I wanted to share a few of the experiences of falling into Awareness. It is really behind every corner, hidden in plain sight, just waiting for us to make the slightest shift of attention.
My childhood, like I suspect most childhoods, was filled with seemingly mundane events that produced profound insights. One of the first I remembered transpired while watching my favorite Saturday morning cartoon show, The Real Ghostbusters. In this particular episode the four Ghostbusters needed to find something or someone. Three of them went off, frantically and energetically searching far and wide. Ray, however, decided to sit down on a bench or by a fountain. His notion was that if one were to only sit in the same place, eventually the whole world would come to him, and indeed the object of the search presented itself nearby a short time later. This statement, though not seeming to be the most practical means of seeking something, hit me like a ton of Koans, and sent me headlong into a vast, cavernous sense of Presence. My body, the room, the television all dissolved into a field of Light. Something within that notion seemed to answer all of life’s problems. There was nothing missing, everything was fullness. The conditioning that was beginning to accumulate was shaken off like so much dust, the other members of my family were not right about life, they simply needed to watch cartoons with me, and the light would go on! (my poor family had quite enough to put with as far as Ghostbusters watching. For at least a year, I may have watched the movie every day, often complaining until it was started)
On another occasion a couple years later, I decided to try out my dad’s Gameboy, which he was given for Christmas in 1989, but hardly ever played. We had two games- a Star Wars game and Tetris. Electing for the Star Wars game I soon became proficient enough to make it through a few levels until reaching the asteroid field escape. This I found an entirely impossible proposition, try as I might, every combination of up-down-left-right proved to be an exercise in utter failure. This process repeated until I accidentally moved the Millennium Falcon all the way to the bottom of the screen. While it appeared that the asteroids would surely crush the ship, they glided harmlessly by. 3 seconds of watching this sent me into a vast silence and within that silence the thought dawned on me that the way to avoid all obstacles was to go to a place where they couldn’t hit you. This simple and obvious thought moved my mind into an even deeper place as it became clear that this was one way of expressing the answer to all of life’s seeming problems. So long as one stayed in that vast Presence, no amount of life’s slings, arrows, and asteroids could possibly do any damage to the Essential you. While I soon faded out of the clear state, the ripples of deep coherence from this experience would continue to permeate my life.
Jacob’s ladder- Fast forward to the topsy-turvy world of Middle School hormones and insecurities and my 6th grade class was on a field trip to one of those team building rope courses that were so popular in the 90’s. My class came to the Jacob’s Ladder, which is a kind of rope ladder diagonally strung between the ground and a tree. Several people volunteered to attempt to climb it before, with the majority or all being flung to the ground. Preparing myself for the same fate, it came to me that I should just climb in harmony with "it's essential Way"- a novel phrasing for the time. Instead of attempting to remain on top, I’d lock my ankles under the wrungs so as not to fall. Much to my surprise this strategy was absolutely perfect and after being flipped over I scaled it upside down with complete ease. After my successful scaling, my classmates proceeded to easily climb up in the same manner, which, for whatever reason seemed to slightly annoy the ropes course master. Were we supposed to be learning resiliency through experiencing failure? Did we cheat the Kobaiyashi Meru?
The true significance for me was the mystical state that the successful scaling of the ladder produced. Apart from my complete surprise that this had happened, there was an immersion into the sense of a vast Flowing Silence. Within that silence there was a deep and clear sense of a current or a river that meandered through all of life, that all problems were really products of attempting to go against the current or cling to the sides of the river, and that the solution to all of life’s apparent viscissitudes was simply to flow harmoniously with this subtle stream of energy and intelligence. Years later upon discovering the Tao Te Ching I was pleased to find that there was an entire philosophical system that expanded and illucidated this one point.
