Category: By Raphael Awen

Spiritual La-La Land In A Time Of Impending Collapse: Golden Earth Tales

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(This is Part Six of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

It’s time in this blog series to pose a very important question.

The question goes something like this: How is seeking the nondual, or any other form of spiritual seeking for that matter, relevant at such a crazy time of global change that we are in the midst of? How is it not just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

We are in the midst of epic changes to our industrial society and its way of life that we are all embedded in. The long and the short of it is that gasoline from a gas station, water from a tap, food from a store, or electricity from a hole in the wall are not likely to persist for much longer. All of the inter-related systems that hold these realities in place are growing more and more vulnerable and tension-filled by the day. I am personally surprised each passing month to see the present order of things stumble against the odds into the next month.

The transition we are facing promises to be difficult almost beyond imagination, chaotic and marked with great loss of life.

My sense is that if you haven’t faced this approaching chaos and come to your own personal grounded choices around it, your spirituality (of any kind) is in la-la land.

Eighteen months ago, my wife and I and two close friends chose to relocate to living off grid two countries south and entered into a crash course of learning to grow our own food. It’s a long story and a great story and you can read it here in our free e-book called Living As If. It’s free monetarily speaking, but reading it will cost you. It will cost you some of your indifference; it will cost you some of your comfort; and it will cost you some of your happiness that’s based in denial. If you’ve been looking to spend those things from your life, the free e-book is a great place to start.

I almost want to apologize for pontificating here. Almost. I just called you indifferent, didn’t I? I am trying to build an audience, not thin one out, but this message cannot be pansied around with. If you haven’t considered the changes that you can feel are coming, you are fucking around with your own life. It’s just that plain and simple. It’s suicide and indifferent to boot. I’d much rather you got offended and left off reading my blogs than using my teaching on the nondual as a way to keep your pile of denial intact. What I’d most rather see, however, is that you could listen to your own heart without needing any prodding from me or anyone else and prepare to ride out the coming storm.

Facing into this with power and choice will feel like nothing short of joining a cult. Your seeking to get others on board in your circle of family and friends will be seen as proselytizing. It will probably add up to being the most difficult thing you have undertaken this life.

When you look at this though through a first-things-first lens, no other approach makes any sense at all. As humans, our needs for survival will always trump our needs for seeking meaning. We embrace spirituality only when our basic needs of food, water, and shelter are met and have a reasonable expectation of continuity.

You may be in a place of what appears to be life-stability at the moment, but I venture to say that you have been sensing the approach of deep structural changes coming to our collective way of life. How could you not? This has left you with an ungrounded feeling. Your ventures into spirituality and meaning are left with one foot outside of the circle. You’re not all here, and rightly so, you shouldn’t be. Maybe ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, this could be a different story, but not now.

As I’ve been writing this series on the nondual, I’ve had a growing sense of disconnect to be offering it into an audience I fear has done little to reconcile with these coming changes. I’m openly asking the question of myself: how does this form of spiritual seeking that I’m advocating for not just another form of a mind-numbing drug?

The shit is about to hit the fan – make no mistake about it.

Like the Captain in the movie Titanic so soberly said just minutes after the iceberg was struck, “This ship will go down.” The Titanic story is a powerful prophetic story for our time. Our collective hubris is only exceeded by our denial, and we are about to be called on it.

Big outbreath….phew. I had to say that… in that way.

My own tendency towards denial is as good as the next person’s; the difference though is that I am aware of mine. That awareness has led and continues to lead to changes – not talk of changes, but balls-to-the-wall grounded change.

So what then is there left to say about the nondual in relation to all this unavoidable change?

My truth is that all the talk in the world of the nondual isn’t worth a fiddler’s fart if you are not in your power facing this approaching storm.

Consciousness itself has prepared this transformation for us, not against us. Consciousness doesn’t see the loss of physical life with the same hysteria as we do. Consciousness sees it as a transformation, not an end in itself. What is at stake is not your consciousness per se, but your physical life and the goals you as a soul associated with this life.

I am convinced that most will not (as they say) know what hit ‘em, as they feel completely victimized and overwhelmed by circumstances outside of their control. Everything in their conditioning will support their chosen view of excusing themselves.

But for those of us who unmistakably sense this coming storm, such luxuries of consciousness don’t add up to much, do they?

The Christians believe strongly in Jesus returning to sweep them away before it gets too unbearable – that at least gives them some form of hope or comfort. Their collective sense of coming chaos is well founded and grounded; it’s just their solution that doesn’t add up. No savior is returning to take care of your business for you. All the universe, God, the Divine, and Jesus himself will be glad to help you – but no one and nothing is going to do this for you. Doing stuff for you is known as infantilizing, and we are moving past that now in our emerging collective consciousness.

You can expect to be infantilized if you must and that will ensure you some comfort in the midst of this great chaos, though it will also pretty much guarantee your early demise. Or you can adult-up and make choices with the power you have and ride out this storm consciously in the deep and personal transformation of yourself and the collective that this will prove to be.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: ­­­­­­­facebook.com/raphaelawen1

Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

Letting In Arising Wonder: Golden Earth Tales

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(This is Part Six of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

I recall when I was first introduced to the terms ‘dual’ and ‘nondual’. The teaching intrigued me. It resonated in my heart.

I learned that an entire world of wonder had been dimmed down inside of me, as well as in my culture. This, I learned was due to the mind’s ability and propensity to categorize and ‘map’ my experiences, judging and evaluating them that in turn removed me from the essence and wonder of the experience itself.

