The Egyptian principle of Ma'at is a level of consciousness that revolves around a formula of Love (the heart) under will (conscious attention). In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the feather of Ma'at is what your heart is weighed against, to see if you are worthy of passing through to "Heaven" or if you are to suffer in "Hell". If your heart is as light as a feather you can pass, otherwise you are condemned to suffering. If you view "Heaven" and "Hell" as abstract concepts, and dimensions of karmic destiny to fulfill - Heaven is ascension to another realm of consciousness, while Hell can be viewed at as another incarnation on planet Earth.
Earth is a school, where we are taught by experience, and shaped by the programming we receive from what we surround ourselves with. We are born into this world, exactly as we should be, but we are tricked into believing we are to "become" something more, something different than who we really are. The tricks, turns, triumph and tragedy are all merely tests to see how light we can keep our hearts, even during the darkest moments of this reality. There is no permanence, aside from impermanence, and living the Ma'at principle is the preservation of this light.
The principle of complete surrender to the heart, is something that requires practice. For those who are in the midst of this awakening process, the task to remain at a high vibration can be challenging because not all hear the same "music". Ma'at teaches us (what we constantly reiterate) that being is doing, and it is not our job to force others to understand...merely be, suggest, and live your True Will.
"Once you comprehend your True Will and begin to work on it, you'll draw people to you without conscious effort. Some will have interest in action congruent with your own, others will diverge, and still others may oppose you. In all cases, you're obliged to help each one's spiritual evolution, according to individual need. This does not mean that you should do other people's work, or even imply that you could. The most you need to do is teach by example, suggest reading material, and raise as many questions as you answer."
While learning about how powerful you really are, and the true nature of The Universe is the most exciting journey to embark on, and you want to shout it from the rooftops to awaken everyone from their slumber...you must understand the importance of silence, and the power of suggestion. You can't create anyone else's reality aside from your own, and in order to facilitate change, you must live, and provide "gnosis" through suggestion, and inspiration.
Nobody likes to be told what to do, and while it may be frustrating, you just have to let go of the attachment to other's personal karmic destiny. It's a difficult "dance", but following your own choreography will eventually inspire others to "dance" as well...and the resistance will dissolve in time.
"The only way to Dance the Mask successfully is to remember that behind the mask there is no dancer, only dance." - Nema
All experience is initiation to a higher or lower realm based off of the lightness of your being. Adversity is the greatest teacher, and feeling good about the contrast will allow you to feel "God". Feeling goodness, is feeling "Godness"...being light, delicate, and airy, but still maintaining the strength to fly, to soar above the Earthly plane is the principle of Ma'at. The "Godness" is the magic, and the Ma'at is the magick (see: "The Difference Between Magic and Magick").
When I first came across Christie Marie Sheldon’s talk from Awesomeness Fest on Youtube titled, ‘How to change your frequency to change your reality,’ the skepticism was hard to hold back. While I try to maintain a healthy distance from lifestyle coaches, internet savvy spiritual leaders and self-help gurus of all kind- I am also aware that treating everything to be hogwash keeps me from discovering information that can be genuinely helpful and sometimes, like in this case, even life changing. Though it is best to be wary of many of her projected metrics (love vibrations?), her talk is eye opening in many ways.
Sheldon raises some hard hitting points to being with-ones that if you are willing to be honest with yourself- will make you squirm.
“If you look at the world the way I see it, you will then be tapped into the causal plane where everything can be changed. Because everything you see in the out-picturing of your life really is the effect of your life. And everything that created it was created by all your thoughts, beliefs, ideologies and every judgement you’ve ever made. Those points of you make up your reality. That’s why your life is the way it is.”
"You fool"
To demonstrate her question, “Can you and your energy influence your environment?”, Sheldon cites Dr. Emoto’s experiment with water crystals. In 1994 Dr. Masaru Emoto conducted an experiment with water to test out a hypothesis about how positive and negative energies affect our environment. He froze bottled water and studied the molecules under a microscope. What he saw were shapeless molecules. Subsequently he froze other bottles of water and labelled them with key phrases: ‘Love and thanks,’, ‘I hate you. You make me sick,’ ‘Joy,’, ‘You fool,’ and purportedly the most powerful of them all- ‘Gratitude.’ These images, posted by Emoto on his website, detail what the water crystals from each label look like after a few hours of refrigeration.
Everything is combination of energetic vibration. As vibration resonates, it makes some tangible objects. The photograph of crystals is neither science nor religion. Nevertheless, the world it shows is truth, and there is no doubt that many messages essential to our lives are hidden in it.”
