, for during it our ego dies to what it was and is born again.

“Even as the man of today with words and technology to broadcast my CRY or my SONG, I still feel I am expressing so little of the wonder I am. I know myself as life, yet I still am so incapable in so many ways. I am still so inarticulate of what I am. Actually, it strikes me as I write about the meaning of Christianity, I see it is suggested that a human is capable of apotheosis or ascension, in which the body is completely transformed. That is what I felt, that this body can be completely transformed, but there were historical reasons I didn’t do so. In other words, the acts of past generations had built in certain limitations and attitudes which needed to be consciously realised and changed. These old attitudes were still operative within me, and so the transformation was not yet realised.

As life I want to love. I want my love to be like a beautiful but passionate song. I want it to be an art form that leads people to flower and discover their own Life.

I realised through feeling it as a truth within me, that I am a priest of a strange sort. I am a priest without a temple. The God I am lives in the temple of my body. It needs no other place of worship, though people might gather to collectively honour this. There is no teachings or dogma with this God. There is no proselytising. The ‘way’ is to live the fact of one’s own godhead. It is to drop the need or dependence upon the things upon which one might previously have held on to.

This if done this leads on to ascension. So, my problem-solving apparatus goes to work on this. Bit by bit, over the years, it puts piece to piece as well as it can. And don’t forget that I live in a Christian community. So, at some time a piece clicks in, and there is a, Wow, this is what the Bible is saying. My grandmother has been lifted up to heaven. My God. Ascension it is called, isn’t it? Ascension. Yes. My grandmother has ascended.

Ascension. So, I set out on this long crusade. I was going to find God. After all, I believe that’s where my grandma was – with God. If I could find God, I could get back to my grandma. Never having been helped to accept the real facts of death – whatever they are – I was going to make it to heaven. But I could have faced seeing her dead body. As a child I had that wonderful innocence that is a gift of that age, because not seeing her dead body I was told, “Nana has gone to heaven.” So, I wouldn’t have complicated it with all the heavenly shit. That was how I started my quest for the Holy Grail.

That was a hard one. Really that was shit for me. It was a shit time of life. I was chasing an illusion.

It was good as well though. The more I chased the illusion, the more I cut away the crap. I got nearer and nearer, until eventually I faced the fact of my grandmother’s death. I met it. But I was an older man at the time, in my fifties. It took me all those years to dig that deep. I suppose some people looking at me would wonder what the hell I was doing digging that bloody great hole in my backyard. Holy Grail stuff I suppose.

The only reason I met it, was because it was getting in the way at that time of my life. It was standing between me and things I needed to do and ways I needed to grow. It wasn’t like it was a huge painful hindrance, just a tangle of feelings and concepts. It was something I had to meet to go on growing. It was in fact wonderful to know what I felt like as that young child. Real education is to understand things, and the experience gained, the understanding of the profound links of love and dependency makes as a child. To feel all the complications of relationship that existed for myself as that child.

Of course, we are all amnesiacs. Most of can’t remember our childhood. We can’t remember what it was like to be a child. We can’t remember what it was like to be a baby. We can’t remember what it was like in the womb. Meanwhile, here am I remembering the fragile sensitive baby who is actually connected with the rest of the world, looking around. I realised that to love meant facing the pain of losing my grandmother and I was trying to love. See Remembering My Birth

It seemed as if it were a pain I couldn’t cope with. At one point I couldn’t breathe for ages, so I had to cut off. While remembering being a baby, I realised that I’m not ready to eat. Don’t you understand? I cannot eat. I’m hungry all the time. I couldn’t digest milk properly because I hadn’t properly finished development because I was two months behind in my development. So, I’m starving. I feel like I’m dying because my body wasn’t ready for life outside the womb. I realised as the observing adult that with today’s technology I would probably have been intravenously fed. But then I was left to survive or die.

I continued to be hungry for so long. It was so painful. The fucking pain. I want to be reconnected so I can be fed. If only I could be fed. If only I could be.” In the midst of this feeling of being alone, disconnected, not bonded with my mother, and starving to death, suddenly there was a change. I had the sense of a higher being understanding my condition, trying to help me. They engulfed me in a feeling of love. I felt this right through to the root of my being and immediately responded. The response was several loud cries of what sounded like a baby bawling. But as the baby I knew I was giving a signal that I was bonding. The cries were a bonding signal. I wouldn’t cry until I was in the presence of someone I could bond with. I felt my mother had been frightened of my weakness, had thought I was dying and had not opened her heart to me. So, only now did I bond.

My Grandmother

I knew someone loved me. I knew they understood what pain was and were not afraid of it or of death. This pierced me right through. It was my grandmother, but to me it felt like some higher being who had reached out of the unknown to help me. (Actually, my grandmother had lived with physical injury all her life and given birth to thirteen children. She died when I was about eighteen months old. She took over my rearing one day when she found I had fallen out of bed and my mother had not known it. I was completely cold, and she never let my mother care for me after that. So, I have been told.)

The bonding cry was a signal to say “I recognise you! I recognise you! I’m bonding to you. I’m bonding to you! Someone recognises me. I can cry now because I am in the presence of love.”

During this remembering, as the adult I felt there are instinctive things that have been built into us over millions of years. The baby must not cry out while lost or abandoned as that would attract the predators. Only when it is touched by the love of the bonded person can it cry its pain, because then there is no danger. Possibly this became built in because these are the babies who survived.”

Yes, again it is love that transforms us, love that was born in us as powerful as the urge to survive, called out by grandmother’s wonderful wise love, for my infant body had been thrown aside lifeless by the doctor, because at that time in the 1930’s there was little hope that such a weak child would survive.  But my grandmother took my tiny body and bathed it in hot and cold water and marked cross on my forehead, and I survived. And through that survival I knew I had experienced resurrection from death and had been ascended beyond death by a higher being – my grandmothers love – and love had been called out my depths in answer. [i]

“It is the heavenly work of Love Triumphant: energising love, which is the life of God within the heart. That Mercury of the Wise, the vital principle of growth and change, working in secret, has subdued all things to the measure of its glory: has turned the raw stuff of human nature into alchemic gold.” [ii]

“Dante found in the freshness and beauty of the Earthly Paradise no continuing city, but sought at once the Ladder to the Stars; and so it is with every pilgrim of the Infinite who has at last attained the summit of the purging mount of prayer. He too goes up in order that he may “lose himself upon the heights.” His newly-anointed senses demand some unalloyed objective; the fire of his all-conquering love demands eternal union with a greater flame. “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,” and nothing less than this total self-loss in Him can suffice them. He who is here discerned beneath veils, and because discerned, so passionately desired, the mystic would encounter face to face. “Thou hast made us for Thyself and our heart is restless.” From God we came: to God we must return.” [iii]

“What is that fruition? The mystics try in vain to tell us: for a mighty gulf is fixed between their mind and ours. “Above all knowledge,” says Ruysbroeck, of that summit of the soul’s transcendence—even the high language of poetry breaking as it were in his hands” I feel, I discover, I surprise a bottomless and limitless abyss of darkness, that transcends all qualities, that transcends the names of all created things, that transcends the very names of God. Behold! this is that death, that ecstasy of transcendence, that evanishment of all that is most sublime into the One Eternal Mystery, that hoped-for peace which we discern in the deeps of our being, far superior to all external worlds.” This is the “Divine Dark” of the great mystics, The Cloud of Unknowing: dim to the earth-trained intellect, most radiant to the heavenward-tending heart. It is the “peace that passeth understanding” of the saints: the dim silence where all lovers lose themselves. Even in our exile we may sometimes look at it, as Plato’s prisoners peeping from their cave. But the spirit whose education is finished, who has trod the long way in faith and hope and love, shall come out from this cave to that sunlight “dark with excess of bright” to find that it is no mere Vision, but a Home.” [iv]

A summary of those words seen in a vision –

“I looked up at the wall above the bed. It was an unlikely shade of green, but what was remarkable was that on the clear expanse of the wall I could see a huge circle, alive and full of movement. My attention was riveted by this amazing circle. At its centre was an unmoving emptiness, nothingness. Yet of this nothingness poured forms of living creatures, mountains and landscapes all moving and dancing out from the centre in time with each other – though making different movements. They were constantly emerging from the pool of emptiness, dancing in time to music. All this stream of emerging life moved in weaving in time with the sound, in and out of each other to the periphery of the great circle. Here it turned and with equal complexity and rhythm moved back to the void. At its return it was lost, dissolved, in that unmoving emptiness, but at the same moment new life emerged. As I witnessed the whole moving circle, I realised it portrayed a great truth of life.  [v]

As humans we are so interested in the light, maybe because we can see where we are going and are frightened of the dark. But there in the darkness is the Hugeness that lies behind our small self. But the vision of the hole was not actually dark, it was simply nothing, a void, yet that nothingness was creating everything.

The Hebrew term for God was Ain Soph – The Unknown God. I know in the Western word we continually refer to God as Him, but that doesn’t make sense, because the creative force behind us, the world, the cosmos is Everything – the known, the unknown, the Greatest Mystery, or as Ruysbroeck calls it, One Eternal Mystery. The Creative Power that has been called God was in darkness until it created light. Even the Big Bang tells us that despite its immense temperature the creation was in darkness and it was after 300,000 years light appeared.

So, do not be afraid of darkness or of the void, for within them both they hold Everything. Everything if it was visible would be a thing, so would not be Everything – and ascension is a move toward Everything.

A Woman Clothed with the Sun

But to understand this we must see how we move toward it. Crucifixion is said to have taken place at Golgotha, the place of the skull – the top of the body and even the top of the skull. But our journey starts at the bottom and gradually move onto the higher. Deep within us, when we have opened to Life itself as a virgin, in the cellar or cave of our unconscious, among the beasts of our instincts, and physical energies, the New Life tentatively begins its growth to consciousness, to birth. The star and the stable are the highest and the lowest in us uniting in this wonderful task. Joseph, our intellect and outer creativeness, difficult though he finds it to believe in this miracle, listens to his intuitions and dreams, and protects and cares for the childlike mother within us.

But that holy mother gives birth to the child that has the power to redeem us, who can transform our personal miseries and lostness into a new insight, a new connection with our Source, our Life. This wonderful new life that is born within us has to pass through stages of growth or discovery though and these have been described by many different cultures in different ways. In Christian terms they can be seen as the seven churches:

Church of Ephesus ——- SEX GLANDS ———- Seal 1 – Church of Smyrna ——- LYDEN GLAND ——- Seal 2 – Church of Pergamos —- ADRENAL GLANDS — Seal 3 – Church of Thyatira —– THYMUS GLAND —— Seal 4 – Church of Sardis ——– THYROID GLAND —– Seal 5 – Church of Philadelphia – PINEAL GLAND ——- Seal 6 – Church of Laodicea —– PITUITARY GLAND — Seal 7.

The different cultural descriptions also see them as seven regions of the human body – the body as the temple of the soul. But their action is described as a release of an energy other than that expended by walking or working, and so can be described as a flow of energy, like a river, that has a purpose other than that of the personality. Each of us is in fact immersed in a ‘river’ of constant change. If you think about it you have been carried, pushed, impelled by this current as you were moved through babyhood, childhood, teenage and adulthood, and there are more stages of growth beyond adulthood. And as we passed through these changes, we died to our old self in order to change to the new. It is the current of Life. This current then carries us on through old age and through the gates of death and on into rebirth. All the time we are faced by decisions, and each decision directs us on a different path, helping to create our future.

Another example of this is the way electricity exists in a house. First, we have the supply of electricity into the house. The wires carrying the supply to the house are not in themselves the electricity. The current is invisible, but it has great potential for good or harm. So, we usually deal with it carefully, and have means of controlling it via insulation, fuses and switches. When the electricity is wired into the house, its potential can be expressed in a huge variety of ways. It can manifest as heat, light, and power to move or do things, such as with a drill or vacuum cleaner. It can produce sound or images as with television, and can, via programs for the computer, manifest in almost magical ways, storing and retrieving huge amounts of information and manipulating it.

The usefulness of this image of the house with its electricity is that we can use it as an analogy of energy expressing as your own life. This enormous potential can express as cellular activity, or physical movement. You can experience it as sexual drive and its pleasure or pain, as emotions, as sight, hearing, sensation, smell and taste. You can express it as thinking, and vocalising in speech or singing, or as the creation of a personal virtual reality, as you do in fantasy and dreams. Some psychic experiences even suggest that part of your potential is to extend your awareness over huge distances or gain penetrating insight into another person’s state of mind or body. But all these are expressions of it, and are not IT.

In ancient Indian teachings the seven centers are called chakras, and the energy is named Kundalini. It is often depicted or symbolised as a snake coiled up at the base of the spine with seven heads. At first it is just the latent potential locked within them. As the snake emerges and is released it start the climb up the other chakras/centers.