The basic teaching goes that we, with our mind’s capacity, ‘dualize’ what we experience. We rate it, we judge it, we locate it – all of which we could not do were it not for this ‘dualizing’ ability. I was taught that the mind, metaphorically speaking, creates something similar to the grid lines that are established over an archaeological dig that provide reference points for where discovered items were found, allowing for mapping, cataloguing, and further study.

The problem, however, is that experience itself and the map of the experience are two very different things, but our minds have lost awareness of this. Our minds instead have become fused with the maps we create of our experience, causing us to lose more and more contact with the aliveness of the experience itself.

Let’s see if we can create a metaphor to bring this home a bit.

What are you doing right now? You’re reading a blog, and sizing up what you are getting out of it. That’s the mental map description/perception of what’s going on. But is there another deeper reality that you do not perceive right now, that is screened out from your perception by this mental map ‘doing’ your experience for you rather than the arising wonder of experience itself?

What else is there to notice? What are you missing, if anything?

What about the use of the written word, in this case English? Here I am referencing pen strokes that evolved into keyboard strokes, conveying written meaning into something called sentences that in turn produce a myriad of brain synapses firing that in turn produce wave after wave of rapid fire evaluations in you, and in turn emotional responses. I don’t guess your mind was paying attention to any of that just now. But isn’t it off-the-charts amazing reality that we came up with the motor skills and the mental skills to create squiggles in the sand that in turn came to be agreed upon and adopted as an alphabet to convey such specifics in meaning?

You are a participator in all of this and I’ll bet that you haven’t given yourself any pats on the back for your achievements in any of this since the third grade. Your use of alphabet and linguistics is all old-hat to you. Your mind has long gone on (or should we say ‘off’) in search of new things, which it will in turn deaden eventually into more of the same-old-same-old.

I could go on and on describing things that have just been assimilated into the mental map of how we navigate experience. There’s your eyeballs; there’s the temperature of the room you’re sitting in and however that came to be; there’s the lingering taste in your mouth from what you just ate; there’s the stream that became a river that became part of a hydroelectric dam that produced the electricity to illuminate the screen you are reading from.

Given all that experience has to offer, it’s an amazing wonder in itself that you are barraged with such oceans of experience without being totally stoned out of your mind in a hallucinogenic experience of what we would call total insanity. You have your mind to thank for that. Your mind ‘dualized’ the aliveness of the experiences themselves into an endless array of filed, categorized, and tamed representations of experience.

But how do we get back to the nondual, the raw experience and its plethora of the wild and amazing? I mean, I don’t want to be totally stoned and unable to function, but I would like a generous helping of arising wonder to be lapping onto my shores in an ever-increasing way. I’d like a good buzz for sure. I think you would too, right?

Here is the offer to discover the nondual where all is an arising wonder, where there are no (or at least, less and less) representational categories by the mind that kill off experience. It’s not too far at all to describe it as an altered state of consciousness. Of course it is.

At this point in my introduction into the world of the nondual is where I was kind of convinced this was for the particularly advanced or evolved in consciousness. It was an ‘attainment’ and that there were many steps between where I was at and where something magical like an ‘nondual awakening’ might begin occurring for me. My mind filed it off as something hopeful for the future, maybe one day. Maybe if I got really dedicated to some kind of meditation process to induce this for me.

My mind, in other words, just dualized the hell out of what I was being introduced to. Part of me pessimistically ‘knew’ that if I really let myself feel this desire for this kind of awakening, I’d probably fall prey to following a bunch of teachers and spending a lot of money in the process, and so it too helped to file this away for another time and place.

What I’ve been saying in this blog series and want to say over and over again is that nondual access isn’t something to attain. You already have it. You may well and correctly say ‘But I don’t experience the arising wonder in my daily experience that you speak of.’ That’s something different, isn’t it? I’m saying that the acceptance inside of yourself that you already have this something is what will precede it transacting for you in your felt experience of life.

You are already as enlightened as you will ever be – ‘positionally’ speaking. That’s part of your ‘In-divi-dual’ (your dual and nondual nature that can’t be separated) as we’ve been saying in this series. All that’s left is for it to manifest for you ‘experientially’. This is something that you are in direct control of. You choose to let into experience what you are already are and have.

Someone else may convince you to let this reality in or reject it, but only you can carry it out. You are the sovereign. There is no God, or god, that will take care of this for you. You have to want it; you have to let it in (if you want to that is!). You are the god who creates your experience here. Ask God/god instead to help YOU let-this-in.

Then fasten your seatbelt because you are opening yourself to a depth of reality that the universe and you are alchemizing through your desire nature.

Why would you settle for anything less?

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter @raphaelawen. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary.

 

 

 

You As An ‘In-divi-dual’: Golden Earth Tales

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(This is Part Four of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

Just before diving back into the warm waters of where we left off, I’m curious what digestions you have going on inside of you from the last blog in this series. I’d love to hear from you through the comments of this blog.

Take a moment if you can to feel what feelings and reactions came up for you in the comparisons we made of your dual and nondual nature.

If you’re like me, the feeling that the nondual needed me (and us) in order to come to know itself, began to open some things out for you.

It suggests (and this may be sacrilege to some) that the nondual wasn’t complete in itself. It decided at some point to extend its completeness out of itself into the expression of you and I, and the rest of the conscious universe. It birthed something out of itself.

However we imagine the infinite completeness of the nondual to be, it would seem that in its consciousness, it came to want something. Even if that wanting was a wanting to share its completeness, the nondual came to have a need. It lacked. It wanted to have an ‘other’ both to share its bounty with, and as a reflective mirror in which to look back on itself. We, along with the rest of the conscious universe, were birthed out of this need.

