Archived here are the blogs I write about inner life and outer life, inner nature and outer nature. Perhaps my writings on life, as I see it and experience it, may offer you some small insight or different perspective as you take your own journey.
With gratitude for all that life teaches me, I share my experiences.
Here are some excerpts from Out-of-Body Exploring by Preston Dennett.
Dreaming with awareness
“Most advanced astral travelers believe that everyone goes out-of-body every night. At first this seemed absurd to me, but as I began to remember more and more of what happened to me at night, I realized it was true. We may think we are asleep, we may not remember, but the reality is, all of us are very busy every night.”
“If you examine your dreams, you will see that most of them represent your fears and desires. By going out-of-body, you are forced to face these issues head-on.”
“Most out-of-body explorers report that they have spirit guides who assist them on their journeys. Others meet advanced spiritual beings who impart sage advice.”
Here are some thoughts from M. Scott Peck, M.D. in his book In Search of Stones:
“One age does not turn into another overnight. Between the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason there lay at least three hundred years of confusion. An old Age does not die easily. Today, firmly ensconced in the Age of Reason, we look back upon its pioneers—men like Galileo—with admiration and respect. For the Inquisition that persecuted him, we have only disrespect and find it hard to imagine how the authorities of the church could have been so narrow-minded, stupid, and downright cruel. Yet were we able to look through the eyes of those authorities at the dawning of the Age of Reason, we would not only have seen a crumbling of faith, we would also have been filled with terror at the impending disintegration of civilization and loss of all that gave meaning and coherency to life. Perhaps the greatest sins of religion are not those of faith per se but of faith threatened.” –page 6.
Here are some quotes from Carlos Castaneda in his book The Wheel of Time:
“To change our ideas of the world is the crux of shamanism. And stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it… When a warrior learns to stop the internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become attainable.” –pages 118-119.
“Whenever the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses, and the extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been heavily guarded by our words.” –page 128.
“Human beings are not objects; they have no solidity. They are round, luminous beings; they are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is only a description that was created to help them, to make their passage on earth convenient.” –page 135.
“Human beings are perceivers, but the world that they perceive is an illusion: an illusion created by the description that was told to them from the moment they were born…” –page 137.
Here are some interesting quotes from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche:
“To see through the eyes of the mountain eagle, the view of realization, is to look down on a landscape in which the boundaries that we imagined existed between life and death shade into each other and dissolve. The physicist David Bohm has described reality as being “unbroken wholeness in flowing movement.” What is seen by the masters, then, seen directly and with total understanding, is that flowing movement and that unbroken wholeness. What we, in our ignorance, call “life,” and what we, in our ignorance, call “death,” are merely different aspects of that wholeness and that movement. This is the vast and transforming vision opened up to us by the bardo teachings, and embodied in the lives of the supreme masters.” –page 341.
“To see death, then, through realized eyes, is to see death in the context of this wholeness, and as part, and only part, of this beginningless and endless movement. The uniqueness and power of the bardo teachings is that they reveal to us, by showing with total clarity the actual process of death, the actual process of life as well.” –page 342.
Here are some thoughts from me:
I believe that we are always in the middle of a tornado, our world collapsing, in the process of death while in the throes of life, but that we do not perceive our world in such a manner until something shakes us out of our complacency, out of our narrow-mindedness, out of our internal dialogue, and out of our ignorance. I believe that we are being gifted with one of those times of shake-up right now.
Look around; look at what is happening. Take a ride on the wings of the eagle and realize that this is the time of confusion before the dawning of a new Age. But, as the shamans, the Buddhists, and deep spiritual thinkers suggest: this collapse is constantly presented to us—we are just not aware of it. And this is where Harold Camping, the end of the world predictor, gets it wrong. The end of the world is an every day occurrence and we all have the opportunity to grab onto the freedom of that clarity every day.
If we can learn how to let go of our reason—our internal dialogue, our conjuring mind, and our description of the world as we have been taught—and open up to the realization that everything is an illusion, we can enter a new reality. We can do this volitionally, learning how to shift our perceptions and how to experience the endless movement of energy, our own included, as it flows in the universe.
Through the process of recapitulation we learn to shed our old selves, our old perceptions and ideas of the self and the world, our self-importance, our attachments to the illusions of this world that we so solidly stand upon. In so doing we relieve ourselves of adherence to beliefs that do not truly serve us if we are ready to evolve into a new understanding of life and death.
We can experience our energetic wholeness in total freedom by constantly challenging ourselves to shatter our world as we have always perceived it, by refusing to attach to the illusions of this world. Those illusions are placed upon us from the moment we are born. If we can break our fixation with reality as we have been taught to perceive it, we might just discover that what is happening in the world, every day, is nicely set up to help us shatter those illusions. Even a momentary glimpse of a different idea of ourselves offers us the opportunity to gain in awareness, to aid us in letting go—just a little bit more—of all that holds us so attached to what we believe is so important and so dear.