"You disgust me"
Dr. Emoto’s findings have their own share of supporters and critics and you should form your own opinion on the veracity of his claims. Sheldon endorses them wholeheartedly and asks us to think that given the human body is made up of 70 % water, what kind of energies are we transmitting in our own lives when we go are so hard on ourselves for our mistakes (You fool) and judge others constantly. If all this seems like fantasy, then here is some hard science-not to back up Dr. Emoto’s study-but to support the ideas that he is peddling. “New studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals, whether to eat, mate or devour an iced latte, are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the program it chooses,” reports the New York Times regarding arecently concluded Yale research.
Think of yourself as a computer. The windows you browse (your consciousness), the websites you visit, what you tweet, post on Facebook or Instagram and the kind of content you consume informs your thoughts, opinions and perceptions and guide your understanding of the world. But the impressions do not stop happening once you close the tabs and switch off your browser. The programs installed in the machine continue running and it is they which ensure the efficiency of the machine.
"Peace"
The good news here is that you can choose to install what programs you like and remove the ones that are weighing you down and affecting you negatively. The earlier belief was that life is mostly predetermined for us because our temperament, attitude and outlook is influenced by our genetic and molecular makeup- a gift inherited from our parents and the gene pool they come from. It is these factors which influence our thoughts, perceptions and behaviours and ultimately our actions.
But a slew of new research shows that the truth is entirely opposite. Our thoughts, perceptions and judgements directly affect our biology. So the more self-critical and judgemental you are, the more your subconscious will work to convince you of your worthlessness. But if you make a habit of surrounding yourself with positive reminders and vibes, then the same thoughts will direct your actions towards goal orienting behaviour.Though you can’t control how your subconscious directs your actions and perceptions, you can choose what to feed it.
Cellular biologist Bruce Lipton, a leading authority in this field, has this to say: “Your mind will adjust the body’s biology and behaviour to fit with your beliefs. If you’ve been told you’ll die in six months and your mind believes it, you most likely will die in six months. That’s called the nocebo effect, the result of a negative thought, which is the opposite of the placebo effect, where healing is mediated by a positive thought.”
In fact the power of thoughts are allegedly so powerful that they not only affect ourselves but, when harnessed collectively, can change the outcomes of society as a whole. This phenomenon is termed the Maharishi Effect. First published in a paper in 1976, it was reported that when 1% of a community practiced the transcendental meditation program, the crime rate was reduced by 16% on average. In 1960 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founding father of this movement, predicted that one percent of a population practicing transcendental meditation technique would produce measurable improvements in the quality of life for the whole population.
Though not without its share of skeptics and critics (who raise fair points), the Maharishi effect has nevertheless been studied under rigorous scientific methodology and has, for decades now, yielded stunning results which defy human logic.
Dr. Lipton believes that gene activity changes on a daily basis, that the perception of the mind is reflected in the chemistry of the body. Twenty first century science finally proves what Buddhist philosophers and ancient statesmen knew all along- that an individual’s full potential can only be realised when there is complete harmony between the soul and the body.
Sheldon says, “You are a living, perceiving, knowing being who is in a body. As an infinite being, there are two things that will determine your fate- choice and awareness.”
She goes on to state that choice will always overrule. That we have to choose something really powerfully. Then realize all the things that have come up that stand in the way of us carrying out that choice. “Then all you have to do is just clear those blocks one by one in your subconscious.”
Our thoughts affect our reality. If you want to change your reality, you know where to begin.
It was 1997. I was visiting the Neem Karoli Baba ashram in Vrindaban, India, when I learned that my old friend and spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, had had a major, possibly life-threatening stroke. How strange to hear such news in that particular place, which took me over 20 years to visit since first hearing Ram Dass's wondrous stories about Maharaj-ji in the mid '70s. ("Maharaj-ji" is the less formal, affectionate honorific used by Neem Karoli Baba's devotees.)
In a shamefully narcissistic manner, one of my first thoughts had to do with me. Because of all his work in the field of death and dying, not to mention being my teacher, I always assumed that if push ever came to shove and I was lying in my death bed somewhere, I'd call on Ram Dass to come sit with me through the process and all would be well. It simply never dawned on me that he was 22 years my senior, and, barring unforeseen tragic events, he was quite likely going to pre-decease me. I was a bit in shock at what should have been an obvious revelation, and felt orphaned.
Ram Dass demonstrated through his stroke experience what it means to truly walk one's talk, for he managed to re-frame a frightening, painful and shocking event that would completely change his life and abilities forever, into what he would eventually refer to as "fierce grace" (which also became the title of a wonderful film about his ordeal.) The teaching he offered is that all circumstances -- seemingly good or bad from our own perspective -- can be seen, felt and even known as God's grace, if one is but willing to hold them that way and learn from them rather than merely complain and be the unfortunate victim of a terrible turn of events in one's life.
Of course, being a spiritual hero to thousands, Ram Dass really had no choice; he couldn't very well indulge in kvetching about his reality for very long, or behaving as if God and his guru were somehow suddenly absent from the universe! Clearly, if God is real and present -- no matter what happens -- then one must learn to accept all experiences ultimately as the grace of God, some more fierce than others.