We have been told again and again that the Life Force or Kundalini, when released from its old patterns of instinctive animal expressions such as the urge for sex, the urge to over eat, or even to grab as much of the worlds treasure as we can and hold onto, it rises up the trunk awakening other centers until it reaches the top of the head. But each level when opened act as sense organs sensing beyond what the physical senses show us.

2 – The first level after the latent potential is sexual reproduction. We may mix up this reproduction with producing something physical, although physical activity may be a part of it; but is about giving and sharing who and what you are. However it is not about teaching others facts, but showing something of yourself which enters another and comes to life in them.

A conversation I heard may be an example of this. The person was saying, “So not only did and do you play a large part in me discovering my inner strength my dear old Friend. You helped me move beyond my fear of powerful men.”

3 – Digestion is the next level; but when we digest, whether it is an idea, something we have read or learned, it has to be first surrendered to the life process. We can see this in our body – it is first chewed and swallowed, then broken down into parts and the useful stuff, the building stuff, can be taken into us and the rest is passed out. The important thing is that even if it is dead or living food, it is transformed into our own living being – in other words our living understanding. If it has not been transformed through digestion it is like something dead inside us. But to be capable of such digestion we must swallow the experience and allow our unknown self to do its work.

But excretion is also a part of digestion. Considering that passing faeces is a natural function, in our inner life it can suggest getting rid of emotions, traumas or toxins that need to be released or let go of. Like digested food, faeces can represent experience that was relevant but now need to be let go of.

In nature these excretions are all helpful parts of the natural order. In our life – our inner life – we constantly take in various experiences in relationships, traumas experienced, ideas presented in the media or personal meetings; we are constantly bombarded with fearful ideas or things that are designed to stimulate our innate responses, like sexual images, videos of war and advertising that work on fears we have. We all have an inner digestive process that sorts out what we can usefully integrate, or we should shit out. But unfortunately, many of us are so stressed or without natural responses we interfere with our inner digestive function and so experience all manner of neurotic symptoms – such as worry, fear, using drugs such as alcohol, nicotine and hard drugs, as escapes from actual experience. See Secrets the Body Knows – Life’s Little Secrets

4 – The chest area. Its function is to take in and give out, as in breathing.  In work that I have done, this is very much the emotional centre. Any blocks here when you lack emotional responsiveness or deny them can cause chest pain, feelings of loneliness or not being able to connect with others. The heart center.

All that potential, when in the chest, if it is lifted up, we give it form. In the chest it takes in the world, just as we take in the air through our lungs. It draws from our relationship with the world and with other people. It takes what one is receiving and begins to form it into a new moving expression. In the chest questions arise as to what shape we wish to give it? What we want to do with it? Where do we want to take that life? What do we want to do with life? We may express it as feelings to somebody else through love or care. We may give it as support to another being. We may give it as admiration that is perhaps a stimulus to another being.

5 – The throat center. It deals with speech and communication. Also, the expression of passionate feelings as in singing. We can express ourselves easily if this segment is unblocked – that does not apply to people who constantly talk. Often our expression may come from below rather from the head. At such time we may feel we are being inspired to express deep things spontaneously.

6 – The brow center, and it is, when awoken, the site of great intuition and insight into life and people. A woman said that, “My experience has shown me that when I still the mind completely, at least at a conscious level, at the end I reach a sudden profound realisation that has nothing to do with cogitation or reasoning.  This has helped me to date to discover innovative techniques to help my patients…and myself.  These realisations come “out of the blue” and are amazing. Perhaps another manifestation of this universality of consciousness is a spontaneous ability to intuit my patients’ deep-seated problems and thoughts.  They often say: ‘How did you know?’”

7 – This is Golgotha, the place of the skull and in Christian beliefs was the place where Jesus was crucified. But the Bible stories can also be seen as mythology with a symbolic interpretation. In that view when our energy has worked its way up through the body to the top of the head, we go through a transformation in which we are no longer lost in one’s personality/ego with its fear of death and its self-centred interests. We face death and see through it into a vision of beauty. We experience enlightenment.

This is the Woman Clothed in the Sun, for White is the combination of all the rays, implies full illumination and intuition of God, the symbol of which is the sun, and is the symbol of initiation. Attaining to this state, the soul is the mystical “Woman clothed with the Sun”. It is a woman because our opening began with the Virgin Prayer, that was the beginning of true intuition, and it is the same inner woman who has been taken in Assumption into being at one with God.

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.

“My consciousness was lifted up, causing me to feel as if my awareness also spread over the immensity of time, and from this condition I was shown the beginning of things.

I cannot say I saw this, more that I experienced the condition of the beginning. And this condition was the gathering together of what I understood to be a whole universe that had previously existed. All that had existed had come to such unity that although this beginning was physical, it was also, in its unity, a being. It had awareness.

As I experienced this I felt as if a resolution between science and religion had taken place in me. For here was something like the condition science suggests preceded the ‘big bang’ a condition beyond space and time. But what had been left out, I realised, was this consciousness, this immense being. For all life had here found a unity in one immense being beyond my comprehension. It was, in fact, difficult to grasp because I was overcome by emotion as I witnessed this.

As I opened to this enormous perception, there was a deepening of understanding, in which a great being aided my comprehension, who I felt must be the Christ. For I realised that the oneness or unity of this being was unbroken. It was everything, and nothing could exist outside of it. Even if it were to create anything, that thing would not have existence outside of the one.

This condition of ‘all-one’ I felt had led to a form of aloneness. This was as near as my human understanding could grasp. In this state it was explained to me – ‘You must understand, this is your perception of it.’

Out of this aloneness, this great consciousness had longed that other beings might exist. But in its present form this was impossible. Then I understood something that tore my heart to pieces, as it still does today when I dwell on the memory of the experience. This being purposefully went about destroying itself so that our present universe – we – might have existence. It was such a wondrous action for it was done in such a way, with such skill, with such love and self-sacrifice, such art and science, that its very death was a magnificent creative act. In other words, its death struck into action forces and effects that created our universe in all its variety. This death is what we know as the ‘big bang’. The very special circumstances of the ‘death’ set in motion the forces that brought about a very particular universe. Without the particular influences set in motion there could easily have been a universe without any ‘space’ for individual awareness. It could have been a universe where everything was purely automated. It could have been many things.

As I experienced this, I realised that everything that exists is a part of that wondrous being. There is nothing that is not of its love. So that whatever arises in the universe arises out of, and as, THAT. Every grain of sand, every particle of dust floating in a beam of sunlight, everything we take into us is God. The human sense of God is a realisation of the very substance of our own existence. The awe we might feel is from an intuition of what has been given us as our own being.

And as that great unity of energy and consciousness died, its very last impulse was for those new beings that might arise from its death. The impulse that flashed out we call love. It flashed through the universe permeating its every particle, in a way that we cannot yet perceive, but which is like a touch upon the pulsating chaotic movements of particles and lives.

We are the seeds of that love. We are God. And in our small portion of the universe, we face a particular lesson through the shortness of our bodily lives. We face death. Yet that is the greatest of things. For that is the heart of everything, the very act of love out of which our lives have been formed. If we discover the secret of that, we discover our creator and eternal nature.

Because we emerge from a timeless and spaceless reality, there is no beginning or ending – now is the moment of creation – the first day is always with us.

But I saw that there are other creators, for many have evolved to the point of unity and creation, so there are many different universes. Unfortunately, I did not see these others.

A comment: Hi Tony, my name is Rodrigo, from Mexico, and I just read your description of the Big Bang.

“Two and a half years ago, I basically experienced in a dream what you describe in your “archetype of the big Bang” article. It was really strange, but I was a bodiless entity floating in a completely black vacuum. I was just consciousness; since I don’t remember thinking “I’m still me”. I just was aware that I was aware. I was completely calm and in peace.

I was not alone. There was another entity there (if it can be called “there”), though it was also bodiless, and even though it didn’t talk to me, I knew it was there.

Then, the explosion out of that being, almost exactly as you describe… and for two seconds I experienced an indescribable bliss and this entity talked to me in a language different to words, just directly to my awareness. Did you ever have an experience where you understood a concept but couldn’t put in words and then the understanding and grasping of the concept you had just vanishes away in seconds? Well, this is what happened to me, but the concept I’m talking about was this: for two seconds, the entity made me understand the purpose of everything in the universe, the purpose of humanity, of all things, it all made so much sense… But I could only grasp the concept for those two seconds… and it was so overwhelming that I awake after that.

I haven’t talked much about this since then, since I don’t want to sound pretentious, and the few people I told didn’t quite grasp how I felt.

It left an important mark on me, and I have been trying to remember those 2 seconds since then, with no result… Why would anyone be told the purpose of the universe?? My guess is that deep within us, we all have it.”

I wrote and asked Rodrigo if he could add anything to what he had written.

“Hi Tony, its Rodrigo again… being trying to put it into words ever since… sorry I didn’t get in touch, of course you can use it any way you seem fit. What I can remember in my thoughts was:

1. It has a LOT, if not everything to do, with love, as you also say. just not passion or lust, something way beyond that.
2. Learning is also very important. Every single day has something to learn from.  Lastly, in order to continue learning, we WILL reach the stars.
3. The whole purpose of it actually isn’t that complex… what I remember thinking was that “Its so simple yet it couldn’t be any other way”

I wish I had more info, but I don’t want to extrapolate on vague feelings, the statements above are what I recall for sure.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

YES, THIS IS THE NEXT STEP IN OUR EVOLUTION – IT STARTED THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO – BUT THERE HAS BEEN A WAR AGAINST KNOWING IT AND SO IT WAS SUPPRESSED BY FORCES AGAINST IT

 

 

 

NOTES

[i] From Tony’s Journal

[ii] Evelyn Underhill. The Spiral Way: Being Meditations upon the Fifteen Mysteries of the Soul’s Ascent, Aeterna Press. Kindle Edition.

[iii] Evelyn Underhill. The Spiral Way: Being Meditations upon the Fifteen Mysteries of the Soul’s Ascent (Illustrated). Aeterna Press. Kindle Edition.

[iv] Evelyn Underhill. The Spiral Way: Being Meditations upon the Fifteen Mysteries of the Soul’s Ascent (Illustrated). Aeterna Press. Kindle Edition.

[v] Tony’s Journal

The Inner Path To Christ 21

Pentecost

“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God. And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this?”

It seems to me that we cannot receive the blessing and initiation of Pentecost if we have not passed through all the previous stages of discipleship and it is open to, and has happened not just to those ancient Christians, but to many in today’s world. Pentecost is not just an initiation but a giving of huge gifts.

Pentecostal Christianity speaks of gifts of the spirit. These are listed as the gift of: the Word of Wisdom; the Word of Knowledge; faith healing; the working of mira­cles; prophecy; the discerning of spirits; diverse kinds of tongues; and interpretation of tongues.

But in an odd way we are not given gifts spoken of such as the word of wisdom and faith healing; for in truth we already had these abilities at birth, but we have buried and forgotten these abilities we were born with; and at Pentecost they are uncovered from long years of blindness and difficulties,

Most of these are easily recognizable descriptions of faculties of the unconscious. The unconscious is constantly scanning information and considering the highest probable outcome – thus prophecy. Access to universal aspects of consciousness allow the gaining of insights which might also account for prophecy, wisdom and words of knowl­edge. Discerning of spirits means the ability to look into a human heart and see what is hidden there. Considering how much we can learn subliminally through body langu­age and verbal cues, this is another straightforward uncon­scious faculty. See Edgar Cayce

Speaking in tongues is a common way in which the unconscious expresses its feelings and insights. It is a level three expression in Van Rhijn/Caldwell’s levels of con­sciousness. When the ‘tongues’ are considered by us as symbolic expression they transform into meaningful words, just as dream symbols do. My experiments with such phenomena convincingly show the common link between these often-considered unrelated phenomena and LifeStream. See Glossolalia – Different Levels of Your Mind

But imagine a group of people all ‘opening’ as described in the chapter The prayer of the virgin soul – there were 120 gathered in a room, men and women being equals – “All these with one accord devoted themselves to surrender, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” Considering present day Pentecos­talism and other forms of LifeStream, this large group would include people who would be shouting in tongues, others would be crying, moving their bodies, discerning spirits, and generally creating a bedlam of noise. Any newcomer to the group, not having had it explained what was being attempted – that each be open to the Spirit and be moved by it – might think the people were crazy or drunk.

Are you ready for that? If not, maybe it might help to practice –

Stand with eyes closed. Become aware of your breathing rhythm. Slowly deepen it but do not speed it up. If anything, make it slower and fuller. When you feel at ease with this add a sound to the outbreath. It is easiest to use the aaaaahhhh sound at first.

Keep this going until you feel the sound flowing out easily and reasonably smoothly. Then move the sound around by changing the volume. Make it soft, make it loud. Try the different volumes of your voice and the different levels of power.

