Ascension Meditation Heals the Shadow

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Carl Jung

The energy involved in repressing all that we believe to be unworthy about ourselves is not just a one time expenditure, it continues for the rest of our lives, unconsciously running in the background, shaping and limiting the scope of life in numberless ways. Inside this shadow land are so often the most beautiful and unique aspects of ourselves. The regular experience of Samadhi ultimately ends those habits of repression, which increases our joy and vitality, and reunites us with so much of what had been hidden in the depths of the shadow. Why does the regular experience of Samadhi weaken and end those habits? Our deepest fears and our deepest pains are tiny waves compared to the ocean that is deep inner silence.

The inner Silence pulls everything into itself, and from its depths emerges Love, which heals all. If we could a give a form to that formless consciousness, we would call it love. Whenever a human being rests into Being, Love is around the corner. As Silence and Love are experienced with greater frequency, the inner walls fall down giving way to a Wholeness. Every fiber of our being longs for this wholeness. While it can seem a difficult or even fictional state, it is very real and very achievable, and it does not have to be difficult. It is our true homeostasis. It is our natural state of functioning.

Come and learn the Ascension meditation of the Ishayas and let the old worries fall away.

The Birds Sing inside You

I was sitting by a window some foggy late morning in Japan, listening to the birds outside, their song experienced as a movement of Consciousness, my body as wide as the whole world. So internal and familiar was the birdsong, that their language seemed to be translating into English. And it goes just the same for every kind of perception. The birds are singing inside of you! To go through a whole life thinking oneself as a tension in the head with an attached biography is a small life compared to our full perceptual potential. The whole world is happening within your own vast consciousness, and your consciousness is as vast as the universe!

We all have glimpses of this, but it becomes a more permanent fixture of our experiential range the more our nervous system relaxes into Silence. And, if one becomes quiet enough, the sound of Om can lead one all the way back home to the primordial unity of the un-struck dawn.

How to access this place on nondual unity? While one doesn’t need any tool to experience what is already their own consciousness, in practical terms a good tool is extremely valuable. The Ishayas’ Ascension practice is the most effective I’ve personally encountered, though there are several others in the same ballpark, and different meditations will be more or less resonant for different people. Whatever tool one finds particularly useful, the key is to use it with consistency and dedication in order to enjoy the maximum harvest of its benefits. Go for it!

Nonduality

One of the most wonderful developments in the path of meditation is finding one's Awareness to be everywhere, even as one is more comfortable and grounded in one's body- as was the case for me! We become so relaxed that the Boundless Silence we have discovered "within" or "at the base of the mind stuff" reveals itself to have no spatial or temporal limits whatsoever. We find it in the walls, in our friends, in people we don't like at all, in our garden, and we learn that it is our own Self shining back at us- and as we find It there, so do we find ourselves to be everywhere - at once a strange experience and infinitely more normal than the fragmented mind identification we once had taken as Reality. Infinity is hiding everywhere in plain sight.

Non-dual consciousness is uniting with the Infinite everywhere.

The Breathless State

FAQ: Is it okay that I find myself gasping for air during meditation, when I am not particularly short of breath?

In the majority of cases, absolutely yes. This is one of the most frequently reported "odd experiences", even with people who consider themselves very new to meditation. The mind and then body relax into a profound state of rest, such that breathing becomes very subtle, perhaps so subtle that it isn't required. In this relaxed consciousness we find the delightful pleasure of "breathing” prana (chi in the Chinese tradition), the subtle life force that is far more nourishing than regular breath and food.

The acme of this development is "the breathless state", closely connected with "originless Samadhi." This state of mind and physiology is so smooth and relaxed (a good translation of “Samadhi” is “flawless evenness”), the body is able to accomplish the kind of healing that regular sleep doesn’t achieve. However, often because of the dynamic activity involved in healing, the body-mind invariably comes up out of this restful place, and when it does, the body notes the lack of breathing and reacts in a generally very healthy life preserving way- a sudden gasp.