For most of us, though, how could having a stroke, being paralyzed on one side, and initially losing nearly all of your speech capacity, possibly be the grace of God? If such a thing happened to me, I know I'd be extremely pissed off at God, and asking questions like, "What about playing guitar and piano? Or bicycling? I mean, I teach movement and dance for crying out loud!"
Rabbi Harold Kushner's famous query comes to mind: "Where is God when bad things happen to good people?" According to the mystics among us, the answer is always the same: God is present, and cannot possibly be elsewhere, for the "One Vast Eternal Omnipresent Source of All Being and Existence " certainly cannot be off at a brothel in Thailand while you're being mugged in New York City. No, as Thich Nat Hanh might say, God is the mugger and the mugged (and the Thai prostitute). Given the daily state of affairs in our own lives as well as the headlines from around the world that bombard us each morning, if any of us presume to intuit the presence of God, then that presence is clearly not impacted one way or the other by actual events that occur. The good stuff that happens doesn't mean God is here, and the bad stuff doesn't mean the divine has left the building. God is the animating force, or the all-pervading intelligence within which all experience takes place. The Tibetan Buddhists call it "cognizant emptiness." Not very spiritually romantic for devotional, religious types, but accurate.
I had a video Skype session with Ram Dass a few years ago, a service called a "Heart-to-Heart" that he makes available to his website subscribers. My agenda in setting up the conversation was to ask him for his blessing before I set out on a book tour to promote a memoir that featured my history with him in the first and last chapters, symmetrically framing the whole work. And though I had badgered him repeatedly the previous year, in the end he had opted not to endorse the back of my book. So now, if I couldn't get his blurb, I felt I at least needed his blessing. He paused a moment when I asked, closed his eyes to search for his answer, then looking straight into the camera and pointing his finger, said very calmly, "You have my blessing, as long as you tell the truth."
That gave my little brain plenty to think about! Was he saying I didn't tell the truth in the book? That I somehow misrepresented him in my story? What did he mean? I didn't ask him, and rather than try and figure out the answer, I lived, as Rilke said, "inside the question." As I traveled the country on my book tour, it became my personal Zen koan each time I took the stage.
And I think I told the truth. Mostly.
He also gave me an extremely valuable piece of advice: "If you go on a book tour as an ego, in order to sell books," he said, "it is a complete pain in the butt. But if you approach each event as a gathering of souls, then you can have a meaningful evening together." I took that very much to heart, and brought my guitar along and wound up singing and chanting with people in bookstores all across the country, and I do believe that souls were touched. Mine was.
Apart from that Skype call, I hadn't seen Ram Dass for some time. But since I was to be in Maui, not 10 minutes from his home, I requested some moments of his time, and he was gracious enough to receive me. His place is gorgeous, overlooking the sea. His living room features a very large holy shrine adorned with flowers, photos and sacred relics, that pays homage to his guru and many other saints from a diversity of religious traditions. Although he can swim in his pool and walk a bit with a walker, he is for the most part confined to a wheelchair, presumably for the rest of his life. Yet not only is he not complaining, it seems he has managed to arrive at an even happier and more content state of being than ever before! This is clear both from being in the room with him as well as from his own public talks about his personal process in the years since his stroke.
I first met Ram Dass in 1975 at the age of 23, when I was first emerging as a spiritual seeker, full of longing and penetrating questions, deeply hungry for answers and direction. Ram Dass was bigger than life, rapidly gaining worldwide notoriety as a counter-cultural hero and teacher to millions, and author of what was becoming the pivotal spiritual guidebook of those tumultuous times, "Be Here Now." He had returned from India wearing the trappings of that culture -- white robe and beads and long, wild hair and beard. But even in his more ordinary American attire, he exuded a powerful, loving presence that was quite palpable, penetrating and real.
I vividly remember the intensity and significance of our first meeting. He would often do an exercise with new students that involved sitting across from one another, eyeball to eyeball, with the instruction, "Anything that comes into your mind that you don't want to share with me, share with me." It was astounding for me to witness and subsequently reveal the vast array of normally private, psychological material -- shameful secrets, things I was embarrassed about and so forth -- and to feel the unconditional love pouring through his eyes as he listened silently to all that came spilling out of me in what amounted to being a liberating confessional of sorts. The exercise continued until I reached my limit, my line in the sand, where there were just certain things too horrible to say aloud, and I didn't, and he didn't ask me to.
And I never have, to him. In a way, I never completed that exercise. Although I had seen him many times in the interim, perhaps I should have used this visit in Maui to pick up where we had left off some 35 years ago when we first played that game, but this time I was determined to show up as an "adult." I wanted to approach my old spiritual teacher not as what George Bernard Shaw called a "bundle of grievances and ailments." I did not want to greet him as a needy spiritual seeker full of problems and questions looking for someone to provide me with answers. Rather, I wanted to have no particular agenda apart from paying my respects, human to human, to an old friend and mentor, with the awareness that I didn't know if we would ever meet again in this lifetime. (Ram Dass never leaves Maui, and this was my first visit there in nearly 25 years.)
