Preface
Many people come to the spiritual path or quest as a result of years of suffering, a yearning or longing, disillusionment, the list is pretty long.
Not John. He was blindsided by reality at nineteen.
Experimenting with pot and psychedelics for eighteen months expanded his worldview and set his curiosity aflame about the nature of self and reality.
John found meditation and spiritual techniques made drugs seem insignificant and more of a barrier than an asset.
The power of being where we are with curiosity is the key to the vast treasure of the human being and reality.
To be clear: the door is our present experience, the key is curiosity. The depth of reality is here in this moment.
All is of and within consciousness. There is no need
to go and get or find.
Pointing At The Moon
The “inner” experiences shared herein can only be shared with the assistance of a reflective, comparative mind. As such, these descriptions lack the true immediacy and knowing of experience as it happens.
Any description of direct knowing is not direct knowing. Image, language, comparison (relativeknowing), and metaphor are the brain/mind’s way of knowing and communicating.
The mind then reifies and conceptualizes the imagined experience which then leads to languagingit. The pointing is now removed from immediacy by several layers of filters.
These processes are automatic and happen in nanoseconds. It’s what the brain/mind does.Resistance is futile.
Two “personal” things happen during this light-speed process:
1. The experience becomes “mine”
2. It is incorporated into “my story.” My story supports the notion of me existing through time.
Ecstasy
Can you recall your most intense, pleasurable orgasm?
Orgasm is the best comparison for what comes next.
Remember the excitation, the body charge, the heightened sensations and affects, the power of the instinctual drive?
When we’re lost in it, completely taken by it, when it rolls our eyes back in their sockets and sends the body into spasms and convulsions of discharge and pleasure – what’s not to like?
Imagine that happening in every single cell in your body simultaneously. Orgasmic explosions throughout you, beyond you, down to the most fundamental you of you.
Imagine that intense experience of yours magnified a thousand times, a million times.
Can you imagine?
This is where this book begins
Consciousness
Self-aware, self-knowing without a self.
Boundless, vastness with no spatial, nor temporal extension. Isness. Immediate hereness.
As the wave (dynamism) moves through consciousness every atom of consciousness it touches explodes in ecstatic bliss
Trillions times trillions of explosions - not even a close approximation.
Everywhere, ecstasy!
Of course, there are no atoms, there is no wave. This is the best the mind could offer up –pointing, pointing, pointing
1954
My central soul child. He has a gray perspective on life and the world. He is not an optimist (that birth continues to influence psychological development). He’s more of a cynic. In 40 years, I’ll be
reintroduced to him.
Out of Body
Leaving the world for spiritual dimensions totally plays into my personality fixation. Why botherwith this world, the ashcan of the universe, and its (my) problems when I can flee into the“spiritual?”
I’ve got a lot more suffering to experience, and collateral damage to spread before the ruin and the turn
Rumi
They chant HU (secret name for God) a lot in Eckankar to invoke the remembrance in the souland they practice presence of consciousness, though this has devolved more into personalityworship (my view).
Blue is associated with consciousness and it was this manifestation of it that first arose in myexperience. These days, the blue arises more as cobalt blue as it is mixed more and more withthe black of the Absolute reality.
So, soul travel is the soul riding the sound current and exploring the majesty and vastness ofreality
Dante's Inferno
I’m standing on a disk of energy, about three feet in diameter. It’s descending through various realms we might refer to as levels of hell.
I haven’t read about the Buddhist hell realms yet, so the only thing my mind has to compare my experience with is Dante’s Inferno.
As I pass through each realm, I can hear the suffering and there is knowing about each realm, without memory or mental content. The atmosphere contains all the information one might need.
Negativity abounds: fear, hatred, rage, starvation of mind and soul, rabid toxicity, and more. Forty years later, I can still taste it as I write these words.
There is demand for my attention from the inhabitants and entities.
I am not afraid, but I am aware that remaining “centered” is necessary so I don’t get “sucked in” for “fresh meat.”
I’m on a mission. I know this, but there was no briefing, no orders given that I recall, simply becoming aware in mid-descent.
Some poor soul’s sentence or penance is up. I’m here on an extraction mission. He, she, it is changing levels.
The disk stops, hovering, soundless. Some entity gets on and we start an ascent.
Now it gets really weird and challenging.
There are a host of small gremlin-like, really nasty entities with razor-sharp teeth gnashing at my ankles.
This is my first experience in these “inner realms” where I am aware that fear will doom me.
I don’t feel fear. I’m not tense. I’m actually quite calm and centered, not even focused, just here functioning.
A bit of time passes. I look down. I’m alone.
I look up. I ascend into the light.
Experience like this feeds my grandiosity. Insight I won’t have for years to come, even though it causes great suffering for me and others.
In short order, the grandiosity will bloom into fantasies of becoming a spiritual master.
Ha!
That ego, what a riot!
How does one discriminate between a dream, a lucid dream, an out-of-thebody experience (astral projection, soul travel, and etc.), imagination,hallucination and “real” experience?
I think it takes experience. Trying to point to it with concepts creates a lot of confusing and conflicting overlap, but the experiential vividness leaves no doubt. It also helps when there’s a group experience for comparison, but that’s a few pages ahead in your immediate future.
Unanimity
Ten years into Eckankar and I was becoming dissatisfied. I was having wild “spiritual” experiences but I was not changing.
After ten thousand people tell you you’re an asshole, you have to wonder, “Can that many people be wrong?”
The “dynamic inertia” of the personality and its ego structures engage the surface elements of transitory experience in a way that accommodates events and phenomena within a self-perpetuating paradigm of self.
We’re very adept at co-opting spiritual experience to keep from changing. I should speak only for myself. I am very adept at this. The rest of the world may not share my talent.