Next try shifting the feeling quality. Make different sounds to see what variety of feelings you can discover or express. If you hit a satisfying sound, something you can enjoy, move it to express laughter, change it into sadness, thoughtfulness, anger, hurt – in fact try it in all sorts of pitches and feeling qualities.

When you have finished playing the instrument of your voice, relax quietly on the floor for a minute or so. This quiet period after the voice exercise is often very healing. It can produce very real internal peace.

But most of what has been written about Pentecost has been written from peoples understanding of life 2000 years ago. A great deal more has been learned about the mind, how the body works and the principles of nature. As a taster of this; in life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as spontaneous movement in dreams, in our breathing and heartbeat – our life. This I have given the description as the Life Will.

While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep and dream our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will, or motivating force moves our body. So, we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis

This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will, all that while we sleep and dream. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described elsewhere – See Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind; ESP in Dreams.

For simplicity I have called this experience, of what is actually waking lucid dreaming, ‘LifeStream’. It would take us too far out of looking at dreams to explore it, but it can be studied within these features: Waking Lucid Dreaming – LifeStream – People’s Experience of LifeStream – Life’s Little Secrets – Arm Circling Meditation

This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will – our natural instincts – in us wants. So, the only way to express what is our best interests for us, is in dreams, when our conscious will is largely passive or we able by being passive and receptive to allow the Life Will to move us, speak through us, exercise us and generally expand our awareness and so grow as a person.

Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course, it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals as instinctive knowledge. Such knowledge, that allows all life forms to do the amazing things they do, is not by our conscious thinking using words, but by a form if direct knowing and abilities learn from their peers. But when that is added to our own conscious awareness our ability to know is magnified enormously, as demonstrated by Edgar Cayce already mentioned

But we need to remember that having a personality with self-awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the Life Will – what we usually call instincts. So, the development of self-awareness was and is an immense step, and leaves us very vulnerable, and still does. Look around at the number of people who must take anti-depressants, or who have to use alcohol every day, or smoke or take other drugs – all means of facing the difficulty of meeting self-awareness.

That is the story of the Garden of Eden. At first, we were all living in an instinctive Life Will state, having no decisions to face and all directions automatically handled instinctively. But when we left our instinctive condition/the Garden of Eden, by having developed our own will, we felt naked and afraid – in the words of Genesis. See The Secret Bible 

And the Eternal One caused the spirits of mankind to withdraw their consciousness from activity and surrender to the process taking place in their beings. So, they lost themselves in the divine will while it acted upon them. And the divine activity in Adam – mankind – caused a separation of their unity with the one will to occur. Out of their united will it was made individual will. For the spirits of mankind had not been capable of personal or individual decision, but now the divine made this a part of their being. And the Adam knew this was now substance of his substance and part of his innermost nature. For out of mankind’s divine inclination toward self-expression, which made them a reflection of the divine forces that had created them, there had arisen their own individual will, with its power of expression.

Now the activity leading toward selfhood in the human spirits was so subtly a part of their nature, that unlike the other activities that had been expressed outwardly as the evolution of cellular life and animals, it was difficult to stand aside from it. The mineral, animal and vegetable forces had not involved mankind so strongly. They had been objectified easily. And the divine wisdom in mankind warned them of the consequence of this, saying, you must not centre your consciousness in matter, for by that you will die to your cosmic awareness and have only consciousness through physical senses.

But the forces of individuation, flowing into matter, seemed to say that if they allowed their being to enter into and experience physical life, how could they lose their eternal consciousness? Instead they would gain knowledge of the opposites, of the paradox that the gods knew. Then the desires for this fired their will, for many spirits wished to know life in physical realms; to experience fully the knowledge of time and space, of the incompleteness of being just male or female, of looking out through the senses of a physical body, and knowing the feel of winds and water, separation and aloneness. Thus, came about the fall of the angels, and many spirits fell into life within a physical body.

So, we are in a situation in which we have only a limited awareness instead of the amazing wider world of the instinctive life – the Life Will when allied with our personal awareness. We are in general very small creatures, and when we begin to meet the enormous world that we left in the Garden, and we meet it with human personality, it often frightens us because we are so unused to it. See Opening to Life

Many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking, and it is a shock.

When we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are, we often react to it in our dreams or in waking with fear or panic. So, we dream of being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures; or being swallowed by a whale or something huge, a tsunami, or even possessed by evil entities. If we realise that they are things we have created through our own fear, we will pass on. But otherwise it will continue to haunt us as something that will get you; or you feel uncertain even lost in facing it! But it is only our small self-image, our ego that reacts because it feels powerless, even though in reality the Hugeness is part of our totality. It is the enormous potential you have within you, it is Life you are frightened of or have been ignoring. It often frightens us. We fear that our ego or personality as it is, will be lost, destroyed or overcome by the Hugeness. My experience is that nothing is ever lost, instead we are added to.

Why are so many so blind to their own hugeness? Perhaps because they have not looked at themselves closely, for are we not seeds? A single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organisms. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I, are the result of gathered experience. Can’t you remember your life stretching back to eternity?

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The Inner Path To Christ 20

Crucifixion

 Self-sacrifice is the fundamental influence in this experience. It has been formed by countless people giving of their life, either in death or in long lives of self-giving, such as mothers give to their children, or so many give themselves in war or a life of service, that it has created a huge behavioural pattern in the unconscious of humanity. Therefore, the symbol is not referring only to Christianity, it is an image that expresses a fundamental aspect of life itself.

Many processes in nature are confronted by the need for self-giving, in creating the new, or giving life to another. A mother animal gives of her body and sometimes dies in the process of giving birth; during reproduction many animals die, the sun is dying as it pours out its energy, thus enabling life on earth.

Crucifixion is linked with love, and of course deep love is a way of giving yourself to or for another person. Such a death arising from self-giving is shown, in the symbolism of crucifixion, as opening the door to sharing a wider life. In the death or willing sacrifice of one’s ego there can enter awareness of how this links you with universal life. You experience how life itself is continually sacrificing itself. But there is no real pain as birth follows death, and both are part of a huge cycle.

The sense of the enormity of the presence of Christ suddenly arrived one day to me and showed me a form of love I had never seen before. It was an enormous experience. I use the word enormous because the experience is often one of meeting someone or something so huge, so beyond the apparent limitations of human life that I, and others, are often overwhelmed by awe. At other times the awareness of Christ brings with it a feeling of communicating with a knowledge, or base of information, that seems to be all knowing, or all inclusive. Sometimes this means a penetrating insight that strips away one’s own lies and reveals unconscious motivations in a gentle way.

It was this knowledge aspect I received in this meeting. This time there was no subjective imagery, but if I put the experience into images to make it clearer, then it was like standing with this all-seeing presence, and him/it explaining to me how many of my feelings and fears about sexuality were not based on reality. This communication was not verbal, but a flashing interplay of thoughts and feelings.

What was pointed out to me in this way was that what we call love is rooted in cosmic and biological facts. Involved in this is a sort of dying or self-giving apparent in what happens between the sperm and ovum. When the sperm penetrates the ovum, they give to each other their most vital treasure, their genes. Each of them dies to what they were, and their blending becomes something new and unique. Christ showed me that this complete giving of themselves was the foundation of human existence and love. If we could allow even a small part of this into our everyday life, then we would begin to experience the love that underpins the phenomenal universe.

Unfortunately, Christian teachings paint a picture of just one life followed by death – with resurrection a long way off. Yet ancient beliefs saw the Sun, overclouded and nigh to death in winter, come to its birth again each year; they saw the vegetation shoot forth anew in spring — the revival of the spirit of the Earth; the endless breeding of the Animals, the strange transformations of Worms and Insects, so they taught that everything, including human lives, goes through the cycle of birth – death – rebirth, as happens with the seasons, Spring – Summer – Autumn – Winter – Spring.

If we begin to see the crucifixion as a symbol, then we can see so much more in the whole event, for the death seen as a symbol depicts a personal ‘winter’ after which the new birth of Spring arises again and is celebrated each year. This can lead to a new view of the cry, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.”

If this is not just a historical account, but about one’s personal path of discipleship, then it gives an amazing view of what we face. Yes, it is about death, but obviously not death of the body, but as a disciple we face death or loss of our old self, a self that was dominated by a sense that we were simply our body, and were trapped in the illusion that what we see or understand through our physical senses is reality – though we now begin to understand that we are only capable of seeing one percent of visible light, and only can hear one percent of audible sound, and we can also start to understand that dogs and other animals can smell and hear many thousands of times better, so our ability to feel we experience ‘reality’ is a flawed assumption. But our death of this illusion, this self, opens us to the wonder of being raised from the death we thought was life into a full experience of the Divine and the Life it brings.

A different cry reveals even more, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This is a cry from the human man – the view of the normal human who sees life as a solitary existence, during which one is always a separate body distinct from others. Such a cry comes because the one crying out sees God as separate from himself and so calls out for help as he faces death.

On the path of the disciple we face this feeling that God is far off and so we face death. But the cry comes from one who faces death, but not as we see from the churches view of death which is a torturous agony. but death of the human sense of a self distinct and separate from all others. When that personal sense of self dies, we open to immense possibilities. We open to the realisation that God is not separate from self, but is the very foundation of our own existence, and crucifixion was the experience that produce this wonderful change.

Many people have personal experience of burdens/ crosses they bear. They may also fear being trapped or nailed to work, painful relationships or life situations, and people express this in various ways.

“This is crucifixion, allowing oneself to be buffeted, torn by all the fears, angers, hates, prejudices human beings are heir to. There’s no creator we are told by our pundits. We are only maggots. There is no life after death. Crucifixion is the meeting of the fears and darkness this leads to. It is to meet the death of all one’s inner life cries out for and through experiencing it moving beyond it.

As I went through this it really did feel as if I had at last understood the meaning of that cry for the father, and the taunts of the mob. The mob are all our own inbuilt doubts, fears, angst, cynicism that lash out at our feelings. Our fears have to hit us to test the strength and validity of our inner sense of the spirit. Also, they need to not just believe that experience, so they shout, “Crucified him. Crucify him!” They need an actual experience of testing and death to discover what the truth is; what lies beyond death. And the cry from the cross is a meeting the reality of the human condition. We are not divine. There is no father to help us. We are alone. Death confronts us. We reach rock bottom. We fully accept our humanity. Then comes death of our hopes or beliefs and we become the divine spirit in everyone. Not something to earn or reach beyond for, but to uncover it as it waits within us.

Gradually there was an awakening. The crown of thorns was lifted off. I felt my pierced side. There were nail holes I felt in my hands. I understood I had suffered these by being willing to work at the common task’s necessity demanded. The nail holes in my feet I had suffered as the willingness to accept everyday life and earthbound consciousness, instead of struggling to raise my own consciousness. The binding clothes were the restrictions of sensual consciousness falling away.

Then I saw the Christ standing above me with a crown of thorns. A cup was in my hands, and I asked that it be taken from me, but if necessary, “Thy will be done.” Then the crown of thorns was lifted and placed upon my head. I was crucified, dead, and buried.

The symbolism of the nails in the hands and feet depict how our personal awareness, the divine at our core, is nailed to physical life, and through being willing to work at the common task’s necessity demands, we experience the falling away of personal desires. The nail holes in the feet are the willingness to accept everyday life and earthbound consciousness, instead of struggling to rise above common humanity. The binding clothes are the restrictions of sensual consciousness as it falls away.

When we begin to experience these things for ourselves, we want to record them as in the following:

As I lay in the tomb I wondered when was Gethsemane and crucifixion in my life? When was death? The answers came from within quickly. Gethsemane was my recent fear of the irrational. It was the conflict I have felt about going further into the unknown. I had prayed – “God if this be illusion take it from me, for I want it not. But if this be what you wish for me, then I accept it.” This had been my Gethsemane. My death was in being willing for my egoistic hopes and beliefs to die and be absorbed or eaten by the Self. My crucifixion has been over the past many years.

To meet and go through these experiences we need to surrender our whole being to the divine action. 

In this surrender, however, instead of questions answered, each time there was for me a bringing all to the centre, offering my ideas of God, Christ, the Devil, in their outer, past, future, conscious, unconscious, all were put into what I had “avoided” – the dark centre, the nothing that was also everything, and they died. There was a feeling of the unreality of Christ, that the Christ has gone, dead, only an illusion, a facade. I see that through this feeling I denied him thrice, and felt he was gone. But now there seems to be something else emerging. I realise that everything had to die into that centre, because this is like the shadows standing before the Light. Only that which is Real can survive this death into the Real. There comes now a feeling that I have been present at the birth, life, trial, crucifixion and death of the Christ. Now comes a glimmer of hope that the Real Christ will be resurrected – a unity. I do not know what this resurrection will mean in actual experience. But perhaps it means that the Paraclete; the helper, that the Holy Spirit will come to me – that I will know the arisen Christ to then ascends into union – that I will be led by the Spirit to baptise with the Spirit in the name and preach the Gospel.