Love for a Day- In my Junior Year of High School I had been reading a book that stressed the importance of the development of Unselfish Love as a means and core reality of spiritual development. Much of the time, meeting the particular definition of this Unselfish Love seemed a completely daunting task to me. I would not have put myself forward as some kind of ever-full, non-needy, fountain of love. However, one afternoon it came to me that if I put forward an intent in that precise moment to live the next day immersed in the field of Love, it would be so. I wholeheartedly aligned with the intent on the spot, though I wouldn’t have placed any bets on that coming to fruition.
Upon waking the next day, both myself and world felt completely permeated with a vast full field of Love and Awareness, to the degree that there was very little differentiation between the world and I. The Love was so strong that none of my buttons or psychological triggers were at all active. If harsh words were spoken to me, while I could hear the negative intent and perceive the configuration of stress that produced them, the whole experience was softened by directly experiencing that all people and things were emanations from this underlying field of Love. What a wondrous day. Unfortunately, upon waking the next day, I was rather back to square one! The old familiar mind chatter was back and gone was that wonderful sense of living in the field of love. Fortunately, my sense of humor was very much intact, as I slapped my knee exclaiming, “Shit, I should’ve asked for more than one day!”
While no technique is needed, for most of us it's exceedingly helpful. A good technique, such as the one this site is built around, can bring one to a continual experience of Presence in a lifetime or far less. For some I've known, it's taken far less than a decade of consistent practice. If you have any questions on that or experiencing higher states of Awareness, feel free to contact me through the website contact button. Now based in Japan, I'm happy to travel anywhere for courses. In addition to teaching meditation classes in person, I also offer different kinds of "coaching" sessions over Skype or Zoom.
Awakening to Higher Consciousness: the Devil is in the Context
When I was 15 I spent a great deal of time reading books at the Public Library and local metaphysical bookstore on Enlightenment and the path of awakening to Higher Consciousness. Like so many others that I’ve met, I easily developed the notion that Enlightenment was necessarily a massive shift in the very stuff of life: thoughts, emotions, and the very background feel of life would one day undergo a transformation so vast that the new state would be almost unrecognizable from the beginning state.
But this isn’t the case. Just as waves need not be altered or removed for the ocean to carry on, so the thoughts, feelings, and other movements of consciousness need not be obliterated or altered in order to experience deeper and more expansive inner vistas. In some ways it's really akin to a gestalt shift, the sudden realization that the duck is also a rabbit.
While there is certainly seemingly new content along the path, for many, encountering these new dimensions of experience is a lot like T.S. Elliot’s line that we “are coming back to the beginning and knowing it for the first time.”
We are like a great, big holographic ocean of awareness, in which the whole Ocean and every other wave, or drop, or particle, is represented in the smallest bit. There is nothing new under the sun, and yet there is the possibility to experience endless novelty from the closest and most essential- our very Essence.
Plumbing that depth is one of those easier said than done activities. While there are as many ways to experience this place as there are people and moments in time, for most I typically recommend a form of effortless meditation to as the backbone practice.
My practice of Ascension, to which much of this website is devoted, is one of those, as is Transcendental Meditation and a few others I've come across. I invested a lot of hours as a crazy teen monk putting myself through various wringers of concentration and discipline, and while there were certain benefits to be had, the biggest growth from those great efforts might have been the sheer exhaustion and readiness to really let go that came in their wake.
In addition, I find that meditation techniques are usually most effective when learned in person from a well-trained, experienced practitioner. Depending on how deeply they’ve explored, those teachers can also be helpful guides along the way. While the process of ultimate Yoga isn’t strictly linear and unfolds for different folks in different ways, there are nevertheless common stages of unfoldment where a savvy guide and an accurate inner topographic map can make the unfoldment more pleasant, effortless, and lucid. On that note, some of the next posts will be a light fleshing out of that topographical map of traveling far by going Nowhere.
Another Tale of Ascension Fuelled Manifestation
A couple weeks ago, I was in bed reading a lovely little book called “The Awesome Science of Luck” by a not so widely known author named Peter Ragnar. There are things in that work and in his other books and videos that I don’t agree with and things that I might find slightly off-putting, and there are elements that I deeply appreciate and find downright magical. That evening the experience of reading the book fell squarely in the magical column. Between that and my meditation practice, I definitely fell asleep deeply intuitive zone. The next morning I awoke with subtle feeling as if I had taken in some Felix Felicis. A deep, comfortable Silence seemed to fill in all the corners of my inner and outer world.