Need, want, and desire is the stuff that parented us. This is a tough one for many people to come to terms with. Many seek out the nondual as a way to tame their desire nature, feeling that their desire nature is at root of their suffering. Many spiritual teachers in turn offer this as a hook to gain adherents.

Identifying with one’s nondual nature will not help anyone rid themselves of their desire nature, though many will stumble in making the attempt. It will change a lot related to your desire nature, but desire itself is an inseparable part of being the combination of dual and nondual natures that we are.

This brings us back to where you and I live everyday. As great and magical as the infinite fulfillment, infinite love, infinite possibility world was and is, it wanted to take that out for a spin. You and I are that test drive, along with shoes, cars, sex and having a unique personality.

From this comes a whole other scary piece about you not existing as a ‘you’ in the un-individuated consciousness world of the nondual. No ‘you’ to ever know shoes, cars or sex.

No ‘you’ to know desire and its offspring – personal pleasure and displeasure.

Here, without a ‘you’ or an ‘other’, there’s no way for relationship either.

The nondual’s hunger in its awareness was to find a way outside of itself in search for a relationship mirror to come to know itself. This longing for relationship, to be known and seen by an other, is at the very core of our being. It would seem then that this need to be known extends all the way back to our nondual essence.

We also looked in the last blog entry in this series at how the nondual (oneness) birthed us into duality (‘twoness’) but put it in an inseparable package. English language captured this reality well in coming up with the word ‘In-divi-dual’ – duality that can’t be divvied, or twoness that can’t be separated. Maybe, we’re stumbling upon the better way to describe the root of all of our suffering – attempting to separate the inseparable.

It was Charles Eisenstein who first introduced this awareness to me where he teaches about the illusion of the split between spirit and matter in his free book ‘The Ascent Of Humanity’, which offers a heart and soul expanding picture of this fundamental split in consciousness awaiting reconciliation.

Christianity, where I spent a big part of my life, is a great example of this split as well. But you can look to the world around you and find this separation attempt everywhere you turn. In Christianity, the separation of essence attempt begins with man having a ‘sin’ nature, a ‘fallen’ nature. It’s the age-old thing of ‘you can’t sell someone on a solution unless you’ve sold them on the problem first,’ which of course is all inside a picture of seeking to gain control over the essentially uncontrollable ‘others’ of our dualistic reality.

Money, (and this is some more of Charles’ influence here) is maybe the king of all spirit and matter splits, because to make money out of something, that is to ‘monetize’ something, you need to separate the thing from its essence. You need to turn people into slaves, you need to turn forests into marketable board feet, you need to turn personal desire and passion into jobs. And to be able to do any of that, you need the illusory-spirit-and-matter split kept well intact. All matter is spirit; recognizing that leads to more and more wholeness. Remaining Ignorant to that leads to greater and greater neurosis.

You, however, as both spirit and matter, both dual and nondual that can’t be separated, that one part can’t be made better or worse, that can’t even be differentiated for that matter – is a grand invitation into a whole new self perception.

If this is true, then what does that say about all the minutia of how you see yourself in every aspect of your daily life? Letting in this new self-perception begins to affect everything in your life.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter @raphaelawen. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary.

Our Essence As Infinite Love: Golden Earth Tales

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(This is Part 3 of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales. To begin at part 1, go here)

By Raphael Awen

We left off in the previous blog in this series with an introductory feeling tone of being infinite love. We felt into how who and what we see ourselves as needs a deep and overwhelming expansion of consciousness to let in the higher reality of infinite love. We need to add in here that this reality of infinite love includes the other infinities of infinite possibility, infinite stillness, infinite potential, and infinite power. There’s more you can add in. After all, it’s only words and language we’re using to attempt to access a feeling tone of your essence.

There is nothing more powerful than a feeling tone that moves through your being and colors your self-perception. When you’re depressed, we could say that you are depression. While not a true statement of your essence, you have for many intents and purposes, become depression in this dimension. Your self-perception, already shrunken to the five-sense earth dimension, now shrunken further into a narrower still bandwidth of perception has become flooded with a powerful feeling tone.

Let’s for comparison sake say that the opposite of the word ‘depressed’ is ‘expressed,’ (because we can invent our own lexicon anytime we want, after all, we are infinite possibility!) I’d certainly rather be in a state of expression than depression, and wouldn’t we all? Well, the truth of that question is actually, no, most of us only think we would rather be in a state of expression over depression. Depression is a shut down and safe place that we subconsciously and understandably choose as a soul, out of wounded emotional patterns. Then parts of us buy into the pathetic current biological and medical paradigm and get to play victim and draw some sympathy. What’s crazier still though is that the depressed person actually not only plays victim with their depression, they also use it to avoid the depression.

Depression is actually one of the soul’s beautiful doorways leading into healthy and alive expression and unless you are willing to honor your depression, you won’t find this doorway. This is the pattern of choice for most, because leaving depression and entering expression of essence (very different from happiness which is more of a medication) is a deeply fearful thing (as well as very understandable). We’ll get into soul-fear dynamics and how they conflict with our innate desire to grow a couple blogs from now, but my point here is that getting into your essence is getting into a feeling tone that floods your being, that colors it, that irreversibly changes everything about you, never to return again to life as you knew it. Thank god it’s a progressive thing that digests and unfolds in your life, or we’d all pop circuits and become true loonies if it were not so, but it is without a doubt, personal transmutation, at a pace you can bear. You become different at the core of your being.

If you’re not up for the world of feeling, or have some story that feelings aren’t real, save yourself a whole lot of frustration and leave off this path now of seeking to experience essence. Many spiritualities, especially the ones that teach about ‘the nondual essence of all being’ (which is what we are getting into in this series) are just this kind of suffering loop that pound their pulpit declaring that your feelings can and must be ignored, turfed or transcended in some form to allow you access into your essence. They go on further to say that this is the core of your suffering: that you want. It’s your needs and desires that are at the root of all your suffering.

