4 posts tagged “spiritual”

There is a quiet place, within yourself, away from the storm. In the center of the whipping winds and stinging rain, there is sunlight, peace and tranquility.

This world, and often this blog, is often full of the terrible side of life – the things people should know about, don’t really want to know about, might want to think about and could benefit from being aware of…but also could suffer from, might be anguished by, become fearful of, or worry about.

In the center of all that, I want to remind myself and others, is a place of serenity. Of Knowing. Of a warm, all-encompassing and comforting love. It is there. At the center of all our atoms is the vacuum, that which binds and connects all things. But we must all participate in the act of finding it. At the very least we must recognize it is there and still the mind, to prepare our awareness. To create a place within ourselves for that quiet feather to land.

This can be very difficult, or it can be amazingly simple. We alone control our bodies, and our reactions towards the outer world. If we don’t – well, go back and read some of the things from my second paragraph. Yes, there are agendas, energies and devices being set against our peace of mind. But they are not our god. Our spirits have much, much greater powers than these.

Awareness is the first step. Then there are things we can do to foil them, to fight that battle. The armor is there. Find it and put it on. Go back and read the old masters. They knew this enemy. This type of struggle is exactly what they were referring to.

Enlightenment can come in a day; even in a minute, a second. Or it can come long and painfully, after much suffering. Just ask Buddha.

The Way can be lined with annoyances and unscrupulous people. But it is always there, ready to receive, ready to heal, ready to teach. Just ask Lao Tzu.

Love is our ultimate weapon. The energy we radiate back out into the world, even as we are bombarded with unimaginable atrocities and negativity, is what will change our reality. Just ask Jesus.

It’s only as hard as we think it is. We only have as much power as we allow ourselves to have. For that matter, the dark side only has as much power as we allow it to have.  Just ask Yoda.

We are all bubbles of energy that radiate far outside our physical bodies, and interact with our reality; a feedback loop of information going in and out. Which information will we choose to receive, which shall influence us? And which shall we choose to release back out into the world?

Follow your heart, not the programmed knee-jerk reactions of your world gone mad. Take back what is rightfully yours. Peace of mind. Harmony. Start with yourself. Many will follow; meanwhile, just stay strong. Stay fiercely focused. We are poised for the most incredible journey we can imagine. Yes, – amidst the chaos of these days, is a bright and wonderful future, hiding there in the center of it all. Waiting for us to see it.

These are not pipe dreams. It can and indeed will happen. The question only remains, who will join me on this Great Journey? Who will be there to guide me when I fall down?

Please note a couple of excellent recent articles by two of my esteemed ‘blogeagues’, Kingsley Dennis and Neil Kramer, whose insights and intelligence continue to inspire me here at Surfing the Tao.

Neil Kramer has blessed us yet again with another thoughtful post over at The Cleaver, entitled What Lies Beneath: Is Belief a Big Con? From religions and spirituality to new physics and our concept of reality itself, how and what we believe, and how we apply these beliefs, can either uplift and heal, or bring certain doom. Our traditional concept of reality, including ‘mainstream’ science, must at some point begin to absorb the study of consciousness itself, to take a note from our ancient sources of wisdom. The two are intricately intertwined on a level we perhaps have not yet come to terms with. Certainly “unveiling the Control System” is important initially, but how we react and what we do with that knowledge is the ultimate key to an enlightened and sustainable future. It’s all in how we catch the wave.

One might understand why I mention Neil’s post in the same breath as Kingsley’s incredibly well-researched article, Global Gridlock: How the US Military-Industrial Complex Seeks to Contain and Control the Earth and its Eco-System. Kingsley does indeed note the spiritual implications of our ‘new reality’ in various posts on his blog, Between Both Worlds, and so this most recent article is received in the spirit of understanding there is a vast amount of information out there we need to be made aware of. The government is intent on achieving dominance over the entire electromagnetic spectrum, including the development of a ’synchronic’ society with regards to tracking and monitoring even the biological elements – this is powerful information that could have vast implications with regards to our future as a society, and even as living beings within it. Making well-informed decisions about how we progress in this world is imperative, and Kingsley is a very important source to pay attention to on that front.

“…the Master concerns himself with the depths, and not the surface, with the fruit and not the flower…” - Tao Te Ching, #38

“I believe that the World Wide Web is, as a matter of fact, the noogenesis of the noosphere.” - Ralph Abraham, The Evolutionary Mind (1988)

Lawrence Hagerty wrote in The Spirit of the Internet,“…the Internet is not the noosphere. It is merely an infrastructure that is now available for the noosphere to use.” Hagerty goes on to profess, “I believe that the Internet is serving as just such an attractor, or basin of attraction, drawing the Earth’s most creative minds into a synergistic union out of which a new form of human consciousness can arise from the wells of chaos.“

The noosphere is a term created by Jesuit priest/radical thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose ideas were frankly force-fed to me in college in the eighties (I happened to attend a Jesuit university where he was practically worshiped as a god). For that reason perhaps I wrongly assumed his teachings were more widespread than they actually were at the time. But I find no uncertain irony that his ideas continue to haunt my own delightfully synchronous journey towards Singularity.