Sitting at the edge of the bed, a clear thought moved across my mental horizon, “if you go to Nordstrom or the Goodwill in NW, you will find a beautiful winter coat hidden away where it shouldn’t be at a deeply discounted price. Heeding the thought, we decided to take a little trip into slightly wintery Portland. Planning the route out, the first place we decided to go was the Goodwill. Digging through the CD’s we found some treasures. I meandered back to the men’s sweaters and XL coat section. Going through the jackets I spotted some camel fabric that looked to have some quality from a distance. A feeling akin to déjà vu mixed with a palpable sense of magnetism grew larger as I moved closer and closer. The Silence grew loud. I quickly noticed that this coat was in no way a men’s XL. Taking it off the rack, the tag read Brooks Brothers, 100% camel hair, and the size was double petit- which happens to be the perfect size for my wife. My wife Luna had actually been wanting a coat of that sort of cut for quite a number of years, a recent viewing of Newt Scamander leading to a resurgence of that desire. I took the coat off the rack, and brought it to Luna to see if she would be interested in such a coat. It fit her perfectly, and although it wasn’t red (the color she had envisioned for it), she nevertheless enjoys it immensely both for its inherent aesthetic loveliness and for the magical way it entered our life.
I knew it was a valuable coat, my guess in the store was that it would be around $700 new. We paid $80 for it, only to find out later that the coat usually goes for $1298. What is even more magical about this find was that it was the confluence of a few desire streams that had come around in the past year for whatever reason: Brooks Brothers (I know, rather waspish!), cashmere (camel hair is close enough), long overcoat, and steep discount. In subsequent trips we were showered by even more of it, with me finding brand new Brooks Brothers pants for $7.00 (retail $100) and Luna finding both a $200 cashmere sweater (on that day, my gut instinct was for her to find a cashmere sweater or cardigan) for $20, and a Brooks Brothers double petit pure cashmere sport coat for $15.00.
Of course, the central beauty of all this wasn’t the stuff, it was the magic of tuning into the river of intuition and choosing to follow it. There are some other elements in here that I have found to be common to the other strange experiences of manifestation from my life, perhaps they may even be principles of a kind. The first thing I have observed is that many of the things that I have wanted, haven’t necessarily been things that I would identify myself with wanting. In this case, Brooks Brothers clothing fits the bill. The fewer things you identify with liking or disliking, the better. The more stuff you pile onto your identity, the less flexible you become, while the confines of life become more and more narrow. Be like water indeed!
Many strands of manifestation and Law of Attraction speak of it as if you are making something happen. While there is certainly some volition, I might describe my experiences as being more akin to stepping out of the way and allowing the river of life to take you for an adventure. If there is a doing involved, then it’s more of an “undoing-doing”.
If you are a tiny drop of water, then you might only ever bump into the tiny drops right next to you, but if you were to live as the entire ocean, then you could experience all of the drops. How does one live like the ocean? Herein lies the most important principle, and that is the Silence. In this case, the mind is the ocean. Most of us spend most of our time on the often-choppy surface level, fighting the currents, and avoiding the rocks of life. However, we can also experience life in a different way. We can dive below the surface of the mind and experience peace, vastness, silence, and a profound sense of stability. It can be like sitting peacefully at the bottom of the pool, only we are also able to more fully enjoy the party at the surface. In my life, my long time meditation practice has been the most profound catalyst for these sorts of experiences and so much more.
Please feel free to contact me if interested in meditation, the expansion of consciousness, and manifestation in general. I’d love to hear your stories. I’d also love to be of some service. After a decade and a half of cultivating these sorts of experiences and teaching meditation, I’ve begun to coach and assist others in perfecting their own practice of swimming in the Presence, flowing with the River, and accepting the bounty hidden in plain sight.