Simply follow their method and picture of reality to kill your wanter, or ignore it sufficiently, and you pop into another magical dimension. ‘Does this actually work?’ you say. Well of course it ‘works,’ or there wouldn’t be myriads of souls embracing this approach. But what ‘works’ is that only a part of you got into the door of some aspect of your essence, while entire swaths of your being got paved over. Here you find the common denominator of Christianity and the New Age Movement. Who’d have imagined these strangest of bedfellows coming to the same demise? We are so nearing the end of these partial solutions and it’s evident that many of us are rattling our cages in hunger for and even demand for more. I support that rattle.

I almost feel to apologize for the rant energy flowing through me right now. But I have no apology. You can find teaching galore on essence, but what you won’t find much of is any personal transparency, real transparency on how that’s working or not working for the person teaching it. Sorry, but I have no interest in that teaching or teacher. ‘Get real or go home’ a part of me so wants to say to both spiritual teachers and spiritual seekers. I, in contrast to this part of me, can more tenderly admit the personal hurt and pain of lost relationship, underlying this anger. One way or another, the universe will learn what it seeks to learn. It’s our choice what role we play in that.

Thank you for feeling this. I hope I’m making you mad or glad. We need to get into the feeling domain big time if we hope to access true and lasting connection to our essence.

So then, now that we hopefully made some sacred space to feel into essence, what can we say about it? It has been called the ‘nondual’ for lack of a better term. What is meant by this is that the realm of true essence is non dualistic. It is not the world of dualism; that is comparative difference.

A little boy recognizes an airplane in the sky and says, ‘Look, airplane.’ He’s already lost a good amount of his wonder at the sight, compared to the first time he saw one, now that he has the label for it. The label is already taking over the awe of the actual thing. Not much later, it no longer even raises his eyebrow. This is a picture of how the dualistic mind labels and enters the world of ‘this, not that’ and so deadens experience by categorizing and labeling. Wonder is reduced to a computer like filing system.

So, if the ‘nondual’ is not all this, then what is it? It is the world where ‘twoness’ doesn’t exist. There is no other to compare or ‘dualize’ with. All is arising wonder. Many say that this state is not a state, for to call it that, you would be in effect defining it, and it cannot be defined or compared. It just is. It is the upstream reality and source of all matter, life and consciousness. Experientially, people who claim this awakening to the nondual claim to be free of this ‘deadening to wonder’ overlay that all of had to take on in becoming human.

It’s sort of like the proverbial ability to ‘stop and smell the roses,’ but from an altered state of mind, or better said, from a mind broken of its need to dominate the essence of a thing. It’s kind of funny, because here we are pretzeling our minds trying to define and understand the nondual which is said to be indefinable and unknowable. I like to offer that the nondual is a return to a magical state of wonder, coming more and more free of the mind’s deadening effect, and more essentially, that this state of being is actually your home frequency of being.

Now, for instance, if you need to arrive somewhere on time, you’re still going to need your dualistic mind. 8 o’clock comes an hour earlier than 9 o’clock. Time is one of the biggest illusions of all. We simply made it up with our minds’ ability to dualize and then all synchronized our watches. Voila, see you at 8! Time isn’t real. Money is another one. So is language. These are all things we made up for our own purposes. Totally cool shit to say the least. All of the mind’s abilities in these ways are not to be downplayed. They do a ton for us, but they also seriously limit our hunger to experience essence.

What we wrestle with so strongly in our search to return to essence and its awakening is actually an awakening in itself that came before. It is your awakening into duality from nonduality that your mind is still mostly not done with yet. You were born out of the nondual (mind you, you weren’t a ‘you’ in the state of oneness) into duality, you were sourced out of it. You are ‘dual awakened,’ we could say. Hence like the little boy, you live in a world of comparative difference. It’s a powerful thing in and of itself, but with the obvious downside of becoming so identified with duality that almost all connection to our essence is lost. Bad news indeed! ‘No me gusta’ we’d say here in our emerging Espanol – ‘I don’t like.’

What helped me recently is feeling into my essence as infinite love. I again say feeling, because the mind can’t grok the word ‘infinite,’ being finite as it is. I feel energy coming from my original source nature assisting me in letting this in. Jelayan recently wrote beautifully about letting in the ‘drip-line of my nondual nature.’ It sends a wave of awareness over my being that I can feel wants to flow more and more.

In the next blog in this series, I will get into side-by-side comparison of our essence (nondual) and our expression (dual). Admittedly, that’s a very dualistic thing in further attempt to ‘explain’ the nondual. Maybe, we will all reach the edge of our minds tolerance for such insanities and pop over into the nondual, or at least into a big soaker hose like Jelelle’s article offered.

Raphael Awen is a co-creator and a facilitator at SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Follow him on twitter @raphaelawen for blog updates and more or subscribe to this blog (if you haven’t already) to receive each new posting from Soulfullheart Sanctuary in your email.

The Illusion Of You: Golden Earth Tales

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(Part 2 of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales)

By Raphael Awen

Who are you, dear reader of this blog? What brings you here? You’re looking for something, right? But what is that something? In fairness to you, I could turn those provocative questions on myself: Who am I, dear writer of this blog? What brings me here?

The rational mind and language itself stumbles in this domain of heart.

In the root of our heart and psyche though are these embedded questions of ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What am I?’….they are seeking some kind of a response. These are the questions that make up our life quest and offer it meaning. The response you’ll have to accept though will be an energetic one, not a mental one, as we shall see.