Awareness is Knocking at the Door

I used to have this dream as a child in which it felt like Reality itself had such a weight that I would be crushed from all directions at once. Years later I entered the dream during meditation, and realized that the weight I feared was my own Awareness that I had been straining to hold back. This same pattern manifested in another way. As a teenager I used to be terrified of some massive spirit or something that I would feel whenever my mind would get quiet. It was so terrifying that I would do math equations just to keep it at bay, and only abated when I asked a psychic for help. Years later, while staying in a farmhouse in upstate New York, 3 years into Ishaya monk-hood, the sense of that terrifying presence fully returned. This time I mustered the courage to let it come to me, and after passing through massive fear, I was filled with Bliss. I was suddenly everywhere and in everything and nowhere in particular to a larger degree than I had ever experienced before. In that moment I realized that it had been my own Higher Consciousness the whole time, just knocking at my door. In talking to people over the years, I've found that this is actually a fairly common experience. In the Jungian tradition, it is sometimes noted that our own Superconsciousness is the first thing to be locked away in the shadow self. If we seriously take up the path of meditation, we will all come to various points of letting go of that existential resistance, and experiencing ancient tensions washed away into the Oceanic Self. At some level, we are already Awake. We just need to put down the distractions.

And, as we relax in this way, we also begin to find our flow, which can also be understood as Dharma. Instead of framing that term as duty, I suggest it is well understood as a kind of soul song, that plays ever more clearly as fears, habits, and tensions melt in the warmth of Samadhi. Letting that song play fully is a huge gift to all the souls we touch and many that we shall never know. It drives us further toward liberation and finds its fullest flowering there. It is the Shakti process that flows out of and deepens the Silence.

Carpe Diem!

Witnessing Consciousness

One day I was chopping onions and potatoes in our little monk run cafe, meditating with the eyes open, like I'd done a million times before. All of a sudden, I had to stop, because I realized that I had been in Silence for who knows how long. This was not a shallow dip either, but an experience where it felt like a comfortable 100 feet between the bottom of this space and my head.

Sinking back again into that Silence, I found myself falling into an endless space "behind my body." Relaxing further, I found that I was everywhere. This space was simply there, comfortably present with all that was going on- providing the sense of sitting in Silence while thinking, talking, and chopping vegetables. This is commonly referred to as witnessing consciousness, or pragya (I need Sanskrit lettering and transliteration- suggestions are welcome!), often considered one of the major roadsigns of the developing first stage of enlightenment. Like so many other things with Ascension, one doesn't have to do anything fancy to make it happen. It’s a depth of experience that has been there the whole time. As with so many other things, when people start to consciously experience it, they describe it as both refreshingly new and as something they’ve known their whole life. It is both supremely magical and as mundane as dirt. If meditation practice is like diving into the depths of the Ocean, witnessing consciousness is the nervous system being loose enough to sit in the fathomless Silence while still being able to enjoy the multifaceted waves of the surface, and everything in between.

With a practice, it happens as a result of relaxing into Samadhi and the accompanying healing that loosens the knots of the nervous system (new wineskins for new wine). In my life, like in most cases, this did not stick around permanently with the first few conscious experiences, but went in and out for awhile, gradually staying around for longer periods. In fact, like every other rediscovered depth, it is developing- stretching, deepening, revealing. If you have a good practice- relax and savor the scenery along the way, you just might find yourself walking through some wondrous unexpected doorways.

If not you, who? If not now, when?

My own first year of regular intensive spiritual practice was not very pleasurable at all- I was driving myself mad!- mainly a year of bitter herbs (Good God!) with a few wild transcendental experiences- probably thrown in to keep me going. When I first started, I would meditate in the fiction and reference sections of the Lake Geneva Public Library, opening my eyes and finding that only 2 minutes of 20 had gone by, the Clan of the Cave Bear books seeming to laugh at my meditative misfortunes from their lofty perch. I know what kept me going, but at the same time, I really don't know why I kept on with it! I am glad that I kept going, because just over the horizon meditation was about to become much more effective and the crazy perseverance and focus demanded by asceticism would find a wonderful balancing channel in effortless meditation. We are all tested repeatedly on the evolutionary path. Even the easiest path of joy will have some challenge and difficulty- though far less than the strain of clinging to a woefully small self identity! We rarely know our true scope until we put our whole being into something. That totality of focus is a process of death and Life, so that emerging from the eye of the needle, we find our real nature to be without end. Is there a spark in your soul that wants to become a wild fire? Are there ancient stirrings longing to get out? If not you, who? If not now, when?

You are Life!