The Fascinating Occasion on Which 38 People Suddenly Came into the Café Immediately after I Expressed My Desire For It.
An incredibly important part of my life was spent practicing Ascension while working in a lovely little Ishaya Monk-owned café situated on the equally lovely mid-Oregon coast, in a town seemingly named to attract my younger self- Lincoln City (as a young child I was deeply fascinated with Abraham Lincoln). The café, called the Sun Garden, served as a kind of training academy for all of us who worked there- it would be a place in which we merged the Awareness we cultivated in our closed eyed meditations with dynamic activity. A lot of what people might call strange and wonderful things happened in that little space. The café itself, and my time there, could probably bequeath a couple chapters of writing, but today, I am focusing on one story in particular.
One of the more popular strands in American spirituality for some time has been the idea of “creating one’s life at the level of thought”. This idea, recently popularized by “The Secret” has many proponents who form quite a large spectrum from fairly baseless speculation to those whose experiences and research strongly point to the universe being something very different from the materialist-reductionist model. Throughout my life, I’ve had a lot of experiences with my day dreams coming true- envisioning long conversations with folks I hadn’t yet met, knowing the precise number of jelly beans in a jar because I viewed myself writing down the number (not through estimation), immediately knowing my raffle ticket for a trip to D.C. was the winning ticket, receiving my Passport less than 24 hours after filing it (even with paying for the expediting, I was firmly told that the soonest it could arrive would be 3 days later), even as it would have to be sent from Newport to Seattle, and then all the way back to Lincoln City, and countless others. However, all of these examples, though fascinating to experience, could be explained through more conventional means. This leads me finally to one of the most interesting experiences I’ve had.
One day, in 2004, we were finishing off what had been a fairly busy day at our monk run café. My co-chef and dear friend, were standing in our tiny kitchen next to the salad bar, taking a well-deserved break, when I felt myself sink (or rise) into a deep, deep sense of peace, clarity, and stillness. In that moment, a desire bubbled up in my heart and found its way quickly to my mouth. I said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if a 20-top (restaurant-ese for a group of 20 people) just came in and we were so in the zone that we got the order out in a crazy short time?” In what must have been a minute or so later, the phone rang, and the waitress picked up and then called into the kitchen, “we’ve got 20 people coming in, YOU BETTER GET READY!” Knowing that everything we said in there could be heard out in the restaurant, I laughed it off, and said something like, “sure, nice try!” at which point she came to the window and said, “No, it’s actually happening, you better get ready!” About a minute later, 20 people (it was a small, 42 seat café, with half of the seating in a beautiful covered back garden area) streamed through the door. The sight of them coming in had the effect of pushing me ever more deeply into “the zone” from which the desire arose. I can’t think of too many other times in my life (there was this basketball game in which, Steph Curry style, I made essentially every shot I put up) when my movements were so efficient, felt so effortless, filled me with so much joy, and resulted in such beautiful products. It was the case for both me and my co-chef, who named Nataraja, proved again to be an incarnation of the Universal Dancer. Having looked at the clock at the start of the order, I noted that in 5 minutes we had produced 20 entrees and several appetizers, atypically finishing our orders ahead of the drinks. As we walked the dishes out of the kitchen, it felt as if we were riding a wave of joy which also seemed palpable to the 20 guests sitting in our back covered garden. The speed of the execution took them completely by surprise- one of them asking if we had prepared the orders before their arrival.
Still walking on a cloud of joyful, paradigm splitting wildness, we returned to the kitchen to take stock of the needed prep for the next day. Another desire bubbled up from the wide open clear spring that was my heart, which again moved quickly up my throat and out my mouth. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had 18 people come in and this time it would be a little more difficult as we’d have to prep a bunch of stuff on the fly?” Again, our waitress announced to us that the arrival of 18 people was imminent, if we could handle it. This time, she must actually be joking, but she wasn’t! Nataraja was all in for it, and a minute or two later, 18 more people streamed through the front door. Still deeply in the zone, we began preparing their orders, which did indeed involve so much “prep on the fly” that the waitress, who was and still is a wonderful cook among her nearly infinite talents, had to come in and help us chop potatoes, onions, red bell peppers, and a great deal more. After that effort, from a truly impish place, I again started to muse about a new party coming in, when all gathered decided that, having no remaining prepped food, it was a good time to call it a day.
