I’m no fan of pie-in-the-sky dreaming.
Of reductionist thought that answers the real problems of real people in the real world with deeper truth platitudes that end discussion and leave people foundering, sullen and silently fuming as their issues are relegated to meaninglessness in the face of the absolute. This is not to say that being aware of the absolute truth of reality is problematic. Rather, it is to say that confronting the limited and material truths of our reality with the Absolute is not a solution, but is instead a communicative, verbal and vibratory weapon often designed to overwhelm less eternal truths.
An example of this is saying that race does not matter because we are all human. Most people do believe this is true. But bringing this truth up in a conversation about the Israeli/Palestinian problem, or the issue of black incarceration in the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States does not forward the discussion, nor does it offer any practical solutions that can be implemented in the resolution of the problem.
Solutions are what are needed. Heart-centered solutions that speak to the necessity of all people to have their sovereign rights as incarnate souls respected. This is a basic human right of existence that cannot be gainsayed by any political ideology, philosophical treaties or religious creed.
The good news is that hearts and minds are opening daily. That consciousness is spreading like wildfire across the world as the inter connectivity provided by the internet becomes the ubiquitous mode of communication for the majority of the world’s citizens. Seeking solutions and salvation beyond the self in groups and institutions must be accompanied by a search for solutions within each of us for our own problems and issues. There can be no real movement for peace and unity when we do not each individually possess those qualities within ourselves.
A slight qualification of the above statement is in order: there can be such movements and have been and probably will be, but those movements will be corrupted at their heart and soul if those who comprise the movement are corrupted in their hearts and souls. The body of membership of any organization is the sum of that membership, inculcating their dreams and desires, which then become the mission and purpose of the group. No matter what their stated principles are, the words and actions of the group will reflect the collective will of their membership, manifesting even their unconscious dreams and desires, masked beneath an rhetorical facade that usually only pays lip service to the ideology publically espoused.
This is why politicians are always caught with their pants down and their bank accounts open, their integrity compromised. This is why corporate raiders and profiteers are concerned primarily with the bottom line, lining their pockets with obscene bonuses and wondering why anybody would complain. This is why preachers and priests do terrible things to children and the emotionally compromised. This is why we hate ourselves, secretly in our inner hearts and souls, desperately seeking salavation outside of ourselves because to look within and actually do something about what we find there is too painful to work with directly.
It’s all well and good to speak words of wisdom or quote the spiritual and philosophical masters and enlightened ones when that sharing is done in the spirit of giving and not in the spirit of taking. In this sense, taking praise from others, likes from the multitude, the verbal praise of having something that others lack, of being able to see into the heart of situations and to share what is seen there in an empathic and seemingly loving manner is a gift of the spirit and can be easily recognized for its resonance factor and embodiment of higher energetic frequencies. Conversely, doing such in the context of a personal battle of wills or in the making of points that emphasize an individual and egoistic attachment to self-gratification through the adulation of the hoi polloi serve to densify and further stratify personality in a hierarchical and energetically vampiric structure of vanity and egoism. Differentiating between these two types of expression is a stark but necessary maneuver for those who seek to recognize the real from the facade. Platitudes and truisms used as weapons in order to win an argument or in response to a perceived slight on the part of others are platitudes and truisms used in vain.
They are indicative of BEingness that is self-centered and ego-centric. Granted, that consciousness may be and probably is on the road of spiritual and philosophical enlightenment, but in that particular instance they have been waylaid by the intellect of ego and the densification of anger, affront or judgement, which renders their judgement faulty. This is a condition of creation and material incarnation and there is no fault in living in the real and being cognizant of the process of gradual evolution, which is indeed a process, meaning, it does not happen instantaneously for most people. It takes a while to grow and learn through experience how to truly become wise instead of just appearing so.
