Current Events

I have been traveling and hanging out with family for several days now, as most folks seem to do during the thanksgiving holidays. Following a 5-day retreat with Adyashanti, my further meanderings have included fixing thanksgiving  dinner for 9 in California, wandering in the Monterey cannery area with relatives, watching a grandson's soccer game in the rain, playing games with grandchildren, visiting friends in Sacramento, checking out the town  where a son will be moving with his family next week, shopping the Christmas sales, flying to Utah to help my son and his family move, seeing a granddaughter dance and sing in a large musical called Showstoppers, and next will be a 12 hour trip with a u- haul through the snow of the sierras back to California and then a return trip to Ashland Oregon. I have read hundreds of books and met many teachers involved in spiritual awakening and never have I seen one involved in the ordinary chaos of western living that I am in. I live a long-entrenched role as a mom and grandmother. This may suggest to some a lack of depth in my own process -- someone advised me the other day "You don't have to do any of this".  Or perhaps it suggests a complete indifference to my own further spiritual development. When I go with the flow of life there are many factors impacting the direction in which I go. They are all ages and sizes and perspectives. They can be fun, tiring, challenging, touching, interesting, boring -- they are the rhythm of the dharma of this character's dream.

I have another dharma too -- teaching or giving general guidance to people in spiritual emergence processes. Some email me and for these weeks I have had to put everyone in that dharma on hold, as there has not been the empty time and space to be available.

I enjoy this dharma, which just feels like something I am meant to do with some of my time, and I enjoy the family time as well.

I once felt divided -- as if the family events were preventing my real work from being done -- my spiritual search or meditation or time with "spiritual" people.  Now I see I divided myself, categorizing life's experiences into favorable and distracting. Today it is all the same -- a flow of meeting what is put on my plate.  There is freedom to do what is wanted but no serious wants to be pursued.  There is just being here and being there, and being this for awhile, and that for awhile, and nothing for awhile. I am more inclined to be spirit-full than spiritual these days.

It is as okay to be interested as it is to be tired or bored, okay to be busy as it is to be quiet, okay just to be with each day.  Some days I read the papers on my computer -- the NY times or LA paper or Huffington Post. I don't know why because they make me aware primarily of conflict -- at all levels in all parts of the world, and the conflict makes me feel tired, like being hit with all of your failings all at once and being too overwhelmed to do anything about them. Sometimes I have the thought of wanting to know what is going on in the world. But I do not want the emotions of knowing what is going on. I have to continually flush them out of my system, like toxins.  I used to think that if I were awake I would not care, that I would have no feelings about anything (even though Krishnamurti often expressed concern for the state of the world!)  I even thought (before the previous thought) that I could transcend it all and love it all the way it was. Now, even though it is fairly clear to me the world is but a dream, with billions of beings  performing roles they have no control over, I still feel compassion for the lost cause of human sanity, kindness and cooperation. I can't agree that it does not matter if people are harmed or murdered whether it be for greed or ideals. It is not possible to honestly see that we are not who we think we are and in fact do not exist in the separateness we think we are, then make this justify in any way the causing of harm to ourselves and others.  Even if our forms are emptiness only, and our essence is eternal, meaning there is really no death, it is still insane to heap abuse upon another being -- we are abusing ourselves, and promoting generational dysfunction for unknown future generations. We are destroying the potential expression of god in others, tearing up bodies and minds that are themselves the same divine essence we are.  From the non-dual perspective this is how the world is intended to be, since it is what's happening. Something bigger that drives all of the workings of the dream is unfolding itself in some way that is mysteriously perfect. From a mother's perspective -- we really need to clean up our act! We act like insane insecure self-destructive and self-centered children in a world which has supplied us generously with the means for every need we have.

Well I am diverging from a simple tale of my family holiday to fall into the world affairs. Perhaps they are linked within this psyche in some peculiar way -- our family is the world, or because of family we want the preservation of the world -- who knows? Minds like to find meaning in everything, even though thoughts and words seldom reflect genuine truth!