I didn't want to arrive empty-handed; yet there didn't seem to be any physical object I could bring that would make any sense. It's all just "stuff." I had picked up various chatchkes around our house to bring to him, but my wife Shari nixed each one. Then, in Maui, a few days before we were to get together, someone was giving away a very long and exotic Hawaiian flower, and I thought that one of them, like a single rose, would make a nice offering. I put it in water for two days, but on the morning I was to drive over to meet Ram Dass, I discovered that the flower had started to turn brown and die. That would have had its own significance, I suppose, but I wanted to bring a fresh flower, and it was too late to look for a florist. As I drove to his house, I passed a field of wild flowers, pulled over and picked one beautiful fuchsia-colored flower on a thorny stem. I spent some time on the side of the road, scraping all the thorns off with my thumbnail until I felt confident that I could hand it to him without the risk of him getting pierced by a thorn.
Meanwhile, I was recalling a story Ram Dass used to tell of his early days in India, when he was agonizing over finding just the perfect gift for Maharaj-ji. He had finally settled on purchasing a beautiful blanket, because Maharaji basically only wore blankets, and Ram Dass carried the blanket with him throughout his travels, building up in his mind how wonderful it was going to be to present his beloved guru with this token of his great love, and how special he would feel as the bestower of such a perfect gift. But in fact, when he was finally sitting before his guru and with great ceremony presented him with the blanket, Majaraj-ji picked it up by the edges of one corner with two fingers, holding it up like a dead rat, and then turned and presented it to another devotee as a gift. He then turned to Ram Dass and asked, "Did I do the right thing?" "Perfect," Ram Dass responded. In that moment, he saw how much his ego had riding on the blanket; it was not a "clean" gift in that way, and Maharaj-ji held it up in that manner to indicate as much.
I examined myself carefully, but as far as I could discern, my flower offering was clean. I liked that I picked it in the wild and not at a store, and that I had smoothed off the thorns to protect his hands. And so, when he wheeled himself into his living room to see me, I rose to greet and hug him and presented him with the flower. He held it in his hand awhile, feeling it, contemplating it in silence. And continued to do so throughout our hour-plus conversation.
Because of my decision to come to him not wanting anything, the result was that in large part our meeting together remained mostly on a "chatty" level, in great contrast to the original soul-bearing, life-changing contact we had had over three decades earlier. But several times we lapsed into silence and simply gazed at one another, and I later concluded that it didn't matter what we talked about. Whatever connection or transmission that needed to occur was going to happen anyway. I suppose this is true of every interaction we have with everyone, but right or wrong, I give my relationship with Ram Dass more weight and significance than I do some others, despite his repeated reminders in the early days that the bus driver or your Aunt Gertrude just might be the Buddha.
At one point, after one of those silences, he said, "You're in good shape; you used to talk off the wall." I puzzled over that one for awhile, then recalled that when I had been badgering him to endorse my book and he wasn't returning any of my emails, each time I wrote him I opened with a bigger apology: "I don't mean to be a nuisance, please forgive me, maybe you didn't get my email" etc., and then even sent him a snail-mail letter on top of all that, until I finally browbeat him into at least agreeing to read my manuscript, but then as press time approached and I saw no blurb from him forthcoming, I bugged him one last time, and my apology had escalated to, "I know you must hate me and think I should rot in hell for all of eternity, but please know that our deadline is next week."
And to that he finally responded: "If you go to hell, I will miss you. Namaste, Ram Dass." I laughed -- a lot -- and I was simultaneously crestfallen. Because now I knew he was choosing not to endorse my book, it wasn't simply that my requests had gotten overlooked in a pile of mail. So perhaps my "rot in hell" routine was what he was referring to when he said I used to talk "off the wall." Though undoubtedly I had teetered on the wall many times before that.
Now, sitting across from him in Maui, talking about this and that, he suddenly said, quite out of the blue, "You should let something else, or someone else, write through you, instead of just writing from your ego." I felt a bit defensive, because I had not posted any blogs in months for that very reason; as an ego, I knew I simply had nothing much to say or offer, and yet nothing else seemed to be wanting to come through me either. In response to Ram Dass's suggestion, I said, "Well, I'm usually pretty dense when it comes to subtle energies or other dimensions." He replied, "Well, your ego is dense through and through, but your soul isn't."
That was a conversation stopper, and we fell into silence a bit. Who knows, though? Maybe this is what I sound like when I'm letting something else write through me! I always figured it would sound more like, "Blessings to all my children who come seeking union with their beloved." Maybe I am a channel for Shecky Greene rather than St. Germaine. (Given a choice, I would have opted for Kerouac.)