Not the technological singularity of Ray Kurzweil; I’m talking more about what’s happening over at Reality Sandwich, and other important, alternative think tanks of our time. “New science” is termed thusly because, reminiscent of Capra’s intuitions of decades past, scientific discoveries are merged with new (and perhaps very old) interpretations of consciousness. This is how it should be; the Newtonian universe must ultimately be discarded in favor of the quantum discoveries that tickle our brains, easing us into new frontiers of existence, consciousness and human evolution. The homo cyber I find mentioned here and there, if left alone in the wilderness of pure artificial or mechanistic intelligence, would be the unfortunate result of not taking the final step of this process. Like refusing to take the red pill, our psyches would be left to rot inside the prison Matrix of third dimensional space-time. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” reminds Shakespeare.

The Internet may be Noosphere 1.0, a precursor to an enlightened state of consciousness; or perhaps, Noosphere for Beginners, or Noosphere for Dummies. Though arguably a creation of Big Brother’s sinister and eavesdropping omnipresence, the Internet is also being used, perfectly a la Tao, as a vehicle to transmit thoughts and ideas in preparation for a purely telepathic noosphere. The next several years its role will be vastly influential in terms of the global progression of consciousness, and I urge all to participate as they can until then (or until the government curtails this freedom, much as it has done with suppressing entheogens); but at some point, perhaps soon, the circuits and transistors will go the way of the covered wagon. Many of us will leave our electronic devices abandoned on the beach as we eventually look up and realize the great sea of enlightenment and oneness is before us, and go in for a dip – never to return. The key to ridding ourselves of the shackles of this reality is love, pure and simple. Love is the thing no machine can transmit; love is the unique trait, or ability, that will catapult our transformation from homo sapiens not to homo cyber, but to homo luminus.

The minds at work on the great consciousness project at this moment are alive during this time not by accident. They are all Surfing the Tao though they may not be aware of it. We are all giving what we have, and taking what we need, in some kind of post-modern, spirit-driven, psychedelic communistic mind trip, hastened by our collective visions of 2012 and beyond. Hagerty calles it entheospace; I might describe the sensation as a sort of dreamstate, finding oneself floating down a river of consciousness, gently colliding with others riding down the same stream in a kind of synchronistic, fractal pattern of atunement, as we all slip closer to the great sea.

Daniel Pinchbeck’s first book was entitled, Breaking Open the Head – which I mention here not for its particular content, which is a mind-expanding examination of the entheogenic experience, but because it so aptly illustrates my own particular state of being.

My own head cracked in college, during several misguided entheogenic experiences. I discovered Terence McKenna, but as far as spirituality goes, I was definitely a seeker who didn’t really want to spend any time looking.

This all changed in 1999. The previous fracture, which had begun to scar over, was rent asunder, and a torrent of new knowledge and higher frequencies began to stream in. I will only say: the true masters are truly hidden. And it is meant to stay that way, for now, perhaps because actual participants can often teach each other more in the beginning. But I was urged to continue meditating, and before long I had what Neil Kramer over at The Cleaver might call a fourth dimensional experience.

Without any entheogenic aid, I crossed over into the void. Suddenly, I Knew.

There are no further words for what I experienced. The language simply doesn’t exist. But it changed everything I knew, all that I was. What followed was years of reading, researching, listening, loving, meditating and change. Many of the books that appeared as if by magic I have listed here. My intellectual side was frustrated, but my spirit was at peace for the first time I can remember in my adult life. The end result of that was, I wrote a book, which was really just a cathartic expression of my overwhelmed psyche.

My own path is still guided by amazing synchronicity and coincidence. I find it startling how often I find articles written about the very subject I had been ruminating about. How I discover brilliant minds have already found answers to the questions I have been asking. How so many of our paths are beginning to converge on the Great Path. Spirituality, Taoism, 2012, eschatology, Planet X, the Matrix, conspiracy, sinister agendas, alien technology, symbology, synchromysticism, mind control, electromagnetism, alternative energy, quantum physics, plasma physics, torsion physics, entheogenic-inspired thought and conscious enlightenment, ecocentric living, — the puzzle pieces are coming together rapidly. I cannot explain how I know what I Know, yet I will say; the quickening is upon us. The noosphere is coalescing. The Puzzle of Being, and the question of consciousness, is in the process of being realized by a vast cadre of psycho-cryptographers.

The great irony is, I sense, that this enlightened, super-charged, noospheric state of being is and has always has been, here and now. This ancient Way that has been lost during our fall, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, is now being quickly rediscovered, picked up and dusted off as some kind of primordial reflex to protect ourselves from what we subconsciously know is coming. We are remembering, so that we will survive.

I remember Y2K. Regarding expectations for 2012, the intensity of thought, intellect, spirit, and energy now in 2008 is somewhat on par with what happened the months previous to Y2K. And we have nearly five years left. What incredible postulations, theories, discoveries, transitions, realizations, opportunities, manifestations, creations and expectations will surface between now and then?