It’s a really wonderful thing to be more and more of a Complete and Total Nobody, because then Life has the space to really rush through us.  That’s what it’s trying to do all the time anyway. There is really nothing at all wrong with an ego.  The difficulty comes in when it’s the primary context of life. What a tension that is, and we often don’t even know that its an unnecessary tension until somehow, some way, we get a taste of life without it. And then we really see that it’s like an Ocean trying to move through a garden hose!  What a tension! Poor garden hose! What unnecessary resilience! At the end of the day, that is what the state of ignorance amounts to- a fundamental tension that we’ve become terribly accustomed to, and so meditation is very simply a means of practicing fundamental relaxation. We practice relaxing throughout every day, and eventually find ourselves living as a great river pouring into a Boundless Sea.  You are Life! You are That! How can you not be? That is the great realization at the heart of the Ascension practice.

Original Innocence

Just about the first thing we throw down into the Shadow is our own Superconscious Self- our own sense of Presence. In a world where most adults have learned to huddle behind facades, the unconditioned freedom and openness of Presence, while often deeply appreciated (because deep down even the most hardened hearts tend to remember our original Innocence), eventually exposes the shadows and fears of those around it, as if sucking poison from a buried wound, and is so often pushed away and discouraged. The spiritual revolution entails a return to that innocent, unconditioned Presence, a letting go of all those masks, and a homecoming to the Self of all those parts of the psyche stashed in the bowels of the Bastille like Shadow. This is one of the great end goals of meditation- we grok that there was never a need for such walls, for we have been home the whole time, temporarily forgetful monarchs wandering through our own realms.

Holographic Tales- Strange Magic in Wisconsin

Here’s a story from the days before I found Ascension. When I was a teenager, I had a very dear friend and spiritual mentor by the name of Austin.   Strange and magical things tended to happen to me when I was in and around his house. Usually, I would sit across from him at his little kitchen table in conversation and enjoy the thick sense of Presence that tended to collect. Usually, I would sense it when I’d come within about 75 feet of his kitchen door- like walking through some kind of force field. It was also common for me to have these strange headaches, for which my remedy was walking into Austin’s house, even when he was working on his truck, and laying down on his couch for 20 minutes. He called himself a “walk-in” and said that the “old guy” was at the hospital on a treadmill doing a stress test, had a massive heart attack and died.   He remembers meeting the “old guy” on their way out and coming into the body via some pre-arrangement between the two.  Whatever the case, the transformation was intense.  The new Austin, the one that I met, identified himself as a Native American shaman using the body for as long as need be. 

 On one of the many sit down occasions, a sudden and strong desire to go into his backyard came over me.  I went out, walking onto the old railroad path.  In an instant, I found my body was frozen and wouldn’t move, and I was lucky that I didn’t poop, as it almost happened.  A second later, I realized that it was gripped by a kind of primal fear, but of what I had no idea.  Looking about 40 feet in front, a large black figure emerged, shrouded with heat distortion lines.  My brain was racing to identify this animal.  Dog? No. Wolf? No.  It moved like a cat, like a massive big cat.  Now it was about 25 feet from me.  The only word for it was. . .  Jaguar!  Of course, I rationally knew there to be no jaguars in Wisconsin, much less appearing with strange distortion fields that weren’t around anything else in the cool, dappled sunlit path.  Fight or run?  My brain was dizzy with calculations.  I found myself running, even as part of my brain remembered that it was a bad idea with big cats.  Never mind that!

 I opened Austin’s door with utmost efficiency, making sure to lock it quickly behind me.  Falling into his kitchen, he was completely hunched over in laughter.  Still panting from my escape, I asked, “what, what’s so funny?”  He answered, “Oh Thomas, you didn’t have to run.  He wasn’t going to hurt you.”  “Who wasn’t going to hurt me?”  “Why the Jaguar, of course.  You met the Guardian of the property.  He came to you because he considers you family just as much as me. He doesn’t show himself to everybody.”  I answered, “oh dear, did I offend the etheric Jaguar?”  Closing his eyes for a second, he answered “He’s laughing too!  He loves you and is glad you can run so fast.”

 Having told him nothing of an “etheric jaguar” I was impressed and fascinated with Austin plucking it out of the ethers, for it was so beyond chance that either Austin was an extraordinary telepath and materialism was decidedly off the mark or I almost shit my pants from seeing an etheric jaguar in a Wisconsin forest and materialism was decidedly off the mark. In the short time that I knew him, there were many more odd happenings, such as the time he out of blue told me that he enjoyed my lecture at the astral school that was floating above the lake, before I had the chance to tell him anything about my “dream” of the night before, or the innumerable times he “remoted viewed” the location of my missing transparent retainer.