As I reached this part of the experience, I began to feel it as deeply Christian. Christian in the sense of experiencing it, understanding it through the being of Jesus.

“Jesus being a willing sacrifice, that was the terrible thing for many to see or believe. Saying he wasn’t afraid of death was what awed everybody. That’s what awes everybody about a saviour. They say – Okay, I’m going to face this thing that everybody is so afraid of. That is why. That is what it is all about. Okay, so I will explore death. Right, here we go.”

The question on my mind, and seeing already, intervened at various points. Now came the question of how to communicate capably to others.

“You just don’t need to do anything. You don’t need some big technique. There is David off there, there’s me here, there’s my wife; we are all just doing our growing, exploring. You don’t need to do anything, not anything in particular, only to accept and love each other. That’s all there is, without any big doctrine or anything else.”

And as Elliot so rightly said –
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So, the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

As I practised what Elliot has written, I experienced death, bodiless sensation, the end. I had taken on the role of the one who explores death. It was such a simple, yet such a profound experience because of the realisation that brought. I do not know whether I can capture it all in words. I was ready to die, to end, to suffer the defeat of extinction. I had found the dignity, the manhood of that acceptance. I met death.

So, I died. There was an ending.

The person who recorded this experience saw another view of crucifixion.

Somehow, I knew we were all actors performing a show or drama. It was the crucifixion, and I was to be crucified. Yet at the same time I was simply watching it and was someone else as well. But instead of being put on a cross, a figure on a slightly higher curve of the battlement, who was also me, carefully aimed an arrow at the sacrificial me. The bowman me was like an Eros figure, and the arrow a dart of love. It was fired and hit me in the heart. Yet in some way it never pierced me, as it had a rubber sucker on the end. Nevertheless, the show was over. We all dispersed. With others I walked down a street with two friends, Bill and Ray, maybe as one person. He showed me a poem he had written about his son, or a heart shaped thing.

Here, crucifixion is linked with love, and of course deep love is a way of giving yourself or dying to another person. Such a death, one arising from self-giving, is shown in the symbolism of crucifixion as opening the door to sharing a wider life. In the death or willing sacrifice of one’s ego, as described in Elliot’s poem, there can enter awareness of how this links you with universal life. You experience how life itself is continually sacrificing itself. But there is no real pain as birth follows death, and both are part of a huge cycle.

Yet another facet of crucifixion lies in our vulnerability as human beings. Our personal awareness is at the centre of all it is touched or impacted by. Here is the agony of personal crucifixion being met by one individual on their journey through the darkness of our times.

I had been talking with my wife about where and how do we find purpose, real manhood and womanhood in today’s world. We talked about past cultures, primitive peoples, and how many of them had the dignity and shining quality of manhood and womanhood.

I felt the situation wasn’t a simple one though and did not necessarily mean we had to learn from the primitive. Because when the primitives, such as the Kalahari Bushmen, were stripped of their myths and fantasies, they became smashed beings who lost their purpose, their quality, their manhood, their soul. Many of such primitives became alcoholics or lost people. And aren’t modern men and women primitives who have been shorn of their ancient fantasies, religions, ways of life, territory, securities, and beliefs? But on feeling this I knew we cannot go back. We must go forward to survival with some wholeness.

What came out of this as I explored inwardly was a reply to these questions. That is, there is no way of life, whether as ancient peoples, modern human beings, hunters, intellectuals, business person, social success or failure, that will in itself give us purpose or meaning or wholeness. There is no answer to our problem in that direction. No religion, no practice or philosophy will give us that assurance and quality the primitive had by being protected by their deep involvement in their religion and traditional way of life.

The answer as I saw it is to go through the agony of completing the job that has been started. If we are primitives who are smashed because we have lost most of our fantasies that protected as from the reality, awfulness and wonder of our situation, then we must complete the process and let the rest of our fantasies fall away until we cut through to the wonder, so we can really look at reality. We must come to terms with our situation. That is the maturity and quality of manhood and womanhood today. After meltdown it is only what is left that has any survival value.  So, we do not look back to past leaders or ideas but move onward creating a new world.

That is the atmosphere many of us are in at this moment. Our beliefs in anything except the physical have been stripped away. What has been put in their place are statements told as truths that there is no mystery to human life except it be chemical or hormonal. There is no reality except death. In a recent copy of the magazine New Scientist there is a reader’s letter in response to a previous statement about there being no evidence for life beyond the death of the body. It says:

I contest your statement that the “so-called ‘Lazarus phenomenon’ has never been documented in brain-dead patients” (5 August, p 6). If a flat electroencephalogram is taken as an indication of brain death, then there are documented cases. An article in December 2001 in The Lancet (vol 358, p 2039) refers to the case of a young woman ‘who had complications during brain surgery for a cerebral aneurysm. The EEG of her cortex and brainstem had become totally flat. After the operation, which was eventually successful, this patient proved to have had a very deep NDE [near death experience]’. This included an out-of-body experience, during which she observed things that happened during the period of the flat EEG and that were subsequently verified. (From issue 2567 of New Scientist magazine, 02 September 2006, page 18)

Although such evidence exists for a reality other than our existence only as chemicals and hormones, bones and muscles, our culture largely denies it. This denial is another form of crucifixion of your personal potential and the reality in which you exist.

All those feelings and stages are implicit in the experience of crucifixion. So many men and women have trod this path of being ready to walk directly into the darkness of personal death, because life as it is painted by the extant philosophy and religion have taken away all personal connection with the underlying reality of life in them. Life is a spirit that never takes form yet is in all form. It is forever dancing absorbing experience, and only if we let drop all the things we hold onto as security can we know it as it dances. When we touch that power and it leads us to crucifixion, then we are led into an initiation in which we meet all our illusions and fears and come face to face with death. And that exposure to conscious death is a doorway to new life.

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The Inner Path To Christ 19

The Mystical Marriage

“Here we come to that aspect of initiation which acquaints man with woman and woman with man in such a way as to correct some sort of original male-female opposition. Man’s knowledge (Logos) then encounters women’s relatedness (Eros) and their union is represented as that symbolic ritual of a sacred marriage which has been at the heart of initiation since its origins in the mystery-religions of antiquity. But this is exceedingly difficult for modern people to grasp, and it frequently takes a special crisis in their lives to make them understand it.” Quoted from Jung’s book Man and His Symbols

But the sacred marriage cannot take place between a physical woman and man, for it is only when a man or a woman become a whole person in themselves that it takes place within them.

“When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male shall not be male, and the female shall not be female: . . . then you will enter [the kingdom].” Quoted from the book ‘The Gnostic Apostle Thomas’

You do not personally own or create love, for love is not from you but is given to you. It is your birthright, and nobody else can give you the love you already have. For such love is universal, it is the flow of love that comes from beyond our own small personality and is the urge that enables us to reach out to another person who is not our own kin, or to another creature, is a small awareness of that universal love.

You can go from partner to partner and still not find it. Such love, if it ends, leaves you emptier and more painful than before. But as you discover your own love you find others love you. Love recognises itself and responds.  With or without a partner you are not without love. This homecoming to love has been recognised in all cultures and is often depicted as the sacred marriage between the male and female elements of your own being that life in the body and the experience of the years have separated. The unfolding of your innate love brings about this inner unity. This unity then shines into the life of others and helps the unfolding of their own love.

This marriage leaves the person united as male and female as shown with the male with a female breast – both united.

A sacred marriage – may take many dreams and personal growth to find an actual full marriage in one’s inner world. This can be seen also in the integration of the female in the male or the integration of the male in the female.

This marriage between the two sides of you is fairly clearly shown in dreams, and even the Bible tells how important this marriage is, “For many are invited, but few are chosen”

Here is a dream showing this wonderful and full union.

 Example: I was looking at a very large and old tree. I wondered if I could climb it but couldn’t see any way up it. But I noticed a large area without any bark, like an old wound, and I thought that area would become rotten and so the tree would become hollow and offer shelter to animals and humans.

Then I walked around the back of the tree and saw that the bark was like thick cables about 6-8 inches wide. I could then see a fairly easy way to climb the tree. So, I climbed up and the top of the tree was like a massive bell of a flower, like a crocus shape. And it was light and full of colour. Suddenly I saw a spirit, a beautiful female. It was the spirit of the tree. At this point I was semi awake, and I wanted to hold the beautiful spirit, but realised that the tree was a representation of my life, and so was the spirit of the tree. The spirit sat on me in a sexual position, so I was lying on my back and she was upright, but there were no sexual movements. She slowly took me into her, I mean the whole me, as if she was sucking my whole body into her. I realised that I had to let go of myself because she wanted to take all my experience of life and endeavour into her and fertilise herself with it to form a baby. So, I was ready to do that and watched her form a new baby, a blend of her and me.

“At this point I experienced the spiritual marriage, in which one’s personal awareness was merged/married to the Divine. It is difficult to be able to define this experience, but at the time I felt that my being was now linked in a wonderful way of sharing the experience with every woman I had felt care and love for – we were all sharing in the celebration.”

“I could see that it has been an enormous part of my personal growth over the years right the way back to childhood. I have experienced a mystical marriage in myself. I am life – and although that is not true, at the same time it is true. In my being I am Krishna and Radha.  In me they both live in a wonderful union of bliss.  I am both the incarnation of godhead and also the worshipper before that wonder.  That this wonder can live in us is beyond my understanding.  That it can take on flesh – and that it does, every time a baby is born – leaves me in a state of wonder. I feel all this because I am that blissful union of Krishna and Radha.  In myself I know the union and the love.  I have been and am that sweet love forever joined. That the very creator of the universe can take on flesh, as it does every time a baby is born, brings me to my knees.  This is beyond belief.  Yet that is what I am seeing and experiencing as the truth.  That is what I am experiencing in myself.  I know that in this very existence, lost as I am in the sensory experiences of the world, and my feelings of isolation and physicality, I am at the same time, at the same moment, the godhead itself in holy union.”

As for how we become this integral self, I feel it starts by possibly satisfying your physical sexual activity and then realising that you never actually become or possess the female or male you desire, you may discover it within yourself.

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The Inner Path To Christ 18

The goodness and badness of things

One of the great statements in the New Testament is – “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” (Mathew 7-1).

Strangely the enormity of this is often overlooked. If used it can have an incredibly transformative influence in your life. So let me point out just one way it can be introduced as a way of dealing with pain and tension, and removing the blocks to surrendering oneself to the divine action.

Many Christians are taught to be forever wary of the evil, the bad, and the sinful. Unfortunately, this turns into awful self–judgements. Such judgements about your own actions and the world continually create misery in you and should stop. That is not to say you should avoid being aware of the results of your actions and of the actions of others toward you. In this way you can decide if that is what you wanted to create with your words and deeds. That is quite different to judging things as good or bad. Evaluation is a process of learning but judging everything suggests that you are all knowing and all seeing. Give it up.

The process of judgements also flows into virtually everything you think about. We arrive at judgements about the value or otherwise of people, ideas, religions, and objects. This may be interesting and maybe, to deal with everyday affairs, may at times be useful. But to take such judgements seriously is like putting yourself forward again as all seeing and all knowing.

Take a few moments to consider this in your everyday life. Supposing you hold a cup in your hand – what do you suppose it is? How would you describe it? What is it made of?

Whatever your description, you may have left out details of who made it, how it was made, and just what skill with hands or machine shaped it. But also, what about its colour or how its shape connects historically and culturally? What about the chemical composition of its components, how they work together or conflict? What about the molecules and atoms that are part of that chemical constitution? Where did its atoms have their birth? Was it on some distant star and system, as many of the atoms of your body? Also, its sub-atomic particles – do they, as modern physics suggests, actually have a link beyond space and time, with all other particles throughout the universe? In fact, does this simple cup transcend within itself all the ideas about time and space, death and loss that you take so seriously? Is this ordinary object an expression of the divine, leaping beyond all the boundaries you feel so trapped by?

Do you really know how to judge anything?

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The Inner Path To Christ 17

Bathing in the Ocean of Life

Beyond that lies the human spirit.  To arrive at a glimpse of this is a little more difficult than understanding the human soul.  The problem is that we live our lives virtually unconscious of what moves us, and the subtlety of our own motivations.  Perhaps we can have some understanding of this if we have travelled widely.  Many of the things we do in our daily life are, as said, done completely unconsciously.  If we have the good fortune to live for a while in a totally different culture, sometimes we are made aware of things about ourselves we never previously noticed. (For instance in Thailand it is very bad manners to sit at a level above the head of the family you are visiting.) So, perhaps you might be able to accept that there are things you do, the whole broad sweep of your life, maybe arising out of subtle things within you that you are presently not aware of.

All of us, in fact, are living deeply immersed in the influence of the spirit.  The directions, the difficulties, the triumphs we achieve, arise out of our spirit.  This spirit that guides us and we are immersed in unconsciously, is the essence, the distillation, of all life experience. This essence, this distillation, when we meet it is experienced as a great ocean of consciousness that we merge into, losing a sense of boundary. Or sometimes it is felt as a dropping away of your boundaries and a realisation with wonder and love that in reality you are this ocean of life.