The solutions to all of the world’s problems are already known. The way to get there has already been laid out. The world’s problems are the same as each of our individual problems, just magnified and fractalized at a larger scale of macrocosmic occurrence. It is in the application of this knowledge to ourselves that we fail to apply the solutions that the world needs. And it will only be when we begin as a collective to recognize our individual failings and the interconnectivity of all consciousness that we will understand that by helping ourselves we are indeed helping the world.
The change begins with each of us. It has already begun and is well in progress. Are you a part of the solutions? Or a part of the problem?
Make a difference. Beyond the platitudes and quotes, we must indeed be the change we want to see in the world. Words must lead to actions in order for the shift to be actualized and manifest for us and our children and our children’s children to enjoy a world based upon a very different paradigm than the one that is failing around us in this very moment.
This is not so because life is perfect. It is not because things are either good or bad. The reason has nothing to do with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the trials and tribulations of life. The reason has to do only with the fact that living in 
The pleasures of a life are many and fleeting but are as nothing compared to the ecstasy of life. The sublime experiences of the spirit are able to lift one from the midst of the daily grind, eliciting wonder and joy, giving a higher context to the purpose of living consciously and in search of the higher aspects of self versus the gratification of the lower. The juxtaposition of the physical and the spiritual is the cauldron of happiness and sadness we traverse through our experiences, the fixation of our attention and perspective alternating between the higher and the lower aspects of our lives. Navigating the Path between the two extremes requires discipline and dedication, mind control and emotional stability.
The pleasures of life lived for the senses are a mere distraction from the deeper pleasures of spiritual awakening. Going beyond pleasure, beyond happiness, beyond the need for any sort of material gratification or emotional intoxication is the reward of the spiritual quest. Food, sex, violence and all variations and associated modalities satiate the sensual, those whose highest aspirations are material gratification and that is as it should be, as life takes all types and we all co-exist at different levels of understanding and experience. But for those traversing these dales of lustful travails they pale quickly, the call ever heard to seek higher, go deeper, expand vision and experience wider. The quiet whisper of Truth promising something more, something amazing, something lasting, something real. And yet, paradoxically, it is the moderate experience of both sides that reveals the true meaning of life.
The gratifying reality of real spiritual advancement is that as you initiate your conscious and directed journey to realization you become aware of the existence of certain markers and signposts along the way. There are traditions that inform the seeker about roadblocks ahead or pratfalls to be traversed. Holy books filled with the wisdom of the ages and oral traditions cached with the truth of eternity. Continued immersion within spiritual themes contributes to control of the mind as contemplative practices such as meditation and prayer rarefy the mental space, making it a fitting abode for the Divine. As the mind purifies, the thoughts purify, as the thoughts purify so do the words and, as a result, the actions.
Each of us has our stories. Every soul incarnate has a lesson and a context within which to learn it. All lessons are one lesson and that lesson is to conserve energy. The conservation of energy is a material energetic law, but it is also a spiritual law. No matter what tradition that you examine no matter where it is across the world, you will find that this law heralding the conservation of energy as the epitome of human development is enshrined at the core of every religion and at the heart of every moral and philosophical code.
People are attached to the world. Religions exhort us to leave it behind, to follow the path of the spirit. But the world calls with all of its attractions. Love, vice, hate, envy, greed, material accumulation, karmic debt, all of it combines to create an intertwined and seductive array of stimuli that distract a soul complex in lifetime after lifetime, expending energy unnecessarily in endeavors that tie us to one another and the world in an endlessly repetitive pattern of interactions. It is only when we choose to forego the attachment process whether that be to good or evil that we create the space within ourselves to contemplate what might lie beyond the many and varied states of material distraction.
The experience of total union, of submersion within Oneness will retaining a recognition of one’s self apart from that Oneness sears the synapses, clearing emotional detritus of a lifetime and allowing the individual to return to mundane waking life. But that does not remove her from experiencing the effects of her actions. Past karma is cleared but current karma in the Now must always be resolved as both the seed and the result are contained within every action. The wisdom of the Ages instructs without err in proclaiming that those seeking to live a higher form of life must free themselves of all attachments, be they good or bad. By so doing, future actions will not create karma that must be resolved in this or another lifetime.