The Dharma Song

Just like Consciousness itself, even as we may feel wholly divorced from it, our purpose has been placed right in front of our nose.  Like Campbell’s definition of mythology, it’s the music we’ve danced to even when we didn’t know music was playing.  And like Samadhi, all of us have flirted with knowing it repeatedly. When we played games as young children, in those moments when we were absolutely present and fluid and unencumbered, there was something of a spontaneous order, a sense of how and why that wasn’t imposed by conditioning, but simply emerged from the innate substrate of play. Later in life, whenever we have experienced deep flow- in art, sport, sex, music, chopping onions or walking in the woods- we may notice ourselves being moved by a logic transcending rationality.  Within that space there is something of our deeper purpose, our reason for being in our particular body, family, and town, situated on a planet sitting at the end of a spiral arm galaxy. 

Our English word purpose could generally be translated into two Sanskrit words: Dharma and Artha, two of the four aims of human life, the others being Kama and Moksha.  If we think of our life as a flowing river, Dharma (evolutionary direction) is the course of the river,  Artha (purpose) is the direction of the flow, Kama (desire) is the motive force of the river, and the ultimate endpoint, in this life or another, is the great unbound Ocean of Consciousness, Moksha (liberation).  Dharma describes the highest lessons we are here to learn, while Artha is the means, strategies, and role we play while living out our Dharma.  We can also frame Dharma is very much like the song our soul is meant to play, while Artha would be more akin to the instrument(s) we use to play our Dharma-song.  Like the Yamas and Niyamas of the Yoga Sutras, these four aims of life are deeply interconnected, their fulfillment not coming in an arduous step-wise way, but simultaneously unfolding through profound relaxation in Presence.  In the end, we don’t really have to look for our purpose, all we need to do is to learn how to profoundly let go, allowing the river of life to carry us with maximum ease to our highest fulfillment.

That said, it can be helpful to have some supplemental insight into the nature of our soul and psyche, to bring a few river maps with us as we make our journey. Each of us is essentially a song or a series of songs. There are many ways of seeing into one’s own purpose or that of others.  My work as an astrologer is essentially a task of tuning into the multilayered music of the soul that is couched within the natal chart and playing it back to the client.  There are likewise other systems of reading the subtle patterning of the soul.  In my view, the efficacy of all of these systems boils down to the universe being structured like a holograph; singular Consciousness enfolded into a tapestry of infinite variation, in which each part is both the undivided Whole and contains all the other parts in a unique combination, arranged by a series of universal laws, that form patterns that extend from one end of the grand chain of being to the other, from the macrocosmic scale of a galaxy to the microcosmic movements of an electron, and everything in between. 

But, even a perfect understanding of the course of a river won’t bring the journey to completion.  In the end, we still need to “turn off our minds, relax, and float downstream”- and merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily let the song of our Dharma play out.

Awareness Everywhere

Another of the most wonderful developments in the path of meditation is finding one's Awareness to be everywhere, even as one is more comfortable and grounded in one's body- as was the case for me! We become so relaxed that the Boundless Silence we have discovered "within" or "at the base of the mind stuff" reveals itself to have no spatial or temporal limits whatsoever. We find it in the walls, in our friends, in our garden, and we learn that it is our own Self shining back at us- and as we find It there, so do we find ourselves to be everywhere - at once a strange experience and infinitely more normal than the fragmented mind identification we once had taken as Reality. Infinity is hiding everywhere in plain sight.

This is an experience of the non-locality that people often write about in spiritual literature. Instead of being a a person experiencing consciousness, our context shifts to consciousness experiencing through a person. While one might imagine this as some kind of dissociative state, it is actually quite the opposite. Functioning in this way, we express our uniqueness with more freedom. Freed of so many psychological tensions and mental noise, we begin to profoundly connect with everything around us, from the surface layers to the subtle depths. The barrier between self and other becomes increasingly porous, revealing a level of experience that my tradition calls Unity Consciousness- a truly “non-dual” state of consciousness.

While I and others often write of the process, evolution, or development of states of consciousness, the wonderful thing is that all the levels of experience that we could step into are present, Here and Now, like hidden jewels in our own pockets. Spiritual practice is simply a means of reacquainting ourselves with something that we already know and have only temporarily forgotten.

Everything Within

One of the wonderful developments of meditation is the sense that the whole world is happening within your own vast consciousness, within you. I still remember sitting by a window, listening to the birds outside, their song experienced as a movement of Consciousness, my body as wide as the whole world. So internal and familiar was the birdsong that their language seemed to be translating into English. And it goes just the same for every kind of perception, even jackhammers, mosquitos, and ill mannered internet trolls. We all have glimpses of this, but it becomes a permanent fixture of our experiential range the more our nervous system relaxes into Silence. And, if one becomes quiet enough, the sound of Om can lead one all the way back home to the primordial unity of the un-struck dawn.