Was it me simply tapping into what was about to happen? Was the world responding to my desires? Perhaps from a certain level, there is no difference between the two. From my perspective, option number 3 is the best fitting explanation. It is the interpretation of some of the folks within the world of the Ishayas’ Ascension, that Pada I, Sutra 48 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (at least MSI’s translation and commentary) partially serves as an explanation for the mechanics of “manifestation”. One of the things I have enjoyed about my fellow Teachers of Ascension has been the high degree of modesty they have usually displayed surrounding the various experiences and phenomena that have frequently accompanied their awakening to higher Consciousness. One of the primary reasons for this modesty is that the experience of Pure Awareness is rightfully valued above other phenomena, as one can possess siddhis (yogic powers) and still be bound to the wheel of suffering, unconscious of one’s Self. However, it can be very helpful to know some of the possibilities for growth and experience that accompany a spiritual practice, and these posts are an attempt to provide that kind of information and much more. If any of these posts spark conversation, and bring up questions, feel free to send us a message!
Self Acceptance Part I
Beginning when I was a young child the notion of self improvement held a dominant position in my mind. Much of this was very likely innate, and being read bedtime stories on the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson went far in strengthening the intuition that an essential part of a life well lived was to develop one’s character and virtues to the furthest possible extent. Notions of Enlightenment and spiritual development rose easily from these early foundations, adding figures like Gandhi, Buddha, and numerous Yogi Saints to the virtuous pantheon. I may not have been raised religious, but my worldview might as well have been, for I typically viewed the human soul and the world as a battle between the forces of love and evolution on one side, and the forces of fear and contraction on the other. Years of earnest effort and razor sharp self criticism revealed something very interesting indeed.
Like so many other seekers, I found that no matter how hard I tried, certain habits of thought and action would not change. In fact, with the many of them, it seemed that the harder I tried, the more obstinately they remained rooted, even increasing in frequency and expanding well beyond the walls I had erected for the containment of all that was unacceptable about myself. Was I truly so bad at the core? Why was I so firmly bound to tendencies which were so selfish that they couldn’t even count as self serving? I changed strategy and attempted to play to my strengths, taking great care to avoid paths that ran into my inner brick walls. The more skillfully and swiftly I walked the safer paths, the more fully it dawned that there was no escaping myself. Then one day I realized that my attempts at self improvement were not being undermined by some iniquitous part of my subconscious, but were rather being scuttled by an exceedingly benevolent part of my Self.* Inside all of us there is a ruthless part of the Self, so loving that it requires complete, radical self acceptance. We may try and try with all our might, but there will be times when the only possible change will be the acceptance of what is.
The deepest teaching of Yoga is found hidden in plain sight in the first of Patanjali’s famous Yoga Sutras. “Now, the Teaching of Yoga”. The Union between the aspiring soul and the Self that is “Yoga” does not happen in some faraway place or some other time, it happens only right Now. This is so to such a degree that even the word “happen” can cause distortion, for in our language, things that happen, just as often don’t happen. Things that happen are bound by time and space. Enlightenment, however, is always happening. In fact, it’s the only Happening. It’s here. The words on this page and the thoughts moving through your mind are but so many ripples on the surface of a vast silent Ocean. Yoga is both the recognition and unfolding of innate pure potential. The expansion of Consciousness is the acceptance of your own, already Awakened Self, a wholeness that is, that’s always been, and that always shall be.
Jai Guru Deva Om
Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Om
* The actual “mechanics” of going from self loathing and condemnation to forgiveness and acceptance are somewhat mysterious and very difficult to adequately put into words. So much of the forgiveness in my life has come through the practice of Ascension.