With a little self-observation it becomes fairly obvious what part language and behavioural responses have in your life.  With training you can become more fully aware of how and from where these arise in you.  The impress of the spirit is subtler, but likewise with self-observation it can be experienced.  Meeting the spirit is a profound experience. It is this meeting that is the aim of being a disciple. It may be a very personal meeting with Christ, or it may be an opening to the vastness of the spirit in a less personal way. Whatever it is, you will know your life is more that your body, more than the smallness of your personal experience in this one life.

But to grasp what it is before you meet it is akin to a person born blind trying to grasp what light and colour are. We understand things because we experience them. Of course, we are constantly experiencing the spirit, we wouldn’t be a living being if it were not so, but we are so immersed in it we fail to ‘see’ it until the coverings fall away. It is what remains when physical sensations, thoughts and emotions drop away. It is naked awareness – consciousness without the clothing of thoughts or imagery, or sound or smell. Sometimes one arrives at it while practising relaxation, meditation or prayer. Deep relaxation can uncover it occasionally because your personal awareness drops away until, occasionally, it is as if you fall into sleep with a spark of awareness. Then, in that place, you lose any sense of your body, and all thoughts melt away. All that is left is an ocean of living awareness, that you know in some way has always existed through all time. You experience a sense of being in the timeless and universal essence of life.

Then I have betrayed Death.
And its face is beauty
For it is all things –
Naked,
Undressed of flesh,
Leafless,
Exposed,
Unclad Life –
Without the garment
That our selfhood is.

And the waters in me rose
To tears.
Bathing me in regret
That I had
So, often
Forgotten
My love
For the
Naked Beauty.

The Time of Becoming

Although there are stages in your flowering; although there are experiences you pass through, like the cleansing and the wilderness, all this comes about because you continue to remain open to that invisible yet felt influence that came to you when you dropped the preconceptions and limitations of your mind and heart. Out of this emerges the potential being you held within you from birth. This flow is continuous if you remain open to it. The following account describes a meeting with this power, and what can come of it.

I felt as if I were falling down a long hole, like Alice in Wonderland. The observing part of me understood that I was dropping backwards through my whole life. At times I seemed to bang into things, or bump off things, and these were the painful times in my history. At one point I wondered if I were experiencing some sort of healing regression, but I only touched the events of my life as I fell back.

Eventually I came to rest. It was wonderfully peaceful, and even my thinking had stopped. I didn’t have any feelings of having a body or shape. I simply existed. Again, the observing part of me wondered if this was the womb, but it quickly became apparent, or I knew, that this wasn’t the womb, it was the basic level of my awareness, how it felt to be before thinking and speech. I began to feel afraid as I realised that if I dropped any further back I would cease to exist. Then I knew the fear was unnecessary as every time we go to sleep, we drop back into the condition where we lose any sense of personal existence, yet we emerge none the worse the next day. So, I let myself drop.

I dropped into a darkness as everything melted away. Then suddenly I was aware that something held me. It was the process that had grown me from seed in the first place. My ego had not created me or grown me. But now this deep part of me was unfolding me again, like a plant opening. I felt it was the very source of life itself, and it cared for me and had grown me from a tiny seed in my mother’s womb. I guess this is what people call God, and I understood that we each have this force at our centre. As I watched it working in my body and life, I had a clear sense of it communicating with me. It was as if it, the very life of me, spoke to me, and I understood from it that if I opened to it each day, if I surrendered to its action each day, then it would grow me to a fuller life and realise itself in me. Things, qualities or talents would unfold as I was grown. This felt like a holy gift, that the mystery of life would live in me and know itself in me, and when this happened others would find shelter and strength in my life.

As this account suggests, you must remain open to this influence from the core of your being. If you do, then there is a flowering of things that were latent in you, and eventually the mystery at your core will know itself in your life. You will wake up to the mystery you are. It is this that the gathering of the disciples suggests. It has the double meaning of following the impulse of that love and unfolding that is emerging, the discipline or training of that – and also the emergence of the various aspects of you, the disciples.

The confusion of discipline

Looking back at some of the disciplines of past Christians, especially the ascetics and monastic orders, it is obvious there is great confusion about what opened one’s conscious self to the spirit. They often seem, when they describe flagellation and extremes of abstinence, to have looked at the letter rather than the law. In Buddhism there is a saying that there is a finger pointing at the moon, but most people look at the finger and forget that it is the moon that is being pointed at.

In the case of disciplines necessary in this path, the method is secondary to the aim. Rebecca Beard, who was a regular medical doctor, but became a healer recognising the place of the spirit in the sick person’s life, says of this discipline:

The noon meditation was difficult for many reasons. I found it difficult to sit quietly while the potatoes burned. A friend lived with us who did some of the cooking. When she put the potatoes on and forgot them, I could hardly resist going to the rescue when I smelled them burning. To be able to say, ‘There are other pans; there are more potatoes; there is only one kingdom of heaven; seek ye the kingdom of heaven; seek ye the kingdom FIRST’ was real discipline.

To understand the place of discipline on this path, you must remember base principles. It is the ‘discipline’ of the Virgin Prayer that allowed the birth of a new sense of the divine, of the wider life. Nothing you could do can MAKE that happen. You open by dropping preconceptions, rigid opinions, fixed ideas or beliefs about God or yourself, and trust the Mystery at your core to do its work. What happens is a natural process of growth and unfoldment. You can help it by remaining receptive and observant, but you cannot create it yourself by effort or force.

Unfortunately, a great deal of information about being ‘religious’ or spiritual, suggests that it is only by being ‘good’; by following certain rigid moral principles; by controlling appetites and desires; by killing out any sign of badness in you, that you can attain real spirituality. This is a completely false direction, a sort of cul-de-sac of your potential growth.

Do you have to be ‘good’ to reach heaven?

When a baby grows toward childhood and youth, we feed it with nourishing food, with a variety of experience and opportunities to explore possibilities. It learns to walk as its body and mind become capable and interested in walking. There is no need for punishment or huge processes of discipline to make this happen; the same with learning to go to the toilet. Although many people try to train their child to use a potty, the child will do this quite naturally as it matures to the point where it is easy for it to control its bladder and bowels without enormous stress and fear of not pleasing its parents.

The unfoldment of your potential does not come from ‘self-development’. It emerges as it is allowed to grow. The evil or darkness in us falls away because the beauty and ease in you grows; because you grow in wisdom and insight, not because you forcibly control yourself to be different.

However, this attitude of allowing growth needs to be balanced by another. Sometimes we are so controlled by fears, by habits, by anger and bitterness that we cannot allow the inner growth to start or continue.  A man’s dream illustrates this:

I was in a prison cell with two other men. We ate, slept and defecated in the cell. I was standing at the bars of the cell and had the impression of having been in the prison for years. I was shouting and cursing the people who had put me in the prison, full of hate and self-pity. Suddenly I realised that my years of shouting had availed nothing. The only person who was upset by it was myself. I was the victim of my own anger and turmoil. I dropped the attitudes and was free of them. Years went by and one by one I dropped other habits of emotion and thought with which I had trapped and tortured myself. I realised I could be totally free within myself.

One morning I woke and sat up on the mattress on the floor that was my bed. The last ghost of inner entrapment fell away. A fountain of joy opened in my body, pouring upwards through me. So intense was it I cried out. The cellmates called a warden. They stood looking at me as I experienced a radiance so strong, I felt as if I must be shining. I was aware my joy poured into them, although they thought I was mad. Nothing would ever be the same again.

The discipline of self-awareness

There was a discipline involved here, that of recognising what held the dreamer prisoner – anger, fear, resentment. The joy was there all the time. It didn’t need to be developed, just released. This is a subtle point, the difference between trying to develop one’s spiritual joy, and allowing it to emerge. It is a point that needs re-evaluating again and again.

Here is another dream illustrating the sort of situations we might need strength to move out of:

In my dream I was watching a man who insisted on living in a small stable like room that was foul with his faeces and urine.  He wouldn’t go out or clean it and his clothes too were filthy.  He wouldn’t be helped but blamed his condition on anything and anyone but himself.  As I watched though, he came to the point of accepting responsibility for his own condition.  He came out, and we then happily asked if we could put his clothes in the washing machine.  He started a new life.

The dreamer says of his dream:

As I explored my dream, I saw that it is a frequent factor in people to need a problem to stimulate us to activity.  But I saw/felt an attitude I had in which I loved to have problems or shit.  I saw that again and again, when talking to people I would describe this shaky condition I was in, the problems I faced, the difficulties I had.  For instance, I might say, “It’s OK for someone like you, you’re not so anxious.  You didn’t have such a bad start.  You have more money.  You have more luck on your side, etc., etc.”  I just revelled in the shit.

Looking at my dream helped me see that I use this defense because I am anxious life or people will ask something of me.  If I have a nice problem, I can run back and hide in it.  It helps me escape the necessity of saying, “What you are asking makes me feel anxious.  I’m afraid I might fail.  Don’t ask me for love or help, it frightens me.”

The task that Hercules faced, of cleansing the stables illustrates the same human difficulty – moving out from the muck that traps or holds us. Hercules diverted the river, and the power of that cleansed the stables. Likewise, the flow of life, or spiritual energy flowing through you by opening to it, has a natural cleansing effect. But you might need to do some work on unwieldy parts of yourself to get that action flowing.

Have you got it – or has it got you?

Firstly, we cannot let go of something and offer it to the spiritual action if it has hold of us. If you have a tiger running around your house, you would avoid it at all costs unless you had a way of immediately being in control of it. So, it is with your own fears and pains. Unless you can stop their attack, you avoid them, run from them, and in fact let them unconsciously control your decisions and actions. Of course, you need help and a greater power than your own conscious resources to totally grow beyond such fears and pains. But often you cannot even open yourself to that greater influence while they have a strong hold on you. Without knowing it you resist the action of the divine in your life. See Ox Herding

One of the simplest ways to begin loosening the hold such things have on you is daily meditation. There are so many methods, and in one way it doesn’t matter which one you use as long as you understand what the point of it is.

If this is explained you will grasp what is meant. So, for the sake of the explanation, let us say that each day you spend half an hour sitting and quietly looking at a blank sheet of paper or a white wall. You are not trying to get anywhere, reach any higher state of consciousness, or achieve a goal – just looking. Quite soon you might get restless, your mind will wander. Perhaps on that first day, or on subsequent days the question will arise as to what the point of this is. Maybe you still remain sitting, or you give up and go back to watching the TV or reading a book or visit a friend.

Well, what has happened is that as you sit and look at the paper without goal, all the things that usually have a hold on your decisions start to come to the fore. They will attack your awareness. They will do this again and again, getting stronger and stronger. But if you quietly continue, they will cease to trouble you. They have lost their hold on you, and now you have a hold on them.

Stop feeding the pigeons

Ramakrishna illustrated this with a story. He said that if you feed the pigeons every day, they will come in greater numbers. But if you stop feeding them, they will gradually give up flying around you and all will be quiet. He described the pigeons as the thoughts and worries, fears and pains that we constantly feed by giving them attention or being directed by them.

In a similar way, the apparently meaningless meditation stops feeding the pigeons of worries, fears and the other urges and irritations that usually control us.

Another approach to this method of gaining control over anxiety, irrational urges and moods is something that was originally connected with the chanting of hymns and prayers. It was thought that this slow measured chanting brought peace and transformation. Recent analysis of breathing rhythms as they connect with anxiety states, suggests that slow breathing or breath holding decreases the influence of anxious states. So, the underlying influence may arise from breath holding or regulation, rather than the sounds. Certainly, the discipline of slowing the breath brings about the same results as the meditation but is possible a more potent method.

But remember that these methods are only a finger pointing at the moon – they are not the moon. In other words, they do not lead to the transcendence possible through allowing the divine to be born in us. They are simply techniques to help us open to that Mystery and remain fertile to it. They are means of developing the strength to make the journey, not the journey itself.

An easy way of approaching the slow breathing is as follows. This is much slower and more purposeful than normal breathing. One imagines a feather near one’s nose, hardly moved by the passage of air. Yet not so slow it becomes uncomfort­able and one has to gasp for breath. Breath in as fully as you can without allowing the chest to rise. You then let the chest ex­pand and fill, but without going to the point where you feel tense or struggling.  Do not hold the breath but let the air out as slowly and as smoothly as possible. If possible, feel the quietness of the breath and allow this to pervade your whole being. If at any point you find you are struggling with your breath, slightly increase the speed.

Starting with five minutes’ prac­tice, slowly work up to ten, then fif­teen minutes, even half an hour and reap the reward of peace and stillness this method brings to the whole system. You will find that your breathing gradually adapts to the slowness, and your system slows down. Some people count their in and out breath, but this is not necessary. Awareness at the point where the air enters your nose is sufficient, along with the feeling of gentleness of the breath.