Enlightenment is an Accident, but Spiritual Practice Makes one Accident Prone

“Enlightenment is an accident, but spiritual practice makes one accident prone.”  It’s difficult to come up with a more accurate broad description of the spiritual path than this.  Enlightenment is when we simply relax into our fundamental natural setting, and in the process let go of those habitual tensions that cause us so much suffering.  It doesn’t require going anywhere else, nor does it require being a different person first in order to have access to some experience. We are already attempting to be so many different people.  We are already going everywhere else, flailing against life and missing the here and now, and that is the primary barrier to recognizing the vast Presence, Silence, and Love that is our essence.

 One doesn’t have to do anything to wake up. One doesn’t necessarily need a practice.  At any amount, you could just drop all the BS. At any moment, you could permanently meander into an experience of joy and total freedom. The fact that most of us are going to have to apply some serious focus and dedication to the undertaking doesn’t take away from the fact that we could drop our masks at any time. Of course we generally need to practice something that brings us back to Now because with and without knowing it, we’ve already accumulated quite a few “practices” that tend to obscure the clear light of the Self.  We need one habit that moves our attention back towards the Self in order to remove all the other habits that keep our attention locked into all of those cul de sacs of suffering.

Something that is also true is that waking up happens on its own. Another person, no matter how Enlightened, can never wake you up. Of course, we can have wonderful experiences in the Presence of realized beings, and we can also entirely sleepwalk by the Enlightened, or even feel like they are the furthest thing from whatever our conception happens to be, or all of the above at different times. When we do feel an expansion in the Presence of an Awakened person, it’s more truly framed as an act of giving ourselves permission to relax and fall into ourselves because the one in front of us is doing exactly that, and like a tuning fork, we feel that. The same is the case with a good spiritual practice, for it serves as a kind of resonance facilitator, guiding us into the most fundamental and expansive octave of our nervous system, allowing us to hear the numinous music that has been playing the whole time. Bathing in Presence, the subjective restrictions upon life relax, and we acquiesce to the flowing dance of Nature.

Enlightenment is living without the masks and conditioned tension that we learned over a life time. * The Self is already Awake.  We don’t have to turn on any light inside ourselves, because it is already very much turned on.  To experience That, we need only turn away from our little distractions long enough to take notice of it.

* If we don’t have an inkling of that conditioning or of the experience of life that exists without it, this sort of language can sound like gobbledy-gook or the height (or low?) of bumperstickerese. But so it goes with many things in life, like orgasm or the taste of chocolate until we’ve had some experience.

Weird Stuff, Love, and Silence

This life has been filled with some very weird happenings. Being born on Halloween was a really good joke, as the energy and opening of my first day on this earth decided to stick around! Amidst an otherwise normal childhood, ghosts would come and tell me their regrets and fears, sometimes asking to be helped along. Angels would descend with their particular frequency, inviting me to listen to their music, demons came to be accepted and to give me tests in overcoming fear. Faeries and gnomes hid in the rhubarb patch and the school library, hoping to be seen by those who had not yet shuttered their innocent softness, telling me about books and where coins were buried. Golden portals would open at random, showering a heavenly light. Specific knowledge has arrived seemingly on its own without any prior exposure, which provided a decided advantage in school and as I took up a practice, allowed more time in meditation and less in study. Day dreams have always occurred with great regularity, opening into full blown and often very useful precognitions. Much of it I didn't take seriously, but it was there all the same. It seems that the "veils have been thin."

Thankfully, those perceptual channels weren’t fully shut down as can be the case and I am even more grateful that all of that experiential territory was ultimately integrated into the far deeper context of Samadhi, the unified field of Consciousness, for it is that place which liberates a soul. The 30 odd years of experiencing and exploring this varied terrain, has led to perceiving a certain subtle architecture underlying and permeating the human world, and has also led to the recognition of certain universally connective strands and patterns woven throughout, primary among all of them has been love.

For, in all of these experiences across veils, the things that were shown to be most important were to find and relax into the Silence, open to the Love that flows from it, and from there, to live wholly, leaving nothing on the table. Most of us can not "carpe diem" enough! I once thought that emotions like anger, jealousy, and sadness were what people repressed the most, but the last 20 years have demonstrated that we may very well tend to push harder at our own vast Presence, and the Joy, Bliss, and Love which are its attendants. Where there is Silence, there is fertile soil for Love to emerge.