In part 1 of this blog series, I described my visit to the parallel dimension Golden Earth. I believe this experience came to me as part of my deep, lifelong quest to explore the ‘Who am I?’ question. Building from there in this blog series, I offer a framework of the path and experiences that led me there. Am I biased? Hell, yeah! How and where it lands in you is sovereignly up to you. Remember, the plumber may claim experience and even expertise, but he only gets his authorization to come into your house and address your problem from you. What’s good for the plumber is good for the spiritual teacher too; both get their authority, their permission to serve from the sovereign of the house – you.

My truth is this……that who you actually are and what you actually are is not who and what you think you are. Who you think you are is a self-perception that is presently encrusted in the five-sense reality dimension of physical earth, the rational mind, and collective consciousness. Those are the things that we have all agreed upon are the umpires that call ‘what’s in’ and ‘what’s out’ of your reality. As much spiritual and emotional work you and I may have done, we don’t get to walk away easily from this consensus reality and its effect in our psyche. We are social beings who seek to know ourselves by comparative difference; but not so different that we no longer feel like we belong. Therein lies the rub.

In that milieu, either directly or indirectly, we are often brought the ‘who are you?’ question. Most every time we respond, myself included, with some form of telling people the basic facts about us and what we do. ‘My name is Michael, I’m 49, I’m married to Susan, I’m a computer programmer and I live in San Francisco.’ Sorry, but all that didn’t even come within a country mile of who you are. You told us about you, it’s periphery; it’s a story. You didn’t get to your essence.

Well, ‘fair enough,’ we might say. ‘I don’t think the person questioning was looking for anything deeper.’ True, but is that enough for you? If it is enough for you, it isn’t for me, and I say ‘Go Home.’ Hanging around here will only frustrate you (and me), so I invite you to strongly consider taking your leave. Look for a plumber when the need arises. I’ve needed to do just that many times in my life to find my own truth and my own authority.

‘No, it’s not enough!’ I hear your heart saying, if you’re taking me up on my offer. ‘I am not my name. I am not my marital status, nor my gender or my age. I am not my profession or my place of residence.’

We may then go another round and wax a bit more poetic. ‘I am a lover of animals.’ ‘I enjoy gardening.’ ‘My passion is to help children with learning difficulties.’ It’s still in the realm of what you do, albeit with more heart, but still more story that falls short of essence. Nice try, but try again.

Going deeper, we could say that you are not your past, present, or future. Neither are you your body, your personality, your emotions, your desires, your dreams, or anything else in the realm of things you have. By process of elimination, we are getting closer to seeing through this illusion of you to finding your essence. But we’re not there yet. What else could speak to this essence, if the mind and even language itself stumble at the challenge?

The quest isn’t a small one, or even one you will ever completely solve. If you’re like me, you’ve eaten up a big chunk of life already in this lion-size hunger of yours.

I was an all-in Christian for much of my life and if had I been raised a Muslim, or a Buddhist, I’m sure I would have given myself just as fully to that answer at hand for as long as I needed, given the size of my hunger to know. I was more surprised than anyone around me by my sudden admission that Christianity had given me all it could. As an adult, I bought into what I was raised in because of its promise that it would hold me with its watertight answers for a lifetime. Leaving was anything but easy. It meant giving up my deepest treasures and identity to go back into the renewed search for meaning, no longer dulled by answers.

I recall the big yellow Christian bumper sticker campaign in my hometown in the late 70’s, proclaiming, ‘I Found It’. Well, in 2008, ‘I Lost It,’ and I had to come back to my essential quest. I am not unique in this. People that have subscribed deeply to a mainstream answer are finding it eroding in the rigors of their hearts, lives and shifts in the collective. ‘Answers’ in this way are what kill quests.

For many, or even most, these questions are too uncomfortable to face. “I can get out of joint if I keep contemplating my navel,” a former friend once offered, “or I can get on with what’s in front of me.” It’s hard at times not to envy this person, but consciousness has a way of maturing, and what was before off one’s radar, no longer is. Your consciousness simply outgrew itself, and as much as you may want to, there’s no getting back into the box. Welcome to the club.

We’ve been speaking of this question and its quest so far from a mental perspective. We’ve been employing the mind as our tool of inquiry. If you are feeling some angst to break through something or out of something as you are feeling into this question with me, I’d like to offer that what you are coming up against is the limitations and frustrations of the mind. The mind does many things amazingly well, but in other things, it fails miserably. This quest and its question cannot ever be ‘answered’ in any final sense. To the mind, this is bad news if it sees this as a statement of its inadequacy.

It can, however, instead actually be good news, if it sees this a retirement party. Here the mind can finally acknowledge with relief the lousy explanations you’ve been giving yourself and others to the ‘Who are you?’ question. Here the mind can sit back and marvel, at the lure of what every cult, culture, religion, spirituality and philosophy on the planet seeks to offer this quest, without assuming responsibility to sort through any of it. The rational mind was never meant to handle these questions.

As Rumi offered, ‘Only with the heart can you touch the sky.’ These questions are questions of the heart. It is the heart that holds our curiosity to know. It is the heart that spans the realms of both your expression and your essence. The knowing that the heart seeks is not any kind of a mental explanation. It is a ‘knowing and feeling’ that transcends the mind, and that reaches into essence, your essence. The mind, hopefully now enjoying and admitting its relief from where it floundered, is now welcome to this domain where the heart is the guide and authority. Here the mind, in surrender to the heart has a place, as a much needed role model of letting in love. Here the mind can finally admit and reflect back to you the reality of your heart; “I want, I need, I hunger for more.”