Human experientiality ranges in the median of all energetic variables. Our senses experience only a small fraction of the total. We see and hear in the middle of the visual range, our other senses are limited to our perceptual awareness which is all too often minimized due to the distracted nature of our thought processes. The inherent subjectivity of human incarnation is made even more difficult by the isolation of ego and the facade of relativity mistaken as objectivity. The inability to see and experience reality clearly result in obscurations that must be reconciled along the spiritual path. That reconciliation is the goal of all aspiration.
Those who achieve this state of being are often apart but never lonely as their compassion fills the world, connects them to all souls within the world and beyond. Normal relationships may fall by the wayside as people move on, as they are not receiving what they were previously on the emotional side of the relationship. The individual may appear uncaring on the level of romantic love, even though the heart of compassion is alive within them. To old friends and lovers, they may seem like a different person altogether. And they are. The memories of the person they were before remain, but the emotional connections no longer define them. The experience of true unity, true all-encompassing, all-permeating, all-existent love, compassion and one-ness contextualizes human aspiration and life and we incarnate within its grasp become visible at our true scale in relation to all things.
Perhaps it is mercury retrograde right now, but communications are at a standstill. People are standing on virtual street-corners screaming out their truths and not caring who is listening or responding back. The babble is continuous and it is rising as space weather increases and the sun pops off flare after flare, as things go downhill even further in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, as politics in the USA heat up, as our lives continue to progress along their winding paths and our personal dramas ratchet up a notch or three, all connected, all beholden to the same energetic input that must find its resolution through some form of activity, some means of resolution. All of the voices, shouting, screaming, crying, complaining, querulous and fearful at heart, the anger, the rage but a front masking the underlying terror. Despite the noise, there seems to be no resolution possible. They all can’t seem to hear each other because the chatter in their own minds is too loud.
That is what most everybody thinks. That is what our life experiences seem to tell us, at least. The life experiences that make up our personal history. Our childhoods with our parents and siblings, our time in school, our friends, our secrets and our shames, our triumphs and our joys. These are the things that we count on to represent our journey through life, these are the things that we recount when people ask us about ourselves, who we are, what our biography is, what our life is about. For those of us who are a bit more thoughtful, we might even put them in some sort of topical order and call that our path through life, as if the details of our journey are the sum of our experience and make up the totality of what we have gained along the way.
Being comfortable in life is one of the primary goals society programs into us as citizens of different countries. Despite the geographic differences and distances, Western culture as a whole displays remarkable similitude in how ideofacts and sociofacts are ingrained within populations. To be successful in any of the Western cultures, a modicrum of capitalistic ideology and consumer-oriented methodology must be inculcated by groups, families and individuals. To belong and to epitomize the expression of said culture, the actual, material expression of lifetime success is a relative degree of affluence as measured by the modernization memes that permeate Eurocentric society and those sycophant socieities serving as peripheral outposts of raw material and low-wage earner extraction.
It is painful to look at the path of a lifetime and determine that you are not on the side of the good guys. If you come to realize it, you may ask the universe, but what else could I have done? What other choices did I have? And the answers to those questions might have shaken you to your very core. Or given rise to a visceral fear that the loss of material security must result in.
Asking these questions – actually realizing that these questions need to be asked – is one of the first steps to choosing to awaken to some of the deeper realities of life. Of accepting the fact that the way things have been is not the way things should be and that a change is in order. Accepting your compliance with the system and that you are indeed an agent of the system as long as you work for and through the system to support the global hierarchy of dominance and control is a big step in figuring out how to create a lifestyle of non-compliance and opposition to the machine.