One need not have any experience of this “invisible ecology” for there to be significant evolution. If the mind is resting in Silence, life is permeated by Love and Wholeness, and we find ourselves effortlessly gliding with the current of Life, what more is there to ask for?

Relax, what you are looking for really is looking for you!

Presence is looking to sneak up on you. Enlightenment seems to show up on its own terms.  Even as you do your spiritual practice, even as you put the pedal to the metal with your Tapas (and I do encourage that!), all along the road of growth, the Self might just come when you aren’t looking.  You may very well find yourself living as the Self when you are distracted by the deepening Silence and the growing currents of Bliss and Wholeness that follow in its wake.

My own life has been peppered with these instances. The following are a couple memorable experiences.  It was two days after I had arrived at the Ishaya monastery on the Oregon coast.  I was an 18 year old spiritual zealot, so much so that I often went around with a look on my face that communicated crazy and focused.  I felt that I really had to put my all into it, partially because I felt myself deficient in certain helpful dispositional traits, such as humility!  People were always telling me, “hey Thomas, you know you can relax” and I would keep going on as before.  Then, I began to have a dream in which I found myself in a birch forest, a 6-year old version of myself smiling at me.  I was overtaken with the desire to meet my younger self, but the quicker I approached, the more elusive he would become.  This went on for two nights, until I became semi-lucid in the dream, and decided to just be still. As soon as I did, my own inner child came right up to me, and reached for my hand.  As soon as he grabbed my hand, I was sent into the deepest, clearest, and most expansive Silence I had to that point experienced.* My eyes opened to a very early morning and an experience that was completely saturated in the Silent Presence.  Something was fundamentally different, although I didn’t know it.

Less than a year later while chopping onions in our café, I looked up from my cutting board full of onions, and realized that I was only this vast Silence.  I seemed to be chopping onions.  There were thoughts flowing here and there, there were mantras being thought in between those thoughts, but the whole world was tiny compared to the endless depth that was really running the show and chopping all of those onions.*

It should also be repeated that every step back into the Self is movement into something we already know deep inside. In those beautiful moments when I’ve seen someone consciously recognizing Samadhi for the first time, it’s never really been the first time. We all know that space. It has been with us for our whole lives, it just happens to be a much more subtle layer of experience than what we were conditioned to experience. This sense of rediscovery

Dive into your practice with all your heart, mind, body, and soul, embrace every moment, appreciate and accept everything, relax into it all.  Grace is coming hard for you, for there is an active conspiracy for your own Awakening.  Enlightenment has just been waiting for you to stumble back home.

*There is much wisdom and evolutionary potential to be found in lucid dreams.

*The facet of evolving consciousness known as Witnessing is a wonderful sign of progress. Resting back into the Witness is a doorway into rapid growth. Relaxing into the Witness while chopping onions may be doubly so.

Ascension, Healing, and Kundalini

The wonderful thing about Kundalini is that it will come when it comes. All one needs to do is to remove the obstacles that block the rise of the primal energy of life.  In fact, it is much better to let it come on its own terms, rather than going to extreme measures to make it rise.  With regular experience of Samadhi, it will surely rise if and when it really needs to.

When we human beings are in a state of suffering, identified primarily as little selves, we are essentially like plugged up conduits.  The energy of life wants to move through us, but because we are all bound up with judgment and trauma, we make what could be a joyous ride into a rather more difficult affair!  With meditation, yoga, and pranayama, as we begin to unwind and become unblocked, life starts to flow again- in spurts and gushes.  When we have a solid grounding in the vast Oceanic awareness, then the experience of this energy moving, whether it be Prana or it is Kundalini, will not overwhelm us.  If we are not similarly prepared, we might encounter some turbulence! 

The same is true when we think of the state of the nervous system itself- gradual preparation of the whole spectrum of our being, allows for the greatest integration of the once again flowing energies of life, with very little risk for the damage- psychical, psychological, and physical- that can potentially accompany attempts at bypassing the preparation.