With your heart now at the helm, and the mind in surrender, the nature of these questions look and feel very different. What the heart knows and feels is that who you are is infinite mystery. Who you are is ultimately unknowable. The heart however knows this unknowable. It feels it. It basks in it. The heart feels the essence of all things as love, the ultimate upstream reality. Love is the only true source and substance behind all matter, behind all being, behind all consciousness. To the heart, all else is only constructed illusion.

You are infinite love. I am infinite love. Try saying those words aloud to yourself, with eyes closed, breathing fully and deeply. ‘I am infinite love.’ Say it again. You’ll feel two things; the mind chafing a bit; and your heart reaching and expanding out into the essence of who and what you actually are. Your own heart is now initiating you into your essence. This essence is your upstream source of being that you as a unique human being are the expression of.

In the next blog in this series, I will explore this magical essence deeper; what it is and how you can know it and feel it; and where that might take you.

Raphael Awen is a co-founder of and a teacher at SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. Visit soulfullheart.com for more. Follow him on twitter @raphaelawen for blog updates and more or subscribe to this blog (if not already) to receive each new posting of his and others from Soulfullheart Sanctuary directly in your email.

A Visit To Golden Earth: Golden Earth Tales Blog Series

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Raphael Awen

infinitelovegates

 

 

(This is part one of an ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

Recently, a magical and deeply personal experience surprisingly opened out for me to be given a visit to the parallel dimension of Golden Earth. It has felt so magical, so alive, so meaningful, so personal, that I hesitated to share about it to allow for a time to savor and let in all that it was – and is – opening out in me.

The intent in sharing this is not to convince you that this dimension is real or that it is accessible, but rather to offer that it is, and to allow your own autonomy and truth to resonate or not. That resonance, or absence thereof, in my truth, is what will open this out for you, or not.

I’d like to begin though by sharing a key experience that led up to this event that felt deeply related. A week or so prior to the Golden Earth experience, I went down to the hammock on the sanctuary here and I could feel a need in me as I went there. I couldn’t put my finger on what the need was, but the signature feeling of a need arising in my field was unmistakable. I lay in the hammock for most of an hour hoping to access something deeper in a meditative space, but found myself blocked somehow. I couldn’t seem to find the juice to take me deeper into my own heart. My mind seemed to distract me at every turn. Strangely, in the frustration of that blocked feeling, and accepting it for what it was, something popped that took me into some of the deepest tears of a heart and soul movement that I have ever experienced.

I felt so achingly ‘done’ with the limitations of the mind’s domination and limitation of my life and reality. I felt so ready to enter new realms of experience having been in a decade long letting go phase of life as I knew it. This was true particularly in the last year and a half having exited a 30 year career and ‘exodusing’ Canada in favor of rural Mexico. The ache was at a deep level of even wanting to die ‘if this is all there is’ kind of feeling. ‘I don’t want to live any more at this level of consciousness, I can’t and I won’t’ was the further heart cry of this ache. Wave after wave of tears rolled through. I knew that it was a doorway into some kind of initiation, and I didn’t want to miss it, even if I didn’t quite know where to file it. It felt so visceral, that even attempting to write up a long account of it in my journal felt too mental and laborious. I’ve chronicled so many lesser things in detail, but strangely, I just felt to let this experience bake in my heart and see where it would take me. And take me somewhere, it did.

It was a week then following this ache rolling through that the Golden Earth experience occurred for me. I was again in the mid afternoon going to the hammock to rest for a bit. I gave myself to a pen and paper brainstorming exercise trying to come up with a handle for a new Twitter account, as I had recently changed my name from Wayne to Raphael. After an hour or so, I was left feeling a bit mental and dense, and hungry for something.

I casually decided to do a ‘doorway’ meditation that I had recently become familiar with as a tool to access the subconscious. The tool works simply by creative visualization and a generous helping of self-permission. One imagines in detail a door, on which is placed a symbol or words of your choice, then imagining your self walking through that door, and taking note of all the feeling tones, messages or guidance that comes up on the other side of that door. Given the dense feelings I was in, I actually prepared myself a bit for a mild or even no result at all.

I chose the words ‘Infinite Love’ as the words to place on my door, as this has been an awareness that was a recently expanding theme and longing arising in me. When I felt into what kind of door this should be, I settled onto a set of stately swing gates, made out of what appeared to be a wrought iron type construct, but was actually in my imagination, a glistening aura of wrought pearl, a two inch diameter variety. The word ‘Infinite’ was also wrought in pearl, in cursive on the one gate, with the word ‘Love’ on the other. River rock columns anchored the gates. A low-rise earthen berm completed the boundary and winged off into the distance on either side of the gates. A sense of invitation filled me as I took in the meadow beyond that began to replace my earlier mental preparation for a possible underwhelming experience. I could feel the energy was different on the other side and desire was rising in me.

As I approached the gates closer and took in their beauty, tears of homecoming welled up in me, with the feeling of my heart need that I felt earlier that afternoon now leading. I let the magical words and feelings of ‘Infinite Love’ move through me. ‘I am infinite love,’ I repeated slowly to myself several times, breathing deeply as I did. The sheer craftsmanship of the gates was kind of distracting from a technician’s point of view to the heart pull and invitation that they also held. I also felt there was no rush, and to take all the time I wanted to observe my surroundings.

I was so taken with the gates that it hadn’t yet occurred to me if I could just simply open the gates. Do I just go ahead and push on them or do I need to call someone? As I felt my desire to enter and, like magic, my energy and desire and readiness to enter simply opened the gates. I was reminded of the motor mechanisms and remote control devices on the entrances to housing complexes. Here though: no devices, no noise pollution to disturb the beauty and magic. My energy was the ‘key fob’ of entry.