At that point in my life, around 30, I’m at the beginning stages of coming to see the number one insight I have into ego life, but the understanding lies in the future.
Someone has to pay for the blinders to come off!
Feelings
I’m lying fetal on the floor in my least favorite experience in life, the blubbering ball of protoplasm.
It only took this much of a lifetime and three nuclear explosions to bring down the wall. I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster for a few days that makes terrifying theme park rides pale in comparison.
When I actually got reconnected to my feelings a couple of days earlier, a very interesting thing happened.
People plumped up!
It was like I had been living in a world of two-dimensional cardboard cutouts and then someone added water.
Feelings I had been containing or defending against came rushing in flooding my nervous system.I thought, “This is what people experience? No wonder they act so crazy!”
There I lay with no strength, no power and my state of affairs totally hopeless. Years later, instudying the Diamond Approach, I learned that this is the true state of affairs for the ego-self.
It is the avoidance of this truth that keeps us spinning and chasing our elusive tails.
Ashes Of The Heart
Don’t worry about mending
Your broken heart
Or wearing it
On your shirt sleeve
That heart
Is only on loan
When the Owner
Wants it back
He’s going to
Reclaim it
Regardless
Of the shape
It’s in
A Dime A Dozen
I am pathless.
Thirteen years as a student of Eckankar, with hundreds of “spiritual experiences” under my belt ,or notches on my ego’s measuring stick, and I’m nowhere.I seem not to have changed a single iota, at least in human terms.
What’s the use of spiritual experience if it doesn’t change us?
If you look in the dictionary under “spiritual experiences are a dime a dozen,” you find my picture.Spiritual experience is experience of true nature, what is fundamental to “isness.”
As we move from and through the constructed self and its world, we can experience all kinds of dazzling, farout things – the lightshow.
The light show can be the event horizon of reality rising or it can be psychic discharge, experience of other realms, or anything that shakes up our world.From where I am today, spiritual experiences are a dime a dozen, but that does not undermine their value, significance, power, nor necessity for spiritual growth.
Afterall, they, like all of manifestation, arise from the same divine source and speak to the sacredlegacy each of us carries.The transformational magic of spiritual experience is in our capacity to be impacted, influenced, and worked in the immediacy of experience. In other words, to be challenged by the affect andeffects of reality instead of remaining in a rut of conceptual understanding as the holy grail ofknowledge and wisdom – being the lab rat in our process of transformation
God’s a real
Pain in the ass
It’s always pestering me
Like a worrisome fly
Buzzing around my ears and nose
I finally got so tired of my life
I started to enjoy the nagging
Now It’s telling me secrets
I have no right to hear
Love
Love
Let us stroll
Together
Hand-in-hand
Into the dark night
To a blackness
So complete and sublime
That what
We are touching
Is the most intimate
Mystery
Curiosity
Is life a journey?
We certainly go from here to there a lot in life.
Growing up in a military family, and then 33 years working at a major airline, I’ve certainlyjourneyed to a few places. I’ve been to most of the States, was graduated from high school inGermany and commercial lobster fished in the Caribbean at age twenty.
At nineteen, when I was blindsided by realty, I was like Jon Snow, I knew nothing (I know less now).
That experience put me on the spiritual path. Something awakened in my consciousness, and sought to know more, go deeper, emerge more into the foreground of my life, its life.
At that point in my life, that awakening was coopted into the “here-to-there” orientation of ego activity.
No guidance was available to help me suss out the nuances of my immediate experience.
What’s a spiritual path?
You’ll have to answer that on your own.
For me, path seems connected to “here-to-there.” I’m more curious about the here, not leaving here, but exploring it, keeping my ass in the chair.
Like drugs, Eckankar introduced me to amazing and astonishing things. It opened me up to possibilities and potentiality I could never have imagined.
But at the end of the day, soul travel and out-of-the-body experience was similar to traveling in this world, visiting a lot of places and winding up with a suitcase covered in travel-destinationstickers. A lot of mileage, little real change. It was still the familiar me flitting around and returning from the cosmos.
The greatest value of Eckankar was it made me aware of the subtlety and pervasiveness of ego life and how it coopts “spiritual experience” for a sense of a “higher” self, or to simply feed its grandiosity, or cover its core of deficiency.
It served me well. Those years brought me to the undeniable fact that I was the biggest problem in my life and others’. An aching arose in me. A longing to get real, as a human being.
But Eckankar had no wisdom or methodology to offer me for that quest.So, there I was wrestling with the whole notion of real change and transformation.
Who would have thought that ‘being where you are” with curiosity would turn out to be the key to the everything.
HERE is the doorway. THERE is the rejection of here, and the fuel for continued ego activity.
The conditioning of here-to-there is deep. We believe that we need goals to get there, and to accomplish this or that.
I thought a good life depended on me “figuring it out,” and using that knowledge for better, more rewarding here-to-there, this & that.
Being where we are is challenging. It’s subtle, full of nuance, history, and unconsciousness.
To really grok where we are, we need the experience of presence which gives us the clarity to discriminate ego activity from being.
When we’re present, we’re available for the loving intelligence of true nature to support the unwinding of our soul, as it reveals the depth and breadth of its (our) treasure.
The amazingly wonderful thing is that as we learn about presence, and to be where we are without messing with ourselves, the past dissolves, we emerge into the here, we wake up from the conditioning, and live a life instead of continuing attempts to get a life.
The Diamond Approach responds to that deep longing in my soul to be real, and (who would have thunk it? (shout out to Greg Brown)) is taking me deeper into the possibilities and potentiality of reality.
Journey?
Path?
I’m too engaged with the Mystery of being where I am.