 In this life, the most powerful Kundalini experiences came completely as a bi-product of practicing Ascension (all of the techniques have the bi-product of cleansing the energetic channels, and many of the advanced techniques deal with specific pathways and chakras), without doing anything else to attempt to bring them about.  Because there had been a good deal of preparation of the whole organism, there was very little friction such as shaking (shaking typically indicates remaining blockages within the channels) that went along for the ride, just a singularly powerful, smooth, and blissful current from the base of the spine up the center of the spine (the Sushumna) and out the top of the head, leading to a marked sense of Omnipresence. When the basic existential tension of the ego dissolves to a certain point, the difference between the self and life dissolves, and the whole reveals itself to be the very body of one’s own Consciousness.

Shakti Kundalini is the slumbering “coiled” Love of our own Self. As we relax into our own Higher Consciousness, the artificial barriers to Love dissolve, and the Goddess of Life once again dances freely through our lives.

So many of these accounts can sound fantastical, but in a way, opening into these stratas of consciousness is the most mundane thing we can possibly do. Instead of going “way out there”, for most people, the whole process is better described as becoming increasingly comfortable in their own body, being perfectly present with all that transpires.

Living from the Marrow of Life

One of the great hallmarks of spiritual unfoldment is the ever increasing proclivity to drink from the very marrow of life, to be fully present and flowing, and to have the capacity to gather joyful rosebuds from depths of experience that one didn’t even know existed.

A simple explanation of how some karma is created in the first place is that it is life experience which we resisted. Something at some time seemed all too much. We ran away and we repressed. We checked out and pushed it away only for it to come back some other day. And this resistance isn't limited to tragedy. Would it surprise you to know that Love, Joy, Genius, and the experience of our own Higher Awareness are some of the great repressed denizens of the Shadow Self?

Here, resistance to “life experience” is really meant a pushing down of “Life.” Life describes a state in which the whole Universe, with all of its seemingly separate bits, is only one thing, a great ocean dancing through its waves and currents. At the fundamental level, we are the whole Ocean, we aren’t fundamentally these little separate characters, trapped in a vast play. You are the Transcendental Actor animating all the other characters. You are the Director, the Writer, the Script, and the Stage. You are the whole Ocean, with all of its waves, currents, and life. The mask of tension, the dominant sense of being a limited person, perhaps sitting somewhere behind a pair of eyes, is only a temporary game, a set up for a profound maturation of the Soul, and a vehicle for greater evolutionary movement of the whole Cosmos.

When we are identified as the little character, sometimes we seem to have a reasonably pleasant role, sometimes we have a wholly unpleasant part, and most of us have something of a mixed bag. Whatever the case, if we are committed to the narrow confines of the mask, there are invariably lines in the script that we fight, avoid, alter, and deliver half-heartedly. Instead of living from the marrow of life, we push ourselves to the periphery of our possible experience of life. We become like King Pellinore from Arthurian mythology, wandering around our own kingdom in a daze, wholly forgetful of our true role and purpose. We are the prodigal sons and daughters of God, temporarily forgetful that the Kingdom of Heaven is Here, There, and Everywhere.

Effective spiritual practice brings us from the peripheral branches of life down to the very roots of our own Being- Pure Consciousness, the Source, the Dao. The more we make the journey, the more the context of our life becomes centered there. As this process of attunement deepens and expands, that extra-curricular existential resistance to life fades, for we begin to grok the greater Life underlying and infusing our “life situation.” While before we might have felt a seemingly reasonable need to hang on at all costs (to anything at all!), as life becomes infused by Presence, relaxing into a place of deep Flow presents itself as the natural and more pleasurable option. There may continue to be Iago’s in our respective plays, with whom boundaries continue to be wise on the earthly plane, but even they can be seen and felt to be none other than the Self. This life is a game of hide and seek, with Infinite Consciousness hidden everywhere, looking for itself through itself!

Life can be ever so short! Wherever you happen to be in your spiritual life, go for it with gusto! Make a start! Do Yoga everyday, do Qi Gong. Learn a meditation practice and stick to it, do it for hours on end or do it every day for 40 minutes with total dedication. Remember that this day may very well be the last in this particular body. As Patanjali writes in the Yoga Sutras, “to the intensely vehement, soon.” To paraphrase Campbell, if you wholly commit to your North Star, if you dive into each moment with all your heart, mind, body, and soul, doors will open where before there were none, and gardens of experience will bloom where before there was only barren desert.