When the renowned Brazilian healer, Joao de Deus (John of God) came to the United States for the first time, I hopped a plane to Atlanta to meet him. Some two thousand of us, all dressed in nearly identical white yoga clothing, had the opportunity to walk past him for a brief moment, while he was presumably inhabited by a variety of "entities," the spirits of deceased physicians. Through a translator, he would quickly direct each person to either a healing room to receive psychic surgery from the non-physical guides that were hovering about, or to a meditation room to simply sit quietly in the energy that permeated the place and was tangible even to a closed-off, skeptical cynic like myself. After whisking people away one after the other in rapid succession, when I approached him the translator abruptly stopped me dead in my tracks, pointed at me and said firmly, "You, he wants to see in Brazil."
I moved on past, thinking to myself, I schlepped all the way to Atlanta to see him, why do I have to go to Brazil? I'm here now! Plus, how do I know if I go to Brazil he's not going to say, "You I want to see in Atlanta?" But I decided to go back a second day, and again I was one of two thousand new (and some repeat) visitors. Once again I watched person after person march by him in half a second, getting waved on to the healing room or the meditation room. And once again when I came before him the translator stopped me and said, "You he waits for in Brazil!" Needless to say, it gave me food for thought, but I never went.
I had heard that Ram Dass had gone down to Brazil to visit Joao's well-known healing center, known as the Casa, and had had very good things to say about it. He compared the loving, heart-opening atmosphere he discovered there to the feelings he had only experienced previously at his Guru's ashram in India, although he did not receive any physical healing of the stroke symptoms that had prompted the visit. I told him my story of meeting John of God, and receiving the repeated admonition to head to Brazil. Since Ram Dass had had a positive experience down there, I asked him if he thought it would be worth the trip for me to go. After a brief closed-eye contemplation, he responded, "Given your attitude, I don't think it would do you any good," and we both cracked up; it was so clearly the truth about me! I am famous for going to places like that in order to demonstrate that they don't work for me. I have a reputation to uphold as the 99th Monkey, the proverbial one who never gets it. (It's a really crummy job, trust me. You wouldn't want to be me.)
Earlier in our conversation, we were talking about his stroke, his physical condition, and with his left hand pointing to the paralyzed right side of his body, he made a a gesture of dismissal, and said, "Just my body," then pointing to his heart, added, "Not me." Of course some could argue this is just cognitive dissonance, that once you've lost half your body, your identity had better reside in the heart and soul, not the failing flesh. And I also realized that if I was to share with him any of my personal issues, I couldn't very well bring up my hurting knees or lower back or the osteoarthritis in my big toes.
Witnessing the contentment, joy and absence of struggle he was clearly enjoying, moment-to-moment, it was fairly obvious that he had arrived at a pretty happy place in his consciousness, stroke or no stroke. The wheelchair and the condition of his body were truly irrelevant to his primary self-identity as "loving awareness," a term from his current book, "Be Love Now." The new title ups the ante, nearly 40 years later, from merely being here now to being love now. I'm guessing they are interdependent, however, and arise together; if you are truly and fully present in the here and now, love is the inevitable outcome. Conversely, if you are truly "being love," you will find yourself in the here and now. But the one-word change in the title points the reader in an ever-so-subtly different direction, imbuing one's journey with a somewhat softer focus, somehow, perhaps a bit like moving from the austerity of a zendo to the bhakti-infused devotion of a Hindu temple.
When I got up to leave, he wheeled himself behind me, steering me in the direction of the altar (unless I went there on my own and he followed? I can't remember.) As I stood before the altar, he gently handed me back the flower, and I understood that I was to offer it, which I did, and gently set it down. My wild, thorn-free fuchsia-colored flower had been received, my offering had been accepted.
The flower reminded me of the time I saw Ram Dass several years after his stroke. He was making his first trip to Taos, New Mexico, to the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram there, in order to celebrate bhandara (commemorating Maharaji's mahasamadhi, the time of his passing from this Earth, which occurred in 1973.) It would be his first public appearance in several years. There were hundreds of people anxious to greet him personally, if only for a few moments. I didn't want to add to what I imagined might have been too much for him, or overwhelming, so I opted instead to go into a small meditation chamber in the rear of the ashram, away from the hubbub.
There were only one or two other people in the room. Not five minutes after I closed my eyes to meditate, I heard the door open, looked up, and someone was wheeling Ram Dass into the room. Feeling thrilled and privileged, I closed my eyes to enjoy this intimate meditation time with my teacher sitting right beside me. Some time passed, and we looked over and gazed into each other's eyes for a prolonged moment. Then, as the aide began to wheel him out, Ram Dass looked up at him and commented aloud, with his then still-limited speech, "Every individual, like a flower." It was his commentary, it seemed, about our silent interaction.