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The Inner Path To Christ 16

The Wilderness Years

There cannot help but be a repercussion, a response in your life to the new energy and potential you are releasing.  This is represented by Jesus going into the wilderness and being tempted by the devil.  It is described in the New Testament as follows:

And Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being forty days tempted by the devil. And in those days, he ate nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said to him, ‘If you be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread.’

And Jesus answered him, saying, ‘It is written that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.’ And the devil, taking him up into a high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

And the devil said to him, ‘All this power will I give you, and the glory of them: for that is delivered to me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If you therefore will worship me, all shall be yours.’

And Jesus answered and said, to him, ‘Get you behind me Satan: for it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve’.

And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, ‘If you be the Son of God, cast yourself down from here: For it is written, He will give his angels charge over you, to keep you: and in their hands they will bear you up, lest at any time you dash your foot against a stone’.

And Jesus answering said to him, ‘It is said, you shall not tempt the Lord thy God’.

And when the devil had ended all the temptations, he departed from him for a season. (Luke 4:1-13)

Everything new is confronted by the old.  In our everyday activity’s habits serve us well.  Without them we would not be able to stand, walk, or talk.  Some habits we have created simply through repetition, such as those in learning to ride a bicycle or drive a car.  But some have been etched into us by great pain, by punishment and reward, or by the enormous pressure of social opinion and peer pressure. The outcome of all this is that we respond to the world and to our own urges and perceptions in particular or predictable ways.  These responses are not necessarily well thought out.  They may not serve us well.  How often have we heard of a person making the same mistakes again and again; or of a man or woman who consistently fall in love with partners who are apparently trying to destroy them?

Therefore, the temptations described in the New Testament are subtle commentaries on the habitual responses that often arise out of our own inner darkness and pain.  If not that, then they have arisen out of perceptions of the world that tell us there are no living connections between ourselves and other people, between ourselves and the rest of the universe.

The Personal Desert

In 1927 Buckminster Fuller stood on the shore of Lake Michigan contemplating suicide. He said to himself: ‘I’ve done the best I know how, and it hasn’t worked.’ He was still grieving the loss of a daughter who had died five years earlier; his business had just failed. He was penniless and 32 years old. He wondered how he could support his wife and newly born baby, but, after struggling with his despair for hours in the dark and the freezing wind, he decided to live the rest of life like an experiment. He wanted to discover whether the golden rule of life was dog eat dog. He would find out by seeing what could be physically demonstrated. To free his mind of conditioned thinking and reflexes he stopped talking for a year because reading Korzybski [i] had convinced him that language structures caused conditioned associations or mechanical reactions that lock us in fixed perceptions. When he began to talk again, he refused to use the words up or down, because there is no up or down in the universe. He also saw, as one of his insights gained through experience, that the golden rule was, ‘If I worked always for others and only for all humanity, I would be optimally effective.’

Buckminster Fuller went on from there to design the Dymaxion House, which was mass producible; the Dymaxion world map, which is the only flat map with hardly any distortion; the Geodesic Dome; the Floating Breakwater, and to become one of the world’s great prophets of a sane, human future, coining the phrase ‘Spaceship Earth.’

Bucky Fuller [ii] managed to step out from behind his habits, his conditioned responses, and create a new life.  In fact, from failure he managed to express his amazing potential and leave an indelible mark in the world.

Fuller said that he had experienced a profound incident while standing on the shore of Lake Michigan which would provide direction and purpose for his life. He felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke directly to Fuller, and declared:

“From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”

The shore of Lake Michigan was Bucky Fuller’s wilderness.  It depicts exactly the situation we will each meet in our own way at this stage.  The wilderness confronts us with a choice.  On this stretch of the way you will have experienced for yourself the realisation of eternity and the recognition that your thoughts and emotions can never encompass reality.  Therefore, any sense of failure you might have, any rigid judgments you make about yourself and others, any belief you entertain that money and power alone will give you happiness or wholeness, can be seen as illusions.  The problem is that old habits, old responses, will tempt you to follow these illusions because for all your life they have been what you have taken as truth. So, the choice is this; will you follow your old habits and your old illusions, or will you trust your sense of the eternal and your awareness of the life beyond the paradox of right and wrong, good and evil?

Trials and Difficulties

Another feature of the wilderness is that you feel you have touched the heart of things, and although you have had an experience of being part of everything, there is now nothing.  Perhaps the events that have led to this point have been extraordinary in their intensity and variety.  You may feel you have made the great Voyage, travelled a wonderful Odyssey, and yet at the end of it what is there to show? Where is the Golden Fleece?

This is a difficult time.  There aren’t many wise words to say about it, it’s just has to be lived through.  But it does seem to be a time of adjustment.  Up until the wilderness the transcendent, the divine, always appeared as something external, something you might achieve or reach one-day.  Then, on meeting it, it disappears.  At least, it disappears as an external, as something separate.  The adjustment then, is one of recognising that what appears to have been lost is a part of ordinary everyday life, and the moment-by-moment contacts and relationships you meet. What you had as an apparent external reality now needs to be roused and seen as yourself, your own potential.

Another thing that may happen is the falling away of many ambitions, activities and directions, that previously seemed very important.  Perhaps they were important enough for you to believe that without them life would be meaningless.  But here they are dropping away, and you may feel very confused.  The confusion arises because the activities were connected with a belief you had that the activities or directions made your life worthwhile, that through them there was something you had achieved or could be proud of.  As they drop from your life you may be left empty-handed, and with the feeling that you are achieving nothing, going nowhere, losing power.

You are in the Middle of Things

Yet, as your expanded awareness has shown you, you are in the middle of things.  There is nowhere that you are disconnected.  Your life has meaning simply through existing.  Yet why aren’t you being used?  Why are you wandering alone in a wilderness?

Those questions have to be answered by you.  For how are you going to reconcile timelessness with the passage of time?  In your time bound world every day, especially every year, must be filled in a way that satisfies your own perception of achievement or power.  But yet, as someone close to me once told me, “Your life is just a gap in eternity.”

The following is the dream of someone passing through the wilderness:

A few nights ago, I dreamt I was with a group of people walking in very dry, desert type countryside. It was like I imagine Egypt to be – or as I saw Israel. We were walking somewhere quite purposefully, but I was not aware of where the goal was. I was caring for a younger man who was not mentally alert, or at least appeared to need looking after. Our path took us into a rock tunnel cut into a huge rocky hill. The tunnel was large and with a well-worn path, and with enough height to easily stand. It was dry and comfortable. Deep within the tunnel we entered a huge cavern that spread for over a hundred yards to our left. The others in the group were ahead of us and out of sight, but the young man and I stood and looked at the cavern that was not at all dark or dismal. What was so remarkable was that on the floor of the cave, entirely covering it were thousands of shoes. I knew a race or tribe of people who had been on a great exodus had left them. They had left their homeland and travelled through this tunnel. The shoes had been left as a sign of the great journey, the great change they had undergone – as if they had left all behind. I felt it had happened long ago.

In exploring this dream, the dreamer said:

I realise this dream is about my readiness to move on. But there is something in connection with the cave I do not want to let go of, something I do not want to leave behind. When I was looking for God there was always the sense that if I found God I would be transfigured; I would be somebody wonderful. I don’t want to look at this tomb thing. There is something I don’t want to see. I feel it is that I betrayed him – the one who appeared to need looking after. He put his trust in me and I betrayed him – this said after a fantasy of sacrificing/killing my younger companion in the cave. These were feelings I had when I left my children. I felt I had sacrificed them to my needs. They put their trust in me and I betrayed their trust. And because in the dream the cave is a place of leaving behind something from one’s past way of life, then what I need to leave behind is this sense of pain about feeling I have betrayed that precious trust.

It was a terrible thing to decide but I am now ready to make this change. I am ready to let go of the past – I need help to unburden myself of all I have been – like these other people have with their shoes. The past is so powerful though. While we are still living in the old country there is still the sense that we can make reparation for the life we have lived; there is still time to change, to make amends. One is making reparation by staying. But when one decides to leave – then I am faced by the finality of what I have done, and that it may never be undone.

I have mourned at that grave so long though. I have wept so many tears over it, to remain would be sickness. There are few tears to shed now, they have fallen in the past. There are regrets, but they are regrets that are not binding me or keeping me in the tomb. So in this way the cave is like the tomb one dies in or is resurrected from.

So now I have the feeling that although I am ready to move on I am in a state of preparation – getting my bag packed, putting my kit-bag/rucksack on. I have left my shoes in the cave, paid homage at the shrine of the dead or the past. I have what may be an old pattern emerging though. In looking forward to changing I keep expecting something amazing to happen.

The change is that I have made up my mind not to go back into the old rigid roles of trying to live in a particular way – trying to be something in particular – struggle for recognition and make a name for myself.

The Whole is Greater than the Part

In a certain way things never end.  The tree can never depart from its roots.  It still needs the life of the earth.  As strong as it may become there are still tender and vulnerable twigs and buds somewhere on it.  Nothing is taken away, but much is added.

So, it is with your own growth.  You still remain a vulnerable human being, and yet so much is added that mitigates your tenderness.

The Human Spirit

Through discipleship you gradually come to recognise that your Spirit is the central fact of your being.  Through the awareness of this you arrive at a greater personal peace, and harmonise with your innate nature, without having to join any sect or give yourself to a rigid set of beliefs.  You may also meet and converse with the master and receive the teachings at first hand.

An example of that was this man’s second meeting with the master:

“It was this knowledge aspect I received in the second meeting. This time there was no subjective imagery as there was in the first. But if I put the experience into images to make it clearer, then it was like standing with this all-seeing presence, and him/it explaining to me how many of my feelings and fears about sexuality were not based on reality. This communication was not verbal, but a flashing interplay of thoughts and feelings.

What was pointed out to me in this way was that what we call love is rooted in cosmic and biological facts. Involved in this is a sort of dying or self-giving apparent in what happens between the sperm and ovum. When the sperm penetrates the ovum, they give to each other their most vital treasure, their genes. Each of them dies to what they were, and their blending becomes something new and unique. Christ showed me that this complete giving of themselves was the foundation of human existence and love. If we could allow even a small part of this into our everyday life, then we would begin to experience the love that underpins the phenomenal universe.”

Achieving this means that you have transcended your own previous state of awareness.  When you transcend your own needs, your own biological, social, sexual needs, and reach across what may be a huge gap that separates you from another being, you change something in yourself.  From the most ancient of times some men and women have done this to extraordinary degrees.  Just as society has built physical and sociological structures that have evolved into what we can see and live within today – for instance we live within this body today that is a physiological structure gradually developed over billions of years – so, behind that is another structure brought about by these extraordinary men and women.  Like our body, like our language, like the social rules and attitudes we live within, this other structure is built out of thousands of lives and endeavours.  As with language it is the accumulation of an unimaginable synthesis of human feeling, action and thought. We have this heritage of extraordinary human action. It is the spirit we open to when we accept baptism. It is the gift we are offered by proxy at christening. It is represented by the blood of Christ.

“Wine was originally just the juice of the grape. It was the fluid, the blood that runs out of the grape when you crush it. The juice of the grape is its life that it gives you freely. It is the blood of its being it lets flow and gives to you. It does this to perpetuate its seed. But this act of survival is done in a way of self-giving. That is why the grape and its juice has become a symbol of the eternal life, the blood of Christ, the love that flows out to us from God and from God’s creative forces. They constantly give of their body to us. The grape is therefore a symbol of our relationship with God.”

The mystery of you

This is so important it needs to be made very plain, otherwise you proceed along this path of discipleship in a fog of misunderstanding. Most of us now understand that the body we inherit from our parents is the result of the physical and mental characteristics of countless forebears.  Your physical body, and who you are as a person, have not arisen from a vacuum.  The details of this are becoming more and more understood as thousands of researchers dig deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the genetic code.  But our science has been sadly lacking in helping us to understand what is meant by the human soul, and the human spirit, and unless we have some grasp of these, we remain vulnerable in our journey towards a fuller spiritual life.

For a single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I, are the result of gathered experience.

No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life, you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self. To explore it see Opening to Life

Just as the human body emerges from immense past action and experience, so do the intangible and huge aspects of your own personal awareness and mind.  As already mentioned in previous paragraphs, without your relationship with parents, family and the people around you, you would never have developed the ability to speak and think.  The language you inherit, like the body you inherit, is the result of enormous human experience, thought, struggle and sometimes bitter hardship.  That immense gift comes to you through your relationship with those around you. But there is another gift that arises with barely any awareness of its impression upon you.  This is the gift of behaviour, or more precisely, behavioural responses.  From the moment you are born, perhaps even prior to that, you are learning, or there are pressed upon you, responses to what you are experiencing.  The culture you are born into is a huge ready-made set of behavioural responses.  For instance, an Australian aborigine would easily respond to a huge living grub/caterpillar by eating it.  This would be a very difficult behavioural response for most Northern Europeans or Americans.