So this is where this being is at the moment. Just thought I would offer a report!

Reflection on 4 Aspects of Human Form

As a life form we are these aspects 1^st Matter – form held together by energy and capable of movement and sensation. Born of matter from parent

2^nd Energy

-- physical   (moves the body),

-- psychic (egoic mind—movement of identification, desire, preference, repulsion, attachment, --mine),

--  subtle (pranas –internal movements that cause us to feel like a separate “me” because they are attributed to one body – the flow upward, downward, and in a circular way connecting thoughts with sensation,  senses with thought, and managing the movement of internal organs such as heart beating, digestion , elimination, sexual activity, coughing, collecting sound into language, expressing thought as words and understanding, transmitting smell and taste.)

3^rd Mind --  psychic energy collected and recirculated in the form of thoughts and  imaginings and dreams being generated from memories and impressions and beliefs, continual in flow

4^th Spirit – awareness, consciousness, presence which entered matter and became identified with a particular form and story.  It likely enters at conception and triggers the growing process and at some point in the womb after the form acquires movement becomes aware of itself as beingness  As the senses and experiences develop after birth it begins to identify as an “I”.

It is through movement that life comes into form – life emerged through the movement of waters over land, repeatedly over millions of years and moved from ocean forms to land forms the same way.  A fetus grows into a child through movement and propels itself from the womb through repeated movements. Movement stimulates growth, expansion and life evolving.

As you walk  and do tasks and exercise notice how the body feels in movement as compared to how it feels in repose?  Can you sense internal energy changes?

It is through psychic movement that identity comes into form.  Notice a desire and how it feels to follow it. Notice restlessness until you decide to do something. Thoughts move forward and back like the tide, repeatedly. What is it that wants to be doing something?  Is it following a preference to be busy, to respond to a sense like hunger or touch, a need to move away from something, a need to have or create or  acquire something? Where are these movements coming from?

Subtle energy can be very quiet or very disruptive. When you are very still, not following any psychic or physical movements, you quiet the work of the senses and you can tune in to the subtle sensations behind them.  It is like a vibration just waiting for something to do.  It will follow attention so if you move attention to different arts of the hody you can feel it there.  Yoga, Tai Chi , Qigong, Aikido and other martial arts work with this vibration, strengthening awareness of it and the ability to direct it in specific ways. Healing practices work similarly but combine psychic energy with the subtle pranic energy in specific patterns.

Certain forms of repeated movement, breath patterns and/or concentration can trigger a deeper rising of energy, causing what could be called a quickening of the life force, and a deconstruction of familiar patterns of thought and sensation. This has been called the rising of kundalini energy, which is a word representing the coiled subtle energy at the base of the spine, which in most lives stays coiled until a person dies and the energy forms are ready to leave the body. When it arises during a lifetime, eventually  all the energies shift  so that  perspectives, belief systems, and identifications move out of the personal orientation and into the impersonal.  It causes a psychic return out of mental identifications and into the ground of being.   Another way of saying this is that instead of identifying with mind one identifies with consciousness. Both still function but consciousness is no longer confused about who it is. Sometimes the ranges and capacities of consciousness are expanded in this process as it knows itself to be unlimited and free. But the person as matter and form can become more naturally present in his or her own environment  as well, as the mind no longer resists the experience of being in a body.  This is wholeness, presence, being here now.   This development satisfies completely the spiritual urge to be connected to God, so it has been called a spiritual awakening or Self-realization.  In Buddhism it is called knowing your true nature.    In Zen it is called Waking Up. In Hinduism it is a form of samadhi

The Biographical Dream

There is some profound Truth at the heart of my story, but I have yet to define it.  It seems to me to be simply: I trusted God,

I lost God,

I found God.

I found there was no God.

I found there was nothing but God.