He left the room and I burst into tears, for through that one poetic remark I recognized that he was seeing the "flower part" of me, a precious and pure, unsullied natural place within that I myself had long since forgotten was still in there somewhere. And I also knew I wasn't special. He said every individual. What would that be like, to go through life seeing each person as if gazing at a flawless, beautiful blossom?
Our good-bye in Maui was less dramatic. I asked him if he still did spiritual practices, and he looked at me as if I was speaking Greek and asked, "Spiritual practices?" And I said, "You know, spiritual practices; you remember those." He replied, "I just hang out with Maharaj-ji." When you're living in the presence, certainty and awareness of "being love now," one is no longer doing anything in order to find or cultivate that love. I leaned over and kissed his bald head and said I love you, walking away and not looking back; just before I went out the door, he called out, "I love you too," and of course I didn't believe him, and got in the car and immediately thought I had acted like an idiot, wasted a precious opportunity to ask the deeper questions, and figured that he probably thought I was an a**hole. And still off the wall.
But that's just my way, and I got over it. Meanwhile, I have some gardening to do if I want this flower to bloom.
"one who looks outside dreams, one who looks inside awakes." -Carl Jung
Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds - Part 1 - Akasha
Part one of the film Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds. Akasha is the unmanifested, the "nothing" or emptiness which fills the vacuum of space. As Einstein realized, empty space is not really empty. Saints, sages and yogis who have looked within themselves have also realized that within the emptiness is unfathomable power, a web of information or energy which connects all things. This matrix or web has been called the Logos, the Higgs Field, the Primordial OM and a thousand other names throughout history. In part one of Inner Worlds, we explore the one vibratory source that extends through all things, through the science of cymatics, the concept of the Logos, and the Vedic concept of Nada Brahma (the universe is sound or vibration). Once we realize that there is one vibratory source that is the root of all scientific and spiritual investigation, how can we say "my religion", "my God" or "my discovery".
Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds - Part 2 - The Spiral
The Pythagorian philosopher Plato hinted enigmatically that there was a golden key that unified all of the mysteries of the universe. The golden key is the intelligence of the logos, the source of the primordial om. One could say that it is the mind of God. The source of this divine symmetry is the greatest mystery of our existence. Many of history's monumental thinkers such as Pythagoras, Keppler, Leonardo da Vinci, Tesla and Einstein have come to the threshold the mystery. Every scientist who looks deeply into the universe and every mystic who looks deeply within the self, eventually comes face to face with the same thing: The Primordial Spiral.
Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds - Part 3 - The Serpent and the Lotus
The primordial spiral is the manifested world, while Akasha is the unmanifested, or emptiness itself. All of reality is an interplay between these two things; Yang and Yin, or consciousness and matter. The spiral has often been represented by the snake, the downward current, while the bird or blooming lotus flower has represented the upward current or transcendence.The ancient traditions taught that a human being can become a bridge extending from the outer to the inner, from gross to subtle, from the lower chakras to the higher chakras. To balance the inner and the outer is what the Buddha called the middle way, or what Aristotle called the Golden Mean. You can be that bridge. The full awakening of human consciousness and energy is the birthright of every individual on the planet. In today's society we have lost the balance between the inner and the outer. We are so distracted by the outer world of form, thoughts and ideas, that we no longer take time to connect to our inner worlds, the kingdom of heaven that is within.
Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds - Part 4 - Beyond Thinking
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We live our lives pursuing happiness "out there" as if it is a commodity. We have become slaves to our own desires and craving. Happiness isn't something that can be pursued or purchased like a cheap suit. This is Maya, illusion, the endless play of form. In the Buddhist tradition, Samsara, or the endless cycle of suffering is perpetuated by the craving of pleasure and aversion to pain. Freud referred to this as the "pleasure principle." Everything we do is an attempt to create pleasure, to gain something that we want, or to push away something that is undesirable that we don't want. Even a simple organism like the paramecium does this. It is called response to stimulus. Unlike a paramecium, humans have more choice. We are free to think, and that is the heart of the problem. It is the thinking about what we want that has gotten out of control.The dilemma of modern society is that we seek to understand the world, not in terms of archaic inner consciousness, but by quantifying and qualifying what we perceive to be the external world by using scientific means and thought. Thinking has only led to more thinking and more questions. We seek to know the innermost forces which create the world and guide its course. But we conceive of this essence as outside of ourselves, not as a living thing, intrinsic to our own nature. It was the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung who said, "one who looks outside dreams, one who looks inside awakes." It is not wrong to desire to be awake, to be happy. What is wrong is to look for happiness outside when it can only be found inside.
Every culture in human history has used some kind of natural consciousness-altering substance. They have used them to cement social relationships, divine the future, call for rain, find animals in the hunt, and expand vision to access the spiritual realms.