Without knowing it, without thinking of it or being aware of it, when we make decisions or choose directions, or simply decide what to eat, we are drawing upon our own massive behavioural pool.  That may appear to be basic psychological insight, and you may wonder what it has to do with the human spirit.  Perhaps you will have a clearer view of this if you consider just for a few moments a little of human history.  Remember the immense bloodshed, the torture, the constant conflicts between different nations and religions, the struggle of countless individuals to survive, to care for their children and those they loved.  As was said earlier, your behavioural responses do not emerge from a vacuum.  They emerge out of history.  What you do today has its roots in what took place yesterday – even in the long past – as it says in the Bible – unto the third and fourth generation. And those roots are passionately feeding upon those past struggles, the past triumph, the times of transcending evil and war. If you do not understand this, then you do not understand the human soul.  You do not understand yourself, and the passions and pains you are moved by. For the human soul is that great pool of inherited human experience and responses, only part of which you recognise and call your own – yourself. In fact, your soul is the part of that grand inheritance that you recognise and are aware of.

The path of discipleship is long, satisfying and including many lives and changes of roles.

[i] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski – He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain’s responses to reality. His best known dictum is “The map is not the territory”

[ii] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

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The Inner Path To Christ 15

The Ancient Mystery of Baptism

The act of baptism long pre-dated the Christian community. One can find water for purification outside very ancient temples. Therefore, the tradition of baptism is older than the historical Christian church.  It had its ascendance in the love a mother felt for her children, and beyond that the love she felt and gave to other children. Beyond that still, a loving woman might suckle a creature and extend her love beyond the normal boundaries.  She might hold that other child, or that creature, with the same tenderness that she held her own baby.  In such a moment she would know something that was beyond herself.  It is something that flows through all of us.  We symbolise it as the milk, the wine, or the blood.  It is the flow of Love and Life that comes from beyond our own small personality.

The urge that enables us to reach out to another person who is not our own kin, or to another creature, is a small awareness of that universal life and consciousness that pervades all things.  It is an expression of the Mystery that we can perhaps never understand, that is Life.

Baptism represents a conscious opening or an introduction to that Life. It is also an entrance into the recognition of the wider family; of that mysterious body we call Christ. We become brothers and sisters in a wider community. It takes some skill to recognise who these brothers and sisters are, and what part they might play in your life.  Calling yourself a Christian does not necessarily mean you have been truly baptised in that spirit of life and love. In fact, you might still be imprisoned by attitudes of class, creed, skin colour or gender.

Fundamentally, baptism means a change in the stance or condition of your inner attitudes.  It means relinquishing fixed opinions and having an open mind.  It means opening the doors of your being to new experiences, to new possibilities, pleasurable and painful. It means learning to love without bending others to your will, without grasping them for your own needs. It also means becoming a channel for that rive of Life to flow through. For this pathway does not dangle a carrot of eternal bliss, or the resolution of all human problems. “I come”, the Christ says, “not to bring peace, but a sword…. take up your cross and follow me.” What is offered is participation in everyday life and death in a new way.  We can become workers in the vineyard – that is, co-workers with the processes of growth and evolution in the worlds of nature.

Baptism means going under the water, which suggests bringing internal contents to consciousness; remembering the womb experience; letting our ego surrender a little and looking at death. Also, it shows that we, our conscious self, has entered more deeply into the enormous depths of our consciousness; we have literally dipped below the level of our conscious self. See My Body is a Moving Sea

That confronts us with the vastness of our inner world which means meeting our growth. We are all subject to the forces of growth – it is one of the main functions of life. But because growth is a push toward change, change that we maybe do not want to face, we often resist it, often without realising we are doing so. Psychiatrist say we have resistances to meeting the uncomfortable aspects of our self. A young woman who was anorexic dreamt of cutting off her breasts, suggesting trying to cut out the living process that was moving her into being a full woman. So, such resistance can also relate to how we try to dissociate from our own process of growth and ageing.

The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations; we take many sorts of pain killers to deal with ourselves. Things such as alcohol, coffee, medical drugs and street drugs, and yet we are still prone to break down, as can be seen by the number of people who need antidepressants or are totally lost in themselves. Look around at the number of people who have to take anti-depressant, or who have to use alcohol every day, or smoke or take other drugs – all means of not facing the difficulty of meeting self-awareness. See Programmed

But we have to remember that having a personality with self-awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the Life Will – what we usually call instincts. So the development of self-awareness was an immense step, and left us very vulnerable, and still does.

Many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self, feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking, and it is a shock.

When we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are, we often react to it in our dreams or in waking with fear or panic. So, we dream of being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures; or being swallowed by a whale or something huge, a tsunami, or even possessed by evil entities. If we realise that they are things we have created through our own fear, we will pass on. But otherwise it will continue to haunt you as something that will get you; or you feel uncertain even lost in facing it! But it is only our small self-image, our ego that reacts, because it feels powerless, even though in reality the Hugeness is part of our totality. It is the enormous potential you have within you, it is Life you are frightened of or have been ignoring. It often frightens us. We fear that our ego or personality as it is, will be lost, destroyed or overcome by the Hugeness. My experience is that nothing is ever lost, instead we are added to.

Who will you be?

What is to be your way? Is it to be a rigid and uncompromising moral and restraint imposed upon yourself from without? It cannot be this, for Mary is a living open heart surrendered to the invisible. Any rigid morals would close the door to this action upon you. To initiate upon yourself a discipline you have read or been told, even in a holy book, is to believe that you know what is best for you. It is to say, ‘I must do this work, not God. I have grown myself from the womb by my own power, not Life. I know where I am going, and by my own efforts I will get there.’ But such an attitude takes us right back to the impotent Joachim and Anna.

Obviously though, without discipline we will be lost. As Kierkegaard says: ‘To tear the will away from finite aims and conditions requires a painful effort and this effort, ceaseless repetition.’ It is this very repetition of will that enables us to follow Meister Eckhart’s message.

“I will give” he says, “a rule which is the sum of all my arguments, the key to the whole theory and practice of the truth. It very often happens that a thing seems small to us which is of greater moment in God’s sight than what looms large in ours. Wherefore it behoves us to take alike from God everything he sends us without ever thinking or looking to see which is greatest or highest or best, but following blindly God’s lead, that is to say, our own feeling, our own strongest dictates, what we are most prompted to do. Then God gives us the most in the least without fail.”

“People often shirk the least and prevent themselves getting the most in the least. They are wrong. God is everywise, the same in every guise to him who can see Him the same.”

Or as Carl Jung puts it, “Do nothing, but let things happen.”

John the Baptist is therefore a strange paradox. He is the remaining influence of the Mosaic, self-imposed law of the ten commandments imposed from without, or the Buddhist eightfold path, or the yoga self-imposed disciplines, of self-asceticism. He is also our love that impels us to heroic acts of self-denial yet is not worthy to lift the shoe latchet of Jesus; for while John may pave the way, by working from without, Jesus initiates by working from within.

Up until the point of baptism, what has been happening may be largely unconscious, but baptism represents your conscious self-dipping deeply into the experience of the wider life of the spirit – a taste of eternity and its wisdom. It also represents a transition from the body centred life to the spirit centred life. This is shown by the descent of the dove. This new life is described in the New Testament:

For as the body is one and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free, and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it, or one member be honoured, all members rejoice with it.

The choice to make

So baptism is a definite and conscious experience. A man here describes it as he met it in a dream.

The night before leaving home to fly to Australia, I dreamt I was looking at a newspaper cutting about a page in size. Near the top left was a photograph of two trees. One was down and the other upright and alive. The feature was about opening oneself to the flow of life. It was presented by an enthusiastic group of people who had a religious approach to this openness. The trees illustrated the ‘dead’ or cut off state of people who have not let the experience of this flow into them.

As I read I realised my experience and theirs was the same, but they brought to it more pleasure, more enthusiasm, more expressed sense of having something wonderful in their life. It helped me feel a greater sense of privilege about my own openness. I saw that each of us have this flow active in our body – causing our heartbeat for instance, but most people never open their ‘self’, their conscious personality to it. The group urged people to be baptised in the wonderful influence. They suggested with enthusiasm that it was worthwhile to surrender to the inner influence.

From this I renewed my ‘pledge’ to this inner life to let it vibrate or flow through me – not by my will, but by getting out of the way. It moved through me and touched other people’s lives. I felt wonderful, and this has carried through into waking.

Baptism as a symbol shows the human identity, Jesus, the Son of Man, choosing to immerse himself totally in a river. Having done that, another power enters his being – the Holy Ghost, and he is acclaimed as the Son of God; that is, he has attained Christhood.  As a human person our area of choice and will is limited, and there are definite boundaries to our awareness.  Although we exist as an integral part of a body, we have very little personal awareness of what is happening at a cellular, atomic, or even organic level.  In most cases we are even largely unconscious of the social forces that gave birth to our sense of identity, and which continue to play upon our being.  Many of us are so unaware that we may even deny the existence and influence of a spiritual force acting upon us leading us to a refinement of the qualities of our soul.

A quote from The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, by Levi H. Dowling:

“8 This washing we establish as a rite—baptism rite we call it now, and so it shall be called.

9 Your work, prophetic harbinger, is to prepare the way, and to reveal the hidden things.

10 The multitudes are ready for the words of life, and I have come to be made known by you to all the world, as prophet of the Triune God, and as the chosen one to manifest the Christ to men.

11 Then John led Jesus down into the river at the ford and he baptized him in the sacred name of him who sent him forth to manifest the Christ to men.

12 And as they came out of the stream, the Holy Breath, in form of dove, came down and sat on Jesus’ head.

13 A voice from heaven said, ‘This is the well-beloved son of God, the Christ, the love of God made manifest’.

14 John heard the voice and understood the message of the voice.

15 Now Jesus went his way, and John preached to the multitude.

16 As many as confessed their sins, and turned from evil ways to ways of right, the harbinger baptized, symbolic of the blotting out of sins by righteousness.”

Baptism means that we acknowledge how limited our choice and awareness is.  We admit how little we know about our own being, and we yearn for a fuller participation with the flowing process of life – the river. We open to that flow so that it can cleanse away the dross, and we can become aware of our transcendental life within humanity and the cosmos.

In plain language, and using the Gospels as a guide, John the Baptist represents your willingness to be washed clean by the flow of divine life in you. We each live within possibilities we hardly sense. The openness of the Mary meditation allows such possibilities to become active in your life.  From this arises the birth of a new awareness and relationship with these possibilities. Then comes the conscious willingness to surrender to the process and changes this is bringing about. Out of that you know your own divinity, represented by the descending dove.

The ancient people who wrote the gospels were not ignorant superstitious peasants. They had found a wonder in the realm of human possibility and experience. They had defined psychobiological processes and how to work with them. The details of this they had written in the manner of their times, in symbolic story form. The story is in fact an amazing document describing the hidden processes of your life and what potentials it has.

So baptism is experienced as a flow of energy, a process working in you that brings to the surface, to consciousness, the previously unconscious pains, resentments, traumas, habits and desires, that were blocking the flow of the divine life. This cleansing may be uncomfortable. It is like a river that starts to flow in a dry riverbed. Rubbish of generations has been dropped in the riverbed, and the flow starts to push it away. It is unmistakable when it happens to you. In the terms of today’s psychology this is called self-regulation, but in terms of the Gospels, it is the divine action upon us. And this divine action is not something that happened only to ancient people two thousand years ago. The principles the early Christians described in the gospels are universal processes of nature, open to anyone in any period of history, and from any race.

Here is an explicit description of such action in the life of a man who had experienced the birth of the holy child and had gone on to seek baptism.

For some time, I had been earnestly surrendering my life to the action of God by offering my body and mind in any way. I was feeling very ill and depressed at the time, and longed for healing, but could feel no definite change. Nevertheless, I sat every day with a ‘waiting’ or ‘open’ attitude. I deeply pondered the question of how the action of God showed itself. Maybe I wasn’t aware of it. I had noticed that while I slept my body experienced a subtle vibration, like you feel when you put your fingers on a smooth running electric motor; even my wife could feel it if she touched my body. But I could observe no changes in myself from this.

Then one night, B., my wife, got out of bed because the baby was crying. When she had settled the baby, I got up and went to the toilet. Just as I was getting into bed again, I heard a voice speaking to me. Literally a loud disembodied voice came from everywhere around me. It said, “You have asked how God touches the human soul – now watch closely.

This was an extraordinary thing to experience and waiting for sleep to overtake me again I had a mood of expectation, waiting for something to be shown me.  In the morning I remembered the following dream.

I was in a huge theatre, or amphitheatre.  The stage was on my right.  The part of the play I observed was where the actor walked up to a mirror and looked at himself.  Then somehow the activity gradually began to take place on my left.  First of all an orchestra was playing on a slope facing left.  Then everybody was moving to see a big event that was going to take place on the left.  This was at the opposite end to the stage.