Perhaps I am living in parallel universes.  There is the rational and conventional world in which I find a body and mind and emotions, all of whom have acquired an identity, a family and a history, which most assuredly demonstrates a beginning , a middle and an impending end. This is my relative world. I look back on this story with gratitude, wonder and a few regrets, and I continue to live it forward – but it doesn’t say anything about who I really am, only who I appear to be to others.  And then, there is also the interior world I will call the mystery world, where anything that happens was never imagined before, and energy and consciousness shifts into new perspectives the way a kaliedescope shifts shape and color, because unexpected events keep turning it upside down.  At this point the interior mystery world is experienced as an awareness that is clear and content, quiet and curious.   I cannot say integration has taken place. Instead, the exterior and relative world has relaxed into the interior mysterious world, so there is no one left with whom to be in conflict about it.

I might tell you of the events, or the circumstances, that rattled and transformed the interior world, just as someone else could describe an accident, or an earthquake, or a war that forever changed their life, and through which they were never quite the same again. Plenty of people today have such traumatic and painful awakenings. Every time I see the lives mangled by war, floods, earthquakes and other upheavals, I am shocked that I have lived in this century and avoided the worst of them. What a grace! So, for the most part there is no proof  in my life that a certain event caused a certain response, or that I was growing or evolving or following a purpose to become someone different than I started out to be. There is only a string of exterior changes, and a string of interior shifts, and when they had passed I recognized I never was who I thought I was in the first place, even as I appear to be continuing along.

There were events in my life – events that impacted both worlds, apparently.

There was Catholicity, which for years effectively anesthesized my psyche with school, church, novenas, confessions, choir, and family events such as christenings, holy communion and confirmation celebrations.  There was a playful, loving and sometimes argumentative Scotch/Irish extended family that provided the illusion of security as a child, and laid a foundation that was called faith. There was Sister Agnes Claire who was the unwitting beginning of the end of Catholicism for me.

There was the death of my mother, which shattered illusion and security, and broke apart any feeling of a being to be depended upon, especially a god. It also left me contracted for almost 15 years, emotionally barren except for sudden bursts of tears which came occasionally, like a sporatic storm  in the sahara.

There was Amelia, a dynamic and inventive fireball of an older woman who provided my first experience with group encounter, and forced me to see that love could exist in the world, even without a mother, but that the hole is my heart was also about losing god.

There was a friend who handed me a book when I was 27 called “Autobiography of a Yogi”, written by a recently departed yogi called Yogananada, who had lived not far from my childhood home.  This little story completely de-framed any remaining concepts I had about spirituality. Here was a religion in which people saw beings who were 300 years old, or appeared from the dead, left their bodies and saw other worlds, encouraged the worship of unlimited forms of gods and goddesses, and used energy practices to connect with spirit. I didn’t believe any of it, but I was intrigued. This guy was far more interesting and modern than the Christian saints. I had no idea the adventures awaiting me would make mystical experiences ho-hum events.

Next came Muktananda, a small fiery being in a red cap who wielded a peacock feather amidst a crowd of cheering pilgrims singing “Baba, we adore you,” The crowds swarmed to his pink hotel ashram in Oakland, overflowing with vividly colored purple and red, gold and blue drapes, saris, shawls and carpets, all permeated with  a pungent sandelwood incense. I sat before him one Christmas eve to be whacked with a feather, but he scared me half to death. I avoided his eyes, afraid of what he might see or say if he really looked at me. I had no idea I would someday become an “expert” on the kundalini energy he was said to activate. Never had a clue at the time…

Through events that brought losses and gains, despair and bliss, I took on a role eventually as a therapist, and followed an interior calling toward meditation.  One day I heard of a school where I could merge the two, work on my body, meet spiritual teachers, and go through a personal transformation. I could even earn a Ph.D. for it. “How improbable”, I thought,”And how seductive.” By then I was longing to know who I was and where I was going, and trying to merge my two worlds – the exterior family along with work, and the interior mystery I was unraveling in my meditation practices. Before I entered this school I had a dream that it was run by ex-convicts and secret criminals. I dreamed  my children were kidnapped and I had no one who could help. With some trepidation I went ahead to the early days of class.  There  25 students from various stages of life gathered 4 days a week to sit in circles on the floor, spill their stories, explore their psyches, pummel and massage one another’s bodies, play with Tarot and the I-Ching, and do spiritual practices. In the midst of this we also studied psychology.