Awakening from the Near Life Experience

One of the realizations that came to me in the immediate wake of my NDE was the awareness that most of my life and the lives of everyone I was in contact with ought to rather have been called “near life experiences.” The state of suffering can really be boiled down to a collection of tensions, that effectively bind us to an extremely limited experience of life, like wearing size 2 shoes with size 10 feet. We end up missing out on almost all the real living that we could experience, clutching with all of our strength on a rusty dime with a forgotten fortune in our back pocket. I had no idea how much fear and tension I had, even as a 13 year old, until it suddenly "fell off" during the car accident which took my mother's life and dunked me into a powerful state of Samadhi. It was such a dramatic sense of weightlessness, that I was slightly shocked I had been so blind to all of the unnecessary tensions I had foisted upon myself. Truly, we all do the best we can to make do until we come to something better.

Thus, a major facet of the path to awakening is the progressive dissolution of those binding structures of tension. This doesn’t have to be a particularly painful or difficult process. It also doesn’t have to be time consuming. Whenever we dive down into the field of Pure Consciousness, the structures of limitation are weakened. Even one little taste of being deeply in the zone can dramatically change the trajectory of a life. If we make that dive frequently, the pace of returning to our natural state of expansive wholeness is quickened. While those habits of thought and bundles of emotional trauma may have taken decades (or lifetimes!) to form, it need not take a long time for them to be healed. It is deeply natural and pleasurable for our whole organism to move in the direction of Silence and relaxation. With each trip to the depths, a certain momentum builds, creating a habit of moving toward Stillness, undermining the old habits of limitation, and curtailing the development of new painful grooves.

Many traditions have painted the unconscious as a frequently frightening place, an ocean patrolled by a watchful and hungry Leviathon. From the perspective of the limited identity (that is the main jailer of the supposedly frightening contents) this is totally understandable. Thankfully, we are not a tiny wave on the surface of the ocean, we are the whole of it. As we practice meditation, this notion becomes more and more a fully grokked (a wonderful word coined by Heinlein, communicating a kind of instant total understanding) experience. Perhaps the deepest area of constriction is the Shadow (using Jung’s conception) itself, that repository of all that was deemed unworthy or otherwise unfit for conscious feeling or display. The denizens of the Shadow are like so many fractured parts of our Self, waiting to be again acknowledged and embraced. Repression is an immense and ongoing drain of our vital energies. As the light of inner consciousness becomes brighter the walls of the shadow fall, the vital energies spent on inner imprisonment are restored, the exiled aspects of the psyche are returned to the whole, new-old talents and abilities very often emerge, and a flowering of renewed creativity blooms in the fertilized field of Life. And, thankfully, a near death experience is not required to wake up out of the near life experience :) If it somehow strikes your heart, in the space of a few hours over a few days, I teach courses in the very same effortless meditation techniques that brought me into a state of Living, and continue to bring immense transformation in their wake.

Gradual vs. Sudden Enlightenment

These days, there is so much information out there about Enlightenment and Awakening to the point that the words hardly have any functional meaning. The full enlightenment of some, is written about as the partial enlightenment or fleeting experience of another. Indeed, there are many people writing cookbooks who have not deeply tasted the food. There are stable experiential plateaus and sign-posts along the way, though they don't transpire in any kind of perfectly linear fashion. One of the many sub topics of which there seems to be much conversation is whether Enlightenment is some kind of sudden shift or a gradual unfolding. When Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was asked, he answered, “it’s a gradual switch.” In my life, the movement from the smaller egoic filter to deep oceanic Presence has been a decidedly gradual process marked by exciting peak experiences here and there. Something of the Destination has been experienced everywhere along the Path. This is so because the Destination to which we are traveling is here right now. The extent that which we can relax into the Now determines how much of the Now we are able to experience. If you think you’ve reached the floor of your possible relaxation, it’s most likely a false one. There are always more things in the heavens and the earth than in my philosophies. My short life has been filled with expansion that I imagined would take many lifetimes to experience and wonders as numberless as the stars. My own process of unfolding far from done, and for my that is a decidedly joyous state of affairs! The Now, the Source is not a finite thing. It has no boundaries and has infinite dimensions, the circle with center everywhere and circumference nowhere, there is no end to what can be Realized. Many of us, myself included, won’t notice the sign-posts of entering a new plateau of awareness until after we’ve been living in the new territory for a little while. It has not been important for me to keep track of where I am on the journey, in fact that has often slowed the process. Rather, the most important element has been attending to the Silence itself. That process became a regular and repeatable experience through meditation practice. Having peers and teachers who were solidly steeped in the Presence was also a wonderful boon, allowing me to tune in, expand, and refine my own experience of Consciousness through resonance. But the foundation was the practice, for while Enlightenment may indeed be a grace induced accident, spiritual practice can make one very accident prone indeed.