Today, across America, many people are waking to a shattered world, everything gone. The tornadoes that have been touching down bringing the end of the world to so many lives remind us that we cannot hold onto anything. In such a moment we are offered the experience of impermanence. So what do we do when we stand there with nothing, when our dreams and our lives are shattered, totally gone?
This is the moment of enlightenment, the moment of freedom in collapse, the experience of death in life. The big challenge is to retain the experience of this moment of death; of ourselves without attachments, without belongings, totally released from the familiar. The is the gap moment that allows us a glimpse of our eternal selves while we still stand firmly in this world.
So, can we accept the convenience of our solidity long enough to embrace the fact that it is offered as a means from which to launch our awareness, as the shamans would pose? Can we allow ourselves to embrace this moment of impermanence, as the Buddhists would call it, as our big moment of evolutionary enlightenment? Can we hold onto our experience and use it to truly shift us away from our old ideas, needs, and desires? Can we use it to enter a new Age, an Age of true Enlightenment as the deep spiritual seekers understand it?
These are the challenges that the shamans, Buddhists, and deep spiritual seekers know are the moments that teach us how to face our deaths, but also offer us the opportunity to face our lives in the same manner. These are the moments of shattering the illusions we hold onto, though what we are really being shown is that we cannot hold onto anything and we don’t need to either.
We are beings who are going to die, as the shamans say. Yes, it’s a very scary thought, but can we live each day with that foremost in our thoughts, basing our lives on that idea? Can we live beyond the illusions of this world, and enter the flowing movement of unbroken wholeness? It’s not really that hard to do, we’re already doing it, every day!
Perhaps we just haven’t fully perceived it that way yet, but we have so many daily opportunities to do so. Every day is the end of the world.
“The time will come when mankind will understand. The most important scientists will come and pay a visit to the grandmother on her plot of land. Famished, they will ask her to give them a tomato for something to eat. The scientists and their illusory creations are not needed by that grandmother today. She knows nothing of them herself, nor does she want to know. She lives a quiet life without the scientists’ help, while they cannot live without her. They inhabit a world of fruitless illusions, leading nowhere. She is with the natural earth and the whole Universe. The Universe needs her, it does not need them.” —From The Space of Love, Book 3 in The Ringing Cedars of Russia Series.
A trinity of recent dreams has afforded me a deeper awareness of nature and life, nature and life as we perceive them in this reality, nature and life as powerful beyond the ideals and hubris of mankind, and nature and life as eternal energy.
The first dream, which has recurred in some form or another throughout my life, since early childhood, depicts a barren, burned out landscape after some kind of bomb had fallen or fire has raged. Perhaps this dream first originated as a result of the cold war, when the illusive Iron Curtain was spoken of almost daily, the threat of attack from Russia as great as getting a simple cold. During my elementary school years we had frequent bomb drills, the way school children now have fire drills, learning to go into the hallway of the school building and duck down and cover our heads, or wind our way into the dark basement, hundreds of kids standing in the dark awaiting the threat of annihilation, just the push of a button away. Sometimes the nuns at my Catholic school were calm during these drills, at other times a heightened sense of urgency made the drill seem very real, the danger imminent.
Perhaps this dream of annihilation originated from within my own unconscious, teaching me something about myself, my true potential. In any case, I dreamed this dream again a few nights ago. It was the same dream as always. First, I notice that the earth is entirely burned to blackened cinders, nothing is left, it is totally razed, as if indeed an atomic bomb, a nuclear attack, or a huge firestorm has come through, completely wiping out every living thing on the entire planet. Not a twig or blade of grass remains, not a building or structure, not another human being. I am alone in this charred landscape.
Nature in renewal
I am never frightened in this dream. As I stand and calmly gaze out over this barren landscape, understanding that I must somehow find the means to survive on my own, I begin to see the stirrings of new life. The earth at my feet begins to crack open and as I stoop down to peer closely at the ground I see tiny green shoots beginning to poke up out of the earth, life seeking light, nature regenerating itself from the most devastating of circumstances. Each time I have this dream I receive the same message: Nothing can destroy nature; life will always find a means of seeking its full potential, and that, no matter what happens, the seeds of life are always present, within me too.
The second dream I had took this idea one step further. In this dream, I am attempting to invigorate life energy in others, to inject enlightening ideas, literally using a hypodermic needle to inject positive life energy into people’s arms. I knew that people were putting all kinds of things into their bodies in an effort to evolve, using all kinds of spiritual and mental processes and nutritional substances, but I saw how difficult it was for people. I wanted to help ease their sufferings. I knew that relief was only just an injection away. If I could just inject enough people with the right stuff the world would be a better place. It was not hubris or inflation on my part, just concern for the suffering of the struggling masses that made me want to help in whatever way I could.
Let it be...