All of my life of conventional thinking went down the drain. I became open to any possibility, and every kind of spirit. Eventually I had an overwhelming activation of primal energy, of the life force, called kundalini in the yogic traditions.  For many years afterwards, this relationship with the goddess of energy and form carried my psyche, my work and my creativity in the world. Before I knew it I was traveling to India, organizing conferences, providing kundalini workshops, lecturing, and meeting similarly energized people all over the world.  It was often not the “me” doing this, but rather the force that carried this body/mind, the invisible awakeness moving within. It was another wonderful grace.

In case there was any naïvite left in me regarding the psychological variations in the kinds of life experiences humans might have, I was rapidly exposed to multiple layers of transpersonal experiences. I met clients who reported alien encounters, psychic openings, out-of-body-experiences, paranormal events, the channeling of light beings, the remembering of past or future lives, seeing spirits in native American rituals, and the ability to turn out street lamps by walking under them. I met dozens of gurus, Tibetan lamas,  Masters of Chi Gung or other energy practices, and eccentric physicists.  I  played with remote viewing,  machines that created changes in the brain, the I-Ching, and nakedness at Esalen.  I did  breathing practices that stimulated birthing and other-life memories, in a room with 100 people tossing, turning and moaning. It could have been a setting in  Dante’s inferno.  I sat for hours in damp ancient caves in India that felt electrically wired. I studied visionary events, UFO’s, esoteric Indian teachings , and near-death experiences. There was a rapid-fire education in all that transpires in the human mind beyond the personal – and how such encounters change the lives of those who experience them.

In the midst of a life full of creative work, counseling, organizing conferences, and seeing my children out of high school and on with their lives, I finally began to burn out. So I did something I had always longed to do. I went to Switzerland. Alone. I quit everything. There, in the library of the Jung Institute in Kusnacht, I discovered a great Indian sage, Ramana Maharshi.  In my tiny hotel room with its slanted dormer ceiling and child-sized Swiss kitchenette, along the edge of Lake Zurich, the rain pouring down the walkways outside, my body wanted only to withdraw and rest. I began to read Ramana’s writings and his letters. For the first time I began to question whether the self I had been individuating for so long really existed. It was a shocking perspective! It took a few days to even consider it.

I began to lose attachments to myself in those days, but this was only the first introduction to the world of non-duality. Non-duality is a term for seeing our selves and the world as One, without a second. It points to the substance we are, rather than the structure, just as gold is the substance of a bracelet and all gold if melted down is one. Or as the waves in the ocean are really just variations of the substance of water. The term is beyond spirituality, but in some way completes it. It refers to that which we are, our true nature.

It would be another few years before I would meet a young American man who called himself Adyashanti (it means primordial peace). He was only the age of my sons, and in fact went to their high school at the same time. He was 38 when we met. He pumped his bike up the hill where I lived hundreds of times throughout his adolescence, but I had never seen him there. He was a slight young man with a  timeless and penetrating presence, and the clarity of his teaching completely collapsed my world view. He demonstrated a way to live simply in the world, while not being of it.  When I looked into his radiant blue eyes I sometimes saw the planets, or the endlessness of deep space, and I recognized myself there. It was as if we could not be two, only One. In his presence I began to seek Truth within my heart and gut, with no more hunger for any experience.

So this is a journey of no one becoming someone and then becoming no one or every one. It is mysterious in that way. It is loving as well– for often in my life it seems I was carried by love rather than violence, in a world that is suffused with violence.  My neurotic, hysteric and depressive tendencies as a young mother were erased by the kindness of meditation and the passage of time. Chunks of old patterning fell away.  The events that supported my becoming no one, and brought me to a simple peace within, cannot really be said to be the cause of anything at all. Yet I am grateful for each of them because the journey was rarely a bore, and the energy in my body and my life was gentle on the whole. I asked it once, when it had awakened me in the middle of the night, “Is this really kundalini? I had thought it would be so difficult.   A voice spoke out in the darkness:“This is really kundalini, we’re just taking it easy on you.”