Ayahuasca is not for everyone. Sometimes the experiences can be frightening and extremely challenging. If you are the type of person who likes to keep your boundaries fixed and to stay within the status quo, then it’s not for you. However, if you are open to dissolving your personal boundaries to explore more of who and what you are, then an ayahuasca journey can provide a direct and powerful means to that end.
However, the most common use is for healing. By altering consciousness, shamans claim to travel the inter-dimensional realms to detect what is wrong with a patient and to find a cure or a helpful remedy. These consciousness-altering plant ceremonies are still undertaken today in many parts of the world. In our culture, which shuns the use of consciousness-altering substances, natural or not, psychedelics are still used by the ‘underground’. People from all walks of life and for a host of reasons find it useful to expand their consciousness using plant-derived natural psychedelics.
In parts of South America, the most common and powerful consciousness-expanding plant ‘medicine’ is ayahuasca, a large woody vine whose scientific name is Banisteriopsi-scaapi. It is made into a tea with another plant, often Chacruna. The two plants have to be boiled together to make the resulting ‘tea’, capable of inducing altered states of consciousness. Over the years the use of ayahuasca has spread into the western world, and many travelers and seekers have ventured into the Amazon to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies. Ayahuasca has also been the subject of many scientific studies, with clear evidence showing that it increases brain cell growth (neuro-genesis) and improves serotonin uptake, helping to relieve depression. It is safe to use, but is not a pleasant experience, as the ayahuasca tea is bitter and generally tastes disagreeable. However, its effects can be spectacular.
Most people report extremely heightened states of consciousness, access to ‘spiritual’ realms and a connection to the deepest aspects of nature that are not possible in normal waking states of consciousness. In 2006, I went to Brazil to participate in a 17-day ayahuasca retreat, during which I would take part in six ayahuasca ceremonies.
The setting was on the beautiful Bahia coast. We were a merry band of about 30 people from all walks of life and from all over the world. As I got to know these fellow adventurers, I learned that they shared a common motivation for attending the retreat, which was to heal themselves on all levels so that they could be happier, more peaceful and have a deeper understanding of who they really were.
After relaxing for the first day, we participated in the first ceremony on the second night. We gathered around and watched the shaman bless the ayahuasca—which shamans consider to be a plant spirit with a being-ness all its own—and chant and commune with it in his own language. One at a time, we went up to the shaman to receive a cup of the ayahuasca brew. As we drank it, each of us thought of a specific intention for our inner journey. After we had all ingested the brew, we reclined under the palm trees, near a central fire pit.
The shaman then began singing special songs called Icaros, which are sacred songs that guide the participants’ energy, visions and healing during the ceremony. I had mixed feelings as I began this journey, feeling both relaxed and excited—and just a little bit nervous. I focused on the stars I could see shining though the palm trees, enjoying the warm night. Soon the fire, with its hypnotic flames, drew my attention. As I relaxed more deeply, the Icaros seemed to be flowing through every part of my body. I allowed them to work their magic, and about an hour later, I began to feel huge waves of energy pulsating through my body. I felt as if I were being bathed in a warm, nurturing ocean. The waves seemed to be emanating from within me, but at the same time from far outside of me. It was an indescribable feeling, one I had never experienced before. A little while later, the energy waves became stronger, growing ever more intense, until they were overpoweringly strong.
Suddenly I began vomiting and rolling around like I was a rag doll being tossed around by a playful dog. (It is not uncommon to vomit while journeying with ayahuasca, as it is a purgative.) I was defenseless against these waves of energy. I felt as if every cell in my body was riding huge wild rapids. My mind felt like I was on some giant roller-coaster, and I didn’t know where the next turn or dip was going to be. My physical boundaries were dissolving into these waves of energy; I was losing my body and along with it any sense of who I was.
The next three hours were extremely challenging and cathartic, and are nearly impossible to describe accurately in words. I began seeing an incredible visual display of interconnectedness among all the trees and plants. Fibres of light radiated from them and everything else around me, so my entire visual experience became one of a huge matrix of interconnected spectrums of light. As I looked at the trees I realized that at the deepest level there was no separation between me and them. We were energetically connected by light. I looked at the other participants and realized that at this deepest level we were all integral parts of an interconnected, intelligent consciousness.
My physical boundaries were no longer recognizable and my being continued to expand, until I merged into this vast matrix of energy, which was intertwined with a matrix of energy from every being, animal and plant on earth. The expansion continued further still, until I was part of a larger matrix of all the planets, solar systems, galaxies and star systems in the universe.
And still it went on, beyond the known universe to regions unknown. I sensed an infinite multidimensional intelligence behind it all. There were systems within systems within systems, much like our DNA within our cells, which are within our organs and tissues, which are within our bodies, which are combined into societies, and those into countries, and those into the world, and on and on.