There was no immediate ‘big event’ in my life apart from the voice and the dream. But looking back I can see from my dreams and outer life that an enormous process of preparation was taking place. This culminated in the pouring up from within me of old hurts, such as childhood medical operations, and inflicted traumas. It took several months between hearing the voice and the start of these outpourings. But the result was that healing had begun, and it carried me toward a level of wholeness and a sense of the eternal life, that I had never known before.

“Then sitting with my friends one day in our experimental group I started to shake. I thought I must be cold so restrained the shaking. But at our next meeting it started again, and this time I was wearing a warm jersey, and in no way felt nervous, so pulled slightly apart from my friends and let myself really shake. That was an amazing experience, and from there on I could allow the process to continue its work on me. Gradually it ‘discharged’ the other things from childhood, and another medical operation, that had thrown my body and mind out of balance.

But it didn’t stop at clearing out difficult past experiences, its process went on to expansion of awareness and growth – it moved toward making me more than I had been. All of that came about by allowing my being to express spontaneously without my conscious intervention, by allowing spontaneous movement and sounds, by surrendering or offering my body, sexual self, me, my emotions and mind to be open to the life that had brought me forth; to the unknown of myself and trusting it.

Rita, a nurse who had been hospitalised with psychiatric problems, describes what happened to her when she let go of her ’self-control’.

“In most every part of me I have felt energy stirring or moving since I started LifeStream. I look different now. When I look in the mirror, I see I am a different shape. I am much stronger than I was. I think this is because I am not wasting energy now. I am also less afraid of my feelings. I was a very passionate person and would get into arguments about everything. Now I can be more detached. I never thought I would be like that. Somehow one’s energy gets re-organised in allowing what can be called self-regulation. You get rid of the stuff which is potentially destructive, and you are left with what is really a force for growth. The process of this seems so sensible to me. Having had a fairly good medical training the idea of homeostasis and energy being blocked, even though it may not be charted in Gray’s Anatomy, is very straightforward. It seems no more puzzling, although it’s mystical. The process is trying to do its work, whether we open to it or not in our body. It is quicker and easier if you give it the right conditions. Most of the time, almost deliberately we give it adverse conditions. All we need to do is take the concrete off, so it can grow. This force seems to be there all the time. Our society deals so much in second-hand experience. The immediacy of it really took my breath away. I am beginning to allow myself now a glimpse of what we often put down as so much religiosity. I am allowing myself now, having had almost an overdose of grieving and anguish, to open up to the other extreme which I have never experienced very much, which is the sheer joy of living. Rita, a nurse who had been hospitalised with psychiatric problems, describes what happened to her when she let go of her ’self-control’ in what at the time we called self-regulation, (SR), but now name LifeStream.

In most every part of me I have felt energy stirring or moving since I started LifeStream. I look different now. When I look in the mirror, I see I am a different shape. I am much stronger than I was. I think this is because I am not wasting energy now. I am also less afraid of my feelings. I was a very passionate person and would get into arguments about everything. Now I can be more detached. I never thought I would be like that. Somehow one’s energy gets re-organised in self-regulation. You get rid of the stuff which is potentially destructive, and you are left with what is really a force for growth. The process of LifeStream seems so sensible to me. Having had a fairly good medical training the idea of homeostasis and energy being blocked, even though it may not be charted in Gray’s Anatomy, is very straightforward. It seems no more puzzling, although it’s mystical. The process is trying to do its work, whether we open to it or not in our body. It is quicker and easier if you give it the right conditions. Most of the time, almost deliberately we give it adverse conditions. All we need to do is take the concrete off so it can grow. This force seems to be there all the time. Our society deals so much in second-hand experience. The immediacy of it really took my breath away. I am beginning to allow myself now a glimpse of what we often put down as so much religiosity. I am allowing myself now, having had almost an overdose of grieving and anguish, to open up to the other extreme which I have never experienced very much, which is the sheer joy of living.”

The Third Step

Step three is a logical outcome of the last stage.  Depending upon how much you dare to allow yourself to experience what was previously rejected or unconscious, to that degree you begin to find a type of awareness and an experience you had never known before.

Overall, this inner life can best be described as a deeper acquaintance with the human condition.  It is dramatically illustrated in Moody’s book ‘Life after Life’ in which many cases of apparent continuations of consciousness after clinical death are reported.  Revived from their seeming death by electric shock to the heart, or other means, the subjects frequently reported meeting a being of light.  This being asked them a question that might be worded as, “What harvest of experience have you brought with you?” In some cases, the being then led the person through full remembrance of every event in their life.  During this they felt the impact of seeing where they had withheld love, missed opportunity, hurt others and missed expressing what was best in them.

You need not die to learn the lessons of your own life.  In discipleship you meet your spiritual life because you have let go of the rigid hold you had on our own mind and heart.  Then you come face to face with the universal consciousness we call Christ. In a series of deepening contacts you burst your own previous boundaries of awareness.  Out of this continuing relationship you are led to see the real inner life, not only of yourself, but also of humanity.  You see its triumphs and beauty; you see its poverty and suffering, and you see its fear and courage.  You gradually view the enormity of change you have weathered in growing up, and how many people never manage to mature emotionally or mentally in confrontation with the world.  You witness the struggle of middle age, where you see the end of life approaching, and sometimes hide from it, or attempt to resist it by holding onto the past.  You see the continual war of forces and powers in human society, where people attempt to snare or farm others and enslave their will with threats, promises, fears and other goads and baits.

The changes that baptism brings are understandable rationally if you follow what has been described of the internal, psychological and physiological events that this path brings about.  To make this clear I will use the analogy of a plant bulb such as a daffodil or tulip.  If you have a healthy bulb that is not yet planted, the bulb can represent potential.  In this case, there is the potential of healthy leaves, a large and full coloured flower, and then fertilisation and the forming of seeds.  But if the bulb is planted in poor soil, if it is injured in some way as experiencing traumatic life events or attacked by parasites, that potential will not be fully expressed.

If we apply this to ourselves, we each have not only the potential of healthy physical growth, but also that the full flowering of our mental and emotional capabilities.  But there are so many things that can interfere with this.  It is fairly well documented now that a difficult birth can bring about a major block against full expression of the growing personality.  And then there are the many possibilities of pains and traumas throughout the years of our growth.  Only today I received a letter from a woman who is a professional nanny working for a wealthy family with three children.  The parents decided to take a holiday in Italy without their children, leaving the nanny to care for them.  The youngest child, three years old, began to sleep badly and crying often quite soon after the parents left.  The older child of six was okay for two weeks but then started wetting the bed.  The parents made no connection between their absence and the bed-wetting or the child crying so frequently.  Many parents have no idea of how dependent their children are upon their presence.  So they would never consider absence would create a trauma.  But these are the possible events that together create a series of blocks against the expression of our own potential.

These blocks in fact create something like a dam behind which lies an enormous amount of mental and emotional energy.  When, through beginning to melt away the emotional, mental, and attitudinal blocks through taking on the posture of the virgin, a massive flow of energy starts.  This is what causes the shaking, the experience of vibration, the flushing out of past traumas reported by the people quoted above.

Having this type of living inner life is not always comfortable.  Neither is adolescence, but do you wish to remain a child?  The pleasure of it is the sharing of the labours of life in the garden where life grows souls. For in some degree you become a worker in that vineyard.  Besides which, having the privilege of being near the Master not only breaks our heart, shattering the brittle casings we may have guarded it with, but it also fills us with the joy of that wider life that the Christ is. The following dream told by Peter expresses something of this wonder.

I was walking out of a town. It felt like the end of the world, or the end of society. I was walking through lots of churches standing empty on a hillside, surrounded by grass. There were all types, strongly built but empty now. I walked past a married couple who were walking up the hill too. As I passed, I heard them say something about a shepherd. Looking up the hill I saw the sheep, then The Shepherd. A beautiful aura of many colours surrounded The Shepherd. I looked and felt joy and exuberance rise in me, and I ran to the couple saying it was THE Shepherd. When I stood with the Shepherd, I felt love and wonder in a way I had never experienced before. I had never met anyone who, just standing near them filled me with awe, and a sense they were more than human. I fell on my knees. I couldn’t help it. Peter M.

Of course, there are hesitations and stages to meet on this journey. One of them is the decision of whether or not to give one’s whole life to this impulse. Andrew describes this in the following way:

I was searching, in meditation, to experience what was central in me. This led to the great question, “What is the life process I am? What gives me awareness?”

The feelings and images that arose as I began to explore this were of me as a person living in a world in which there is a huge organisation or ‘company’ that influences everything and everybody. My question of what was the centre led me to sense myself as someone considering whether or not to join this massive organisation. At first my feelings were that if I did, I would be another cog in the huge machinery of its massive workings – perhaps like a worker in a huge government office. I felt threatened by this, as if I would lose my identity. But the organisation would not go away simply because I tried to ignore it, so I decided I would join. What other option was there if the Company, Life, was everywhere?

Still feeling a bit threatened I met the manager – not God – but someone experienced in the place. He welcomed me and assured me that there would be no attempt to take away my identity as Andrew. In fact, it would be useful to the organisation if I continued to live and work in my accustomed manner. The only change would be that I was given a gadget like a bleeper. It represented intuition. Through intuition I could link with the Whole – the united being of the organisation of Life. This link would guide, not control, my individual activities to help me harmonise with the overall working of Life. This felt wonderful, so simple and clear. Behind the smallness of my personal being lay the immensity of Life, of which I was a linked part, living my individual life yet working with the whole.

At this point in your growing awareness of the divine in you, you might think, ‘This has arisen from myself. I am doing this.’ You are wrong.

Or you might say, ‘This is God’s work, its influence is completely beyond me.’ You are wrong. This is from your own self and its influence is completely beyond you!

People then ask, ‘Am I doing this, or is God doing this to me?’ the answer is ‘YES.’

 

Being Made a Disciple

Knowing you are blest happens when discipleship is bestowed upon you. I quote again the following piece:

“The man was ordinary in appearance, but as he got near to me it seemed as if a great force surrounded him that penetrated me completely. The force was love, buffeting me like waves I could barely tolerate. The man stood before me and took my hands and said, “You are my disciple.”

At this, love so immense touched me that I fell backwards, the contact too painful for me to bear, and the man walked on.

I knew who he was. I also knew, because it was welling up from within me, as sure knowledge, that he was the man I had killed. It was his blood I had on my hands. It was his death I felt guilty of. But he, in some strange paradoxical way, he was myself. He was the cosmic mystery I have been born as. He was the very best of myself I had killed, murdered. He was my youthful sexuality I had suffocated to death, helped by the tenets of a religion that was supposed to be teaching his way, the way of life, the way of recognising one’s cosmic link.”

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The Inner Path To Christ 14

The next step of the path is baptism

The emerging spirit in you will not take away all problems from your life.  In fact, having let go of your old certainties, your habitual rigidities and beliefs, things will emerge into your life that had been buried, held back by the iron bars of your own preconceptions.  They may be painful things, dark things you have harboured at some time.  Meeting them will be your part, your work, in transforming yourself and the world; for some of what you will meet is from the long past and is the burden you and the world carries.

But you will also release a wonder and beauty you could not have imagined. And along with this will arise wisdom, insights that throw light on things in a new way.

What was deeply buried within you is gradually emerging. The years of maturing have passed. What has been born has grown and become known in your everyday life in some way. This ‘Jesus’ has come from your opening to the Mystery, and it is taking its place in your affairs; for this to have taken place will have required much strength, or the development of much strength. To surrender, to open oneself to the Mystery is not an act of passive weakness. It means you have found strength enough to stand amidst your own swirling thoughts and emotions, your own doubts and fears, and remain open to what is unknown to you. That takes great perseverance and strength of purpose.

So it is this strength that brings you to baptism. John the Baptist, who through discipline makes straight the way of the Lord, represents this strength. In the New Testament the baptism is described as follows:

On the next day, he saw Jesus coming to him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who is preferred before me, for he was before me. (John 1:29)

‘I indeed have baptized you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.’ (Mark 1:8)

Now when all the people were baptised, it came to pass, that Jesus also was baptised – of John in Jordan – and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven which said, ‘Thou art my beloved Son: in thee I am well pleased.’ (Luke 3:21-22).

Although we may have touched that higher Life through our prayer as Mary, it can only enter into our consciousness fragmentarily while we are still largely possessed by our mental, emotional and passionate life. Like the poem, we have to be ‘waiting the Word of the Master, watching the hidden Light; listening to catch His orders in the very midst of the fight; seeing His slightest signal across the heads of the throng; hearing His faintest whisper above earth’s loudest song.’

The fight is our inner turmoil, and earth’s song our sensual impacts. It needs discipline to remain open to God and yet not closed to them, and this is our task.

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