So now I have told you what I am about, instead of showing you as every good writer is advised to do. If you simply believe my story is real it cannot awaken you. If you understand it as a dream, your own dream may unravel itself so that this one that we are can become more free. You will not wake up in the same way I did, or anyone else has. Our journeys are as unique as our faces.  But at the core there is only one awakening, and it is available to all the many diverse variations of humans.

Seeing Through the Fog

I look out my windows and see that Ashland is blanketed in fog this morning. I’m reminded that this is often the condition of the human mind.

There is a cloudiness that causes confusion or blind reaction because so many experiences have happened over the years that leave impressions which dull the light of  clarity.

There is a way of seeing that is clear and immediate, open and responsive. How often do you see things that way?  Most of us have to wade through many hours of indecision, second guessing ourselves and others, reactivity, mood swings and other aspects of our dividing minds before we make a move.  We listen to a myriad of thoughts about ourselves and everyone else as if  a mere thought could be true and more significant than the moment in which we are living.  It is amazing we ever get anywhere.  I am not saying you should never  weigh an important decision, but wouldn’t it be easier if we knew ourselves well enough to have an immediate sense of what is right for us.  Then we would move with the flow of the river or the Tao as the Chinese philosophers described it. Our life would become more natural and integrated with the world around us.

All of us are part of an unfolding, a movement , of life itself.   Each of us is presented with the possibilities of the day every morning when consciousness arises out of sleep and into the world of form.  There is a natural and intuitive way to move into the day, in response to what is arising and in tune with our openness to it.  Sometimes a morning meditation puts us consciously in tune with this place and we can move on into the day without the fogginess of our cluttered minds.  Some people have rituals that help them orient to the day.  When I was a young mother I remember having such overwhelm just getting everyone fed and off to school along with myself on the way to college classes that it felt like I was just plowing through life, barely noticing what was going on around me.   The spirit is easily overwhelmed when the mind is running our lives like a business.

Today there is a natural rhythm in me that seems to come from the heart or the belly.  I have days that are very active and days that are quiet, but  this “I “ is no longer goal-oriented or task-oriented.  Generally there is a flow into the life, whether there be sun or fog.  The spirit is open to either and curious to see what it brings. Life is more peaceful this way.

How do we stop listening to our cluttered foggy minds and get in touch with a deeper  awareness within us?  For me it has been through the willingness to be still, to drop awareness into the heart, to notice awareness is what moves through the body/mind stirring sensation, looking through my eyes, listening, noticing emotion rising and falling, noticing thoughts rising and falling, noticing everything that arises and falls in life.  To be this awareness without attention on that which I am aware of, to get curious about what this internal presence really is, has opened a door  into  a place more deep and true and clear than I ever knew when I was living in the fog.

The Core is Good

I recently witnessed a disturbing scene of violence. A little girl about 5 was getting a drink from a fountain in a waiting room where I sat. She looked bright and curious. She told me she was not allowed to speak to strangers. She was examining a  blood pressure machine when her mother arrived and yelled “Who said you could touch that?”  She then took her into the bathroom and smacked her. She came out crying. I felt like crying too.  I tried to look sympathetically at the child, and said, “She is a good girl. Be kind” as the mother angrily left the room. I did not know what to do for the child, the mother, or my own sorrow. So I am writing this essay for us, for all of us. One of the causes of suffering in this world is that humans do not recognize that at their core they are good.  They do not know what they are. We do not recognize our children because we do not recognize ourselves.

This is because of the childhood experiencing of events and conditions that appear to be destructive, insensitive, critical and harsh.  Such events create a confused and defensive energy field within the body, and lead to a belief in the need to protect, defend, fight and judge others.  These events often begin very early, while a child  is naturally curious and open, seeking to find a welcoming world,  and instead  experiences neglect or fear, or a critical attack or a blow from a parent.  It continues on in the dynamics with other wounded children who have learned from adults to push, hit and bully one another, and on into the adult world. By a certain age each forms a position and image they hope will allow them to navigate in an unsafe world.