And what will happen on December 21, 2012 at 11:11 universal time? That remains to be seen; but to prepare for either global catastrophe, psychedelic wormholes or simply more life as we know it – the only answer is, and always will be: love, peace and harmony.

Sometimes I wonder how I find what I do here online – and when I do, I wonder what else I’m missing. I’m only one person. Only one computer. Only so many hours in the day.

If you’ve made it this far, please consider leaving a comment here regarding what author, what religion, what spiritual path, what thinker, what scientist, what discovery, what issue, what website, what experience – what ANYTHING that has made a difference for you on your journey.

Give what you have. Take what you need.

As it acts in the world, the Tao

is like the bending of a bow.

The top if bent downward;

the bottom is bent up.

It adjusts excess and deficiency

so that there is perfect balance.

It takes from what is too much

and gives to what isn’t enough.

– Tao Te Ching #77

On any journey of self-discovery and seeking the unknowable, one cannot help but notice the inextricable and inevitable influence of place upon progress-to-date – until, of course, one reaches the place of no-place.

Though my own metaphysical journey started in Los Angeles, it quickly became clear that at least for me, further advancement wasn’t going to be easy there; I had to get out. Not to mention that I had, during this initiatory period, stepped foot on this island for the first time and was simply changed forever. Frankly I couldn’t get back here fast enough.

Certain places on the globe seem to resonate with different people for whatever reason; one friend is currently finding solace in the Southwest, another longs for home in Switzerland while away on business, while yet another perhaps more gypsy soul is currently in debate with this particular crazy rock. The ancients knew certain locations resonated with specific planetary energies, and built their monuments/observatories accordingly to harness or intensify the power – for what uses, I might suppose were many.

In terms of spiritual development, paying attention is the key. A place can teach, if we allow it to. I can speak from experience about the Big Island; its energy is palpable, electric, shocking, penetrating and alive. It’s like the Great Pyramid of the Pacific. If tuned to its particular radiance, it tends to force a certain coming-to-terms with elements of oneself in clear and often disturbing reflection, far more rapidly than might normally occur in life somewhere else. Perhaps it’s the seemingly concentrated mega-supernaturality of the place, all confined here on a relatively small patch of land out in the middle of thousands of miles of ocean; I don’t really know what makes this place so magical and transformative. But you can either face yourself, and perhaps some difficult challenges, or you can run away. Trust me; plenty of people choose the latter.

This place isn’t for everyone, and I image it’s the same for all the islands. It’s not a little ironic that “Lost” is filmed in Hawaii – because it’s easy to get lost here, trapped in a kind of psychical warfare with Self in which intriguing clues to endless puzzles dot the landscape of existence, with no escape. This is a unique place which at first seems to be a refuge, where a calm, slow-paced way of life accented by warm weather, beaches and aloha beckons; but a violent and molten core suggests a more turbulent spiritual undercurrent. After about two years, more or less, newcomers are either fully absorbed in the trials by fire and subsequent honing of their character, or are in the process of being expelled. Residents know, the island seems to pick and choose who stays here, simply spitting out the rest. One either resonates with this place, or not – and the ‘nots’ often get a solid kick in the rear on the way out.

In the six years I’ve been here, I can attest to the transformation that has occurred within me – and is still taking place. It hasn’t all been plumeria blossoms and coconuts. I’m stronger, calmer, wiser, but not before some difficult experiences; I exorcised not a few demons, walked the coals, and witnessed the same in loved ones around me who came here. This island, as I’m sure other places too, will heal you, strengthen you and teach you – if you pay attention and let go of your expectations. If you force your own ego upon it and refuse to listen, this island will shake you, rattle you, and even burn you or swallow you whole.

It’s as if this haunted isle is a microcosm of the Tao; within it - for some - are all the tools necessary for transformation of spirit and character, in loudly resonating abundance. Wrong choices exist glaringly alongside the right ones; not necessarily good or bad, as all things become part of one’s conscious development. But certainly they depend on one’s level of awareness and participation; there are plenty of lost souls wandering around out here too, as in any place. Personally I feel blessed to have been led somewhere I could move through my own journey at what seems to be an accelerated pace – where every step rings clearly, announcing itself, sometimes painful, sometimes joyous – and the in-between, no-man’s time can be an intense paradox of aware not-knowing. In another place, perhaps these signposts might have gone unnoticed under the thundering din of a materialistic, overcrowded, overbuilt and neon-lit now. In another place, perhaps my own tuning fork might have been out of phase.

Certainly Surfing the Tao is a Way of many diverse paths, and the point of it all is to find the essence of one’s own experience – discovering Self, discovering the Tao, and the links therein; discovering the Way of Life and love as it unfolds in an increasingly chaotic world. Every place and person will be its own, and these paths will all someday converge on the Great Path, within the spirits and hearts of those willing few. I can only suggest that place can play a far more important role in our journey than we may realize. Pay attention and the Tao will lead.