When I walked through the gates, I immediately felt a shift in the heart porosity and density. My needs and desires and aches were all immediately heightened. I also felt an overwhelming sense of home. The contrast of the ache for home and finding it at the same time was disorienting. I had to ‘just breathe’ if I was going to be able to take in any more. Divine Father appeared just as I was feeling the need to be hosted on whatever this tour would be. I was grateful for such a trusted guide. As I stood in the now tree surrounded meadow (landscapes morph easily here I learned) with Divine Father patiently at my side, I could do nothing but weep at taking in the being at home feeling. A deer stepped out of the trees and came toward us. The deer easily telepathed that all I was feeling was landing in its heart. “I know…I know…welcome, welcome,” he said. He then welcomed my touch, which gave me a grounding point of contact and helped me shift gears to let in more.

A natural desire arose to explore, check things out, then a bit more overwhelming feelings of ‘where do I even begin?’ Divine Father suggested a coffee shop and that felt perfect. We were both effortlessly transported to an outdoor coffee shop nestled in amongst huge evergreen trees called, ‘The Golden Earth Café’. The wait staff was unlike any I had ever experienced before, totally connected and feeling. The coffee was also a completely new experience and taste, so rejuvenating. Divine Father seemed to be just giving me space to expansively feel myself as the center of things, fading in and out as I needed him. I couldn’t help but feel all my previous years, back in Canada, early in the mornings having a Tim Horton’s coffee shop of my choice all to myself as a sacred ritual space to begin my day.

About then, a friend came by and sat down. Back in my Tim Horton’s days, I would most often have felt his presence as an intrusion. Here and now though, we communicated so heartfully and again, that effortless quality that seemed to pervade everything so far. The conversation was the most profound conversation I’d ever had with another human being. There was a complete absence of any posturing and unworthiness on either of our parts that normally chokes the flow of relationship. No fears of rejection, or if they were present, they were too small to be picked up on my radar. I felt so completely nourished by the exchange, opened out even more and enlivened. This was exactly what I had longed for all of my life to find inside of male friendship. Here, it seemed to be just the norm. I wondered if I might come to take this for granted some day.

After we were done at the Café, a further desire to explore arose. Divine Father, reading my mind, as well as my past life enjoyments, offered we could take in some of the ‘city.’ Transport was again only a thought away and the city I learned is not set in stone or concrete as it were. Rather, the city just materializes in the moment in front of the purposes and needs that arise for it, and it makes no environmental footprint somewowhow. The architecture, the cityscape, the detail was anything but thrown together, but each building lovingly energized and appointed, part of a completely different ethos. I could do nothing but look and feel myself, as a part of this wow. Divine Father said this city was put together just for our afternoon leisure, and it was ‘constructed’ out of my need along with the mood I was in. It could be replicated if I needed it to be, but the tendency here was for settings to morph and change as often as we do.

I then reached my limit for what I could take in, and Father vibed that it was best not to push it, pace myself, and that I could come back ‘whenever.’ My return to the hammock back on the sanctuary wasn’t an issue because during the whole experience, I felt like I was both in Golden Earth and the hammock simultaneously. The shepherd and a flock of sheep on the sanctuary had came through at one point during the time at the Café and bridging between the two worlds felt like an easy and grounded part of the magic. This wasn’t an ‘out of body’ experience, not yet at least.

Attempting to summarize this experience only adds to the questions that surround it. I will however offer a few observations and questions.

Willingness to feel ones emerging despair and hunger for more feels key to accessing this parallel dimension. Maybe this is the point of the time we spend in the ‘time illusion’ of this 5-sense based made up ‘reality’ we call earth; fully basking in all that earth life has to offer and coming eventually to our deep longing for more, even to the point of being done with previously treasured aspects of the earth reality. It’s hard for me to imagine myself simply stumbling upon Golden Earth while still given to and happy with my previous lifestyle as a painting contractor. The frequencies of each are simply too far apart to bridge. None of us are done with anything till we are, and until we are; the appetite to take us to a new place just isn’t there.

In an infinite-love, infinite-possibility reality, wouldn’t this hunger-for-more be way more natural than camping forever in any kind of heightened attainment? It would seem that once and for all ‘full’ fulfillment is never actually attainable, but instead something more akin to our appetite for food or sex; a back and forth of satiation, digestion and hunger for more.

So what’s happening with your hunger for more as you read this? Is my story synchronistic for you in something related to your journey, or something you’ve asked the universe for? Is there a choice or action you feel as a next step in relation to this? I’d love to hear from you what it’s about, or support you in any way I can. You can reach me at soulfullhearts@gmail.com, or if you prefer, through the comment box on this blog.

Note: An audio with more on my visit to Golden Earth is here.

Raphael Awen is a co-founder of and teacher at SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. 

 

Christianity’s Surprise Demise: Divine Father Dialogues Day 27

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Wayne's Mandala

W:  Good Morning, Divine Father.

DF:  Hey, Good Morning, Wayne.

W:  I have a plan where I’d like to go with you today…

DF:  And where’s that?

W:  I’ve been digesting a book I’ve been re-reading called The Event That Created Christianity by Eric Zuesse, and it’s been calling to me again. I want to ask you to hear me out on this story.

DF:  Sounds good, Wayne, tell me about it.

W: Here comes a bunch of content if you’re up for it?

DF:  For sure, I’m up for it.