There has been no return to my previous state of mind or being. In fact, there has been a further deepening of the condition. As discussed in previous articles in the Practical Enlightenment series, there was a flattening of my emotional ties to past events and traumas that has continued. While that remains the case, as mentioned previously as well, old patterns of thought and behavior do continue to echo, although, for the most part, they grow fainter and fainter. A few behaviors continue that are deeper rooted within my psyche. According to Sadhguru, once Full Enlightenment is reached, the spirit automatically leaves the body. That is, unless something of the Earth is held on to. Some desire. Mine pertain to my family and mission.
For some who attain enlightenment in these days and times it comes out of the blue. Some were not previously on a spiritual path while others had been seeking for years. It can occur spontaneously or it can be the culmination of a long period – potentially many lifetimes in the making – of mind-training and meditative practice. For many who attain Enlightenment, there has been no previous meditative immersion to the extent and intensity that Shakyamuni practiced. There has been no clearing of the neural networks. And so, for these souls, the process must occur after Satori. For me, I achieved the state first when I was 12 years old.
The remaining primary and secondary school years were revelations of difference and I was an observer, even of my own participation. I had no context outside of the terror of 
The above-related event occurred in the middle of August, 1987. The Harmonic Convergence, as predicted by the Maya – ending the 5,125 year Great Cycle of History and beginning the 25 year energetic shift culminating on December 21, 2012 – occurred on August 16-17, 1987. The Harmonic Convergence was marked by a number of planets in Leo trining Jupiter in Aries and that also trine Saturn and Uranus in Saggitarius, an auspicious alignment, indicative of a collective energetic realignment and unification of purpose. This event marked the planetary embarkation upon a direct, spiritual path of evolution and ascension. As that has been the primary impetus of my life-path thus far, the correlation of my kenshō experiences with significant astronomical and astrological alignments is not lost on me. As I cannot date my initial experience, its relationship to astronomical factors remains a mystery.
One of the most important things that happens directly after a kenshō experience is the loss of personal emotions. At least, that is what it seems like. But it is not actually what happens. The actual experience of kenshō results in a virtual wiping of the synapses within the brain’s neural network. Memory remains intact, as does the ability to feel emotion. What has occurred is that the emotional ties that were once held in common with certain memories and states of being have been severed.
This can be very confusing at first, but grows easier to handle in time. The emotions gleaned from others, which have rushed into the vessel of the enlightened one, can fuel responses commiserate either with old patterns of thinking and feeling or they can be processed and released. Effectively, they can pass through without catching hold. For the newly awakened, there remain old patterns that it is possible for the energy of the emotions to catch hold to, drawing the individual into the conflict which results in further confusion and inner examination. This is why it remains necessary for individuals who have experienced kenshō to continue in their meditative practices as well as designating time to the recapitulation process as a method of self-clearing and re-attunement.
Life is too short. It seems like just yesterday that I was two, living in Maine, lying in the grass on a cool Fall’s day, intensely aware of the blue sky above me. Pale, green blades of grass streaked with gold rising above the fur of my hood, rustling gently, the sound of wind and the awareness that I was connected, that I was a part of something I could not define at such a tender age, but which I now recognize in remembrance as 
Fifteen years old, finding Carlos Casteneda’s “
Twenty-two years old and astral-projecting through 
The difficulty of doing so is known to us all by direct experience. Our perception of the world is constantly trying to distract us from the Now through the workings of our minds; our Egos, inordinately concerned with regrets about the Past and worries about the Future, obscuring the moment. 
Everything becomes a matter of urgency, a matter of the utmost importance, a matter of foremost importance to the 
The present, and Death still threatens comfort and complacency, as always. Life is too short. Those we love won’t be with us for long. Every decision we make counts. It’s never too late to say you’re sorry. Relationships are what much of life is all about, and when those people we love are gone, we won’t be able to hold them, to kiss them, to tell them that we love them, and to confess the deepest truths of our hearts and souls – and to bear witness to the confession of theirs – to the ones who love us and have loved us and will love us till the End of Forever draws close.