Because we have minds we all live in division, since one function of mind is to differentiate, divide, evaluate, select and explore the nature of opposites. One of our mental divisions is between the sense of being good or bad. This tendency to division has magnified to such an extent that even religion tells children they are born with original sin or have evil in them, making them inherently bad for no obvious reason except birth.  Even apparently good people who reject abortion can find it acceptable to hit this same life at age 4 or kill it at age 18 as long as the government asks it.  The belief in badness allows entire groups of people to be called enemies even though they are mothers, fathers and innocent children just like our own.

Badness as a concept is so ingrained that politicians refuse to cooperate in finding solutions for difficult problems, some corporate managers feel justified in cheating others, and some parents feel comfortable attacking their own children.  For some people violence is entertainment. For others it seems like the obvious condition of the world.  When our true nature moves into the play of the world it moves a long way from its home, which is peace and love.

This  situation of human suffering, exponentially expanding itself, calls for our deepest alignment with compassion and universal truth, which is rarely owned because of the human tendency to hold that one group of  concepts is more true than another.  These concepts, based on the unconscious attachment to self-defense and self-enhancement, are framed around the concept of a “me”  who ought to be able to have it’s own way in life and can’t because of the behavior of others, who are "bad."

The basic problem is not in the concept or belief about how things should be, it lies in the belief in this “me”.  The “me” would not be a problem itself if it had not witnessed such struggle and suffering and so many challenges in life.  But it has formed a whole set of patterns of defense that cause it pain and difficulty. It responds often from the confusion of its conditioning, instead of the essence of its true nature.  But this is the human experience. It is what is.

Until we begin to question our conditioned identifications and the concepts we grasp in order to feel safe in the world, we cannot know the true goodness of what we are.  It is the seeing through of the conditioned “me” that allows the pure essence of consciousness to be felt as a living and positive force in our bodies.  This consciousness links us all together and has a potential to express itself with the openness, wonder  and goodness inherent in the newborn. It is what loves unconditionally and finds the world a blessing.

The awakening to our true nature can look threatening  to some who have spent a lifetime creating ways to be safe in an ”unsafe” world.  This is why many people do not begin an inward search for truth until they are in so much pain they can think of no other alternative. But considering our true being to be goodness,  love, innocence and openness offers a passage into our true heart. Examining  this possibility, and especially cherishing it in our children, can free us to end the perpetuation of violence in our lives.

Hello world!

Welcome to my new blog. Shanti River is the name of the center I have started in Ashland Oregon as a gathering place for discussions on non-duality, spiritual awakening and the kundalini process. For 10 years I have had websites dedicated to these themes, and a kundalini blog at blogging.com, but I hope to expand with this new invitation on wordpress to people who are seeking a deep discussion on the possibilities inherent in the awakening of consciousness, often called simply Waking Up, and in its fullest unfolding called enlightenment, meeting your True Nature, or Self-realization.  I have just returned from a conference on Science and Non-duality held in San Rafael CA and there I found several hundred people engaged in a search for the core Truth of our existence, many of whom have reported “awakening” and others who are dedicated to a search within themselves for the realization spoken of in scriptures of every tradition.

This is a major movement in the West.  Many eastern traditions begin teaching here in the U.S. from the 1930′s onward, but these teachings appeared esoteric and requiring a commitment and devotion to a teacher or system that seemed foreign and incapable of integration into the lives of most westerners.  These eastern schools had much to offer in terms of their emphasis on turning inward for the Truth, and learning to be at One with our inner silence.  Some, like Yoga, tantra and Qigong, offered energy practices that have initiated many people into subtle energy changes that impact their consciousness and their lives.