In this dream, I was told to stop trying to control nature, that nature itself, within each human being on earth, would right itself, that everyone had the potential within to grow and find true alignment with nature, in their own time. The message was: Let nature take its course; it will come out right in the end, as it should be.
The third dream went again another step further. Now I had learned that nature was unstoppable, that it would correct itself when the time was right, but in this third dream I was asked to notice something else.
In this third dream, I am teaching a nature drawing class, asking everyone in the class to really look closely at the leaves and flowers and trees we are drawing, at the landscapes and scenes of nature that lie before us. In this dream, spring is in full bloom, everything is bright green, fully alive, perfectly beautiful, nice and neatly returned to pristine beauty after a long hard winter. The message here is to notice that even though the landscape has returned to a recognizable state, we must not assume that it is stagnant. We must not fall into complacency or take anything for granted.
“If you look closely,” a dream voice tells me, “you will notice that everything is still growing and changing, that nature never stops!” I ask all of my drawing students to peer closely at the blades of grass, the leaves of lettuce and the tips of the branches before them.
“Look,” I say, “everything is still in motion, always changing.”
This is the message of this third dream: to not stagnate or assume that just because everything has returned to a semblance of normalcy that it’s so. No, nature is doing so much more. We too have this same potential, this same life inside us. We are all in constant flux; like nature, our growing time is endless.
As we now face the truth of a rapidly changing natural world, as we continue to drill for oil and frack for natural gas, as we continue to send men into the depths of the earth to dig for coal that blackens not only their lungs but the air we all breathe, as we return to complacency after the recent natural events, saying that everything will take care of itself, we must look more closely at the decisions we make.
Yes, we must face the truth that we may destroy the earth, as depicted in my first dream. We must remember that we are the ones who have made the bombs that destroy nature, the nuclear power plants that hold annihilation at their core, with the potential to destroy the earth. We contaminate our water, the air, the earth we grow our food in. We do have the power to destroy and we may well be the generation that tips the scales. We may have to accept our part in annihilating ourselves. So what then?
Do we simply sit back and let that happen? Is that where we are now? Are we so disconnected from nature and our true interconnected potential that we will let that happen? Maybe.
The decision to grow...
Maybe we are the ones who will really change the world; we do hold that power, in a destructive sense, right now, at this moment in time, as well as in a positive sense if we so choose. But we do not have the power of nature to renew the earth. That power belongs solely to nature. We do not have the power to inject life, as I tried to do in my second dream, a false hope on my part, because real change and new life can only happen when people are ready to change and embrace new life. But we all have the power to make decisions to change, right now, so that our hubris does not destroy us and all other living things on this earth.
As in my third dream, if we observe the power of nature, use it as our guide, showing us that we are life itself, we are the energy of nature and life too, we are offered the opportunity to grasp that life will go on, in some form, with us or without us. Just as nature restores itself and changes constantly, in alignment with the energy of life itself, so do we have that same potential for unending life energy inside us. The final message of my third dream was that life is unending, that it never stops, that in some fashion it will keep going.
Yes, we must let nature take its course, but we must be in alignment with true nature, not with what we have done to her, not what we want to keep doing to her, curtailing nature to fit our needs. We must get in alignment with the fact that nature has the power to restore, but we must not be so accepting and complacent of this power either. We must wake up and read the signs of nature. She is asking us to change now and we must accept that we do have the power to enact change.
I do not accept that we are doomed, though it often feels that way. But I also feel that it is critical that we make personal and universal choices that uphold the truth of life.
Life is eternal, always changing and growing, in constant flux.
Often we are dragged into recapitulation, a shamanic term for revisiting memories, by the usher, the moment of collapse of one reality as we enter another. The usher shows us something of cataclysmic proportions, jolting us out of our complacent and compliant life, and asks us to do inner work. We can also do recapitulation volitionally, by choosing to mindfully investigate something about ourselves that constantly needles us, that just won’t go away yet does not interrupt the flow of our lives. Such needles are often the first awakenings that we have deeper issues to resolve.
Not all recapitulation involves memories. It may also involve habits and behaviors that we do automatically, without thinking, though they may in fact be keeping us from evolving and growing. The following quote, from Full Catastrophe Living by John Kabat-Zinn, offers a gentle approach to mindful recapitulation, a nice description of a process that will, as we persist in its practice, aid us on our journey of change. Here is what he says:
Like the cat, be mindful and alert
“The way of mindfulness is to accept ourselves right now, as we are, symptoms or no symptoms, pain or no pain, fear or no fear. Instead of rejecting our experiences as undesirable, we ask, “What is this symptom saying, what is it telling me about my body and my mind right now?” We allow ourselves, for a moment at least, to go right into the full-blown feeling of the symptom. This takes a certain amount of courage, especially if the symptom involves pain or a chronic illness, or fear of death. But you can at least “dip your toe in” by trying it just a little, say for ten seconds, just to move in a little closer for a clearer look.”
Be courageous. Change your world. Change the entire world