This was the most astonishing experience of my life. I became aware that consciousness is a field of infinite energy, information and intelligence—and I, as Chris Walton, was a droplet of that consciousness having a physical experience as Chris Walton, born into a material body on January 19, 1970. I understood that we all are consciousnesses born into physical bodies with the ultimate goal of realizing our part in the whole and awakening to the experience of our true self. And I was not only human. I was the trees, insects, noises, wind, other people, songs, stars—my consciousness was the consciousness of everything. I was aware that the consciousness I access in day-to-day life is just a minuscule fraction of what is available to me—and to each of us. I was bathed in a supernatural ecstasy, in a state of cosmic unity of consciousness that continued for hours.
Some time later—time was not important to me—my individual mind started to reconstruct itself. I found myself trying to analyze my feelings and experience, trying to make sense of it all. I wanted to put it all in definable boxes and clear-cut categories. I witnessed my own process, detached from myself: the mind of Chris was trying to reduce the experience to separate parts so that his rational self could make sense of things and say, ‘Ahh! This is what is happening, and it’s okay.’ My mind was struggling to frame a picture, and to make that picture into the ‘real reality’.
Yet almost as soon as this process started, I was blasted back out into the infinite pool of pure interconnected and expanded cosmic consciousness. This back-and-forth mind movement went on for hours: one moment I was rationally trying to define and categorize and the next I was in a state of pure cosmic unity. I finally came to see that I could learn from this see-sawing of my consciousness. It was like a lesson being taught me: we reduce the cosmic down to the mundane. That’s what we do all of our lives, creating limitations through the conditioning of our minds and losing the reality of how huge and interconnected we really are with everyone and everything else in the cosmos.
After several more hours of this kind of roller-coaster experience, my mind settled down and I relaxed into a state of ecstatic bliss. I lay on the ground for hours, feeling this bliss and marveling at my new understanding of what I am—and what we all truly are. We are without any doubt beings who have for some reason decided to materialize on planet Earth to become creators of our own destinies. We are here to experience the physical, yet our goal is to awaken and realize that we are far more than the physical. Every second of every day our beliefs, thoughts and feelings determine what we are and how we view ourselves. We have access to a state of being of pure loving awareness within an unlimited matrix of possibilities, and to engage this infinite field is our true destiny.
This single experience profoundly changed my life. From that moment on I have felt a deeper connection to nature and look at people with ‘new eyes’, knowing that at a core level of reality we are one. This was a brief account of one of the six ayahuasca ceremonies I participated in. They were all equally powerful, deeply insightful and healing on all levels of my being. Yet I learned that they were also larger than me. The shaman explained that in the ceremonies three levels of healing traditionally take place: our own personal healing, a collective group healing because we are all connected and our individual healing and intentions affect everyone else, and a global healing since we are all connected in the larger universal mind.
Ayahuasca is not for everyone. Sometimes the experiences can be frightening and extremely challenging. If you are the type of person who likes to keep your boundaries fixed and to stay within the status quo, then it’s not for you. However, if you are open to dissolving your personal boundaries to explore more of who and what you are, then an ayahuasca journey can provide a direct and powerful means to that end. However, as the shamans say, you do not choose ayahuasca, it chooses you. It is a plant spirit that must be treated with respect, and it is best to wait until you ‘feel its call’ before exploring working with it.
No matter how you choose to expand your awareness, doing so can be a satisfying and even a life-changing experience. A transformative experience is, in the words of Dr Stanislav Grof, something that “comes about when you are forced to reconcile your ordinary world view with insights gained from extraordinary or non-ordinary experiences.”
Earth is a school, where we are taught by experience, and shaped by the programming we receive from what we surround ourselves with. We are born into this world, exactly as we should be, but we are tricked into believing we are to "become" something more, something different than who we really are. The tricks, turns, triumph and tragedy are all merely tests to see how light we can keep our hearts, even during the darkest moments of this reality. There is no permanence, aside from impermanence, and living the Ma'at principle is the preservation of this light.
However, the 
Suddenly I began vomiting and rolling around like I was a rag doll being tossed around by a playful dog. (It is not uncommon to vomit while journeying with ayahuasca, as it is a purgative.) I was defenseless against these waves of energy. I felt as if every cell in my body was riding huge wild rapids. My mind felt like I was on some giant roller-coaster, and I didn’t know where the next turn or dip was going to be. My physical boundaries were dissolving into these waves of energy; I was losing my body and along with it any sense of who I was.
Chris Walton, was a droplet of that consciousness having a physical experience as Chris Walton, born into a material body on January 19, 1970. I understood that we all are consciousnesses born into physical bodies with the ultimate goal of realizing our part in the whole and awakening to the experience of our true self. And I was not only human. I was the trees, insects, noises, wind, other people, songs, stars—my consciousness was the consciousness of everything. I was aware that the consciousness I access in day-to-day life is just a minuscule fraction of what is available to me—and to each of us. I was bathed in a supernatural ecstasy, in a state of cosmic unity of consciousness that continued for hours.