But the opening now — the emphasis on simply awakening, and the non-dual realization of Oneness with all things — is presented in a much more simple and direct way by many who have had a glimpse of what it is to know consciousness in its primal form, before it is entwined with the forms, thoughts, concepts, senses and emotions of the relative appearance of the world.  Through their insights we begin to see that awakening is not an experience available only to those with saintly lives, but seems to be possible to all humans who sincerely open to it, especially as it is only the realization of our own deep essence, which is shared by all.  So it can be remembered if one can only let go, even momentarily, of the identifications and attachments of the separate self.  In this letting go we discover the stillness and expansiveness of consciousness (without a me moderating it), and this is a life-changing event.

I have met about 2000 people in the years since I began this work who have had awakenings of energy or consciousness or both.  Some were in formal spiritual traditions, some had dived into many different practices and teachings, and some woke up spontaneously without any preparation at all.  Most were confused about what happened to them and no longer felt connected to their old identities and interests, but could find no one to talk to about the changes, either in psychology or religious groups.  There has been no clear understanding of the primacy and the nature of consciousness in either field, and no clarity about what it means to know you are not the character you have  been trained and conditioned to be.

From the moment of conception a spark of consciousness begins to develop a sense of separation, finding itself in a human body that is being formed with certain DNA, and then identified quickly enough as male or female, and soon afterwards in a family role, a nationality and race, a certain kind of education, and all along the way it develops a sense of who it must be to survive.  If it is blessed it learns the world is a friendly place; if not it learns to be protected on defended in many ways. All of this conditioning and training is considered healthy if one ends up with a good identity and a positive sense of separate self emerges out of it. But of course most children internalize a lot of beliefs about inadequacy, inherent “badness” and not fitting the status quo.

In this “becoming human” process the absolute source  from which we began, and the sense of  peace and wholeness that is our innate condition, is clouded and contracted.  Meditation is simply a process of remembering and returning to this, seeing through thoughts and sensations and perceptions as subtle forms created by experiences collected while consciousness inhabits a human body.It allows us to discover an inner silence that can open us to our true nature, and thus to insights about the nature of all.  Awakening happens in the dropping of all identifications and the pure explosion of consciousness itself.

There are many conditions that may precede or follow the awakening of consciousness, including the arising of kundalini energy, the energy of the subtle body field that carries all our inner experiences of senses, feelings, thoughts, etc. Many challenging and many blissful phenomena may follow a kundalini awakening, which is described in much detail on my website www.kundaliniguide.com.  I have spent many years offering guidance to people who have difficulties with this process.  But a shift in consciousness can bring its own difficulties and confusions, because it orients you differently in the world, and you no longer feel like your former self.  There can be non-ordinary experiences, mood swings, a kind of brain fogginess, and a shifting back and forth between feeling very clear and present to feeling like you have lost something wonderful when the clarity and presence shifts away.  It can take months and years for an awakening process to stabilize and a return to letting this awakening live through you as its own expression in life.  You, the character, do not become enlightened. The character of ” me”  becomes nearly irrelevant, although the flavor remains, and the sense is more of a presence or consciousness that is peaceful and open to life moving through you [or as you] and responds in a more natural way to whatever arises.

There are many kinds of “spiritual” experiences, openings, insights, visions, heart openings etc. All can be rich and good for the evolving of the “me” into a more compassionate, wise and capable person. But when all these events have happened, many people still wonder, is that all there is? Who am I really? Then there may follow a deeper questioning about who or what is having these experiences, and a discovery it is the same presence that has all experiences, good, bad, spiritual, profane. Ultimately one can not feel complete and at peace until they have  released all the phenomena and directly felt themselves to be the source.

It won’t make your life perfect or make you powerful.  It only makes you free to live in a natural way and with a natural connection to life as it is.

This blogspot is for those who are on this journey and would like to share their journey or ask questions related to the phenomena along the way.  I hope to include reviews of books and teachings by other non-dual teachers and to bring my experience of many years practice and listening to others to help readers feel more at home in this process. Although one can only use language to form concepts and mental positions, I hope this site will offer pointers beyond any concept and encourage you to fall within your own stillness to find what is true that cannot be said in words, what is real that cannot ever be lost or diminished, and what is eternal.