W:  Okay, here goes…So in Paul’s letter to his converts in Galatia, the very earliest of New Testament writings, though still some 20 years after Jesus’ death, Paul is forced to deal with an arising issue that’s going to blow the lid off of his life’s work unless he can wrangle it under some kind of control. Paul has been an influential and rising leader over the past 14 years in the sect of Judaism that Jesus started. The movement is now under James leadership, that’s Jesus’ brother whom he appointed just before Jesus was put to death by the Roman authorities for sedition against Rome.  Paul, however, has been off to one side of this movement considerably, as he has been introducing gentiles (as in non-jews) into the sect, successfully so, and herein is the mounting problem, which I’ll get to in a moment.  Paul; though a contemporary of Jesus admittedly has never met the man; who also has proudly had little to do with Jesus’ disciples. Paul, though he is credited for authoring over two thirds of the New Testament, strangely never referenced a single teaching or life experience of the earthly Jesus. Here in the letter to the Galatians, some 17 years into his work with the Jesus sect, for the first time, Paul claims to not only have met Jesus’ ghost in a physical resurrected apparition, but to have been certified by him in this apparition to be god’s anointed messenger. Paul now comes on with monstrous claims saying that the god of Judaism had changed his mind on everything he had previously sworn off on that he would never change his mind on. In other words, God is now completely pulling the pin on Judaism.  Problem is Paul had sold these converts on Judaism, and he has to master mind his choice of words and timing so as to keep a hugely hidden agenda adequately hidden. Paul is as hokey as this god he claims to have met. Problem is, hokey or not, Paul has been successfully attracting these non Jewish converts probably by the thousands, to this Jesus sect for some time selling them on something very different than what he is debuting now. Nobody has ever called themselves ‘Christian’ in any way shape or form, including Paul, and certainly not Jesus. Worshipping a Christ, as far as a follower of Judaism is concerned, is as false as any of the other forbidden pagan religions of the day. Judaism is the deal here, and if Judaism is anything, it’s one unitary God, no Son, and certainly no ghost, holy or otherwise.

Paul, is for the very first time rolling out something of epic proportions, again admittedly, to save his own ass, speaking of stuff that is unequivocally anathema to everything Jesus and his specific Judaistic sect of followers held dear, not to mention all the rest of Judaism, and not to mention all of what Paul himself had previously taught. He’s betting the farm though that his converts won’t see through it.

Paul, tells his converts that though he had been up until some 17 years prior obsessed with persecuting this Jewish movement with a murderous zeal. Then through his claimed conversion experience, on the road to Damascus to carry out his persecutions, god knocked him off his horse and called him to take his message to the world. The god he claimed to have had this completely unheard of encounter with (except maybe for Moses and the Burning Bush) rewards him somehow with a special revelation and calling.

DF:  Only the true god would do such a thing, right? Confounding human wisdom and all of that.

W:  Totally. Now, Paul’s been running this convert circus for non-jews into this Jesus sect for the last 14 years while hiding from his converts how very much off to the side, and completely out of collaboration with what Jesus’ disciples have been doing and teaching that Paul’s work actually is.  Pardon me, Father, if I’m repeating myself a bit here.

DF:  No problem, I’m tracking. I get you have to get this out.

W:  Thank you, Father, yes, I so do. Back to my story.

So now, the growing problem behind the scenes with this rapidly growing group of converts is a deal breaker, and the issue strangely, to our ears at least, has to do with the cock. These converts are not circumcised. They are not like the Jewish babies who were circumcised on the eighth day, according to the command of god in Judaism. If there is one defining issue of a follower of Judaism, laid out in Genesis chapter 17, verse 14, as a completely non-negotiable, forever and unchanging deal, it’s circumcision. James and his group finally comes full out and says ‘it’s circumcision or the door.’ Snip, snip, snip. Circumnavigate the penis with a scissors of all things! Maybe, we can thank Paul for trying to put the brakes on that one, but really, he could have cared less if it was about amputating the penis. In fact, he explicitly said that he wished castration upon the circumcision group who were opposing him. This opposing group however is none other than Jesus’ brother and closest disciples; James, Peter and John. For me personally, Father, it wasn’t until the eve of my journey in Christianity that I could see that what was plain as day in this text, that Paul was in conflict with the very leaders that Jesus left in his place.  I, like Christians everywhere, simply could not see such a travesty, for to see it, would erode everything Paul and his later followers set out to establish.  These ‘Judaizers,’ as he calls them were not some oppositional group that challenged him, but in fact the very ones who had earlier authorized him to take the message of Jesus outside of the Jewish population to what they call, the gentiles.  Paul is finally making his complete break with the movement Jesus begun to begin a brand new religion.

Paul was a con artist like no other. His hoax has endured for 2000 years, and even came to form the basis for the entire western civilization even deeply affecting the way of life for all westerners, not only Christians.

DF:  My god, Wayne. I don’t know what to say…. and of course, the women didn’t count for much….

W: Nope, no penis, no say. If only the women had a role in this, this pissing match parade about who’s included and who’s not wouldn’t have dominated our culture for all these years. Neither Judaism, nor Christianity would ever have came into existence had it not been for this battle of gender dominance. I guess it’s what we needed as a species on some level, to learn our way into something new.

DF:  Please go on…

W:  So now, the men in Paul’s thriving group are in no mind to sign up for circumcision, like Jesus’ true followers are finally asserting they must do, after some waffling on the matter. These men prefer instead to keep their cocks intact, thank you very much. Back in the first century, there isn’t any antibiotics, no antiseptics and no anesthetics. Just surviving such an operation and avoiding the risk of infection and death was a very tall order, and of course, one wrong slip of the knife on a writhing, screaming unsedated patient, and he’s now castrated.  The offer for an eternal heaven, for this temporal pain, had no takers, and Paul didn’t need to take a survey to know that. He had sold them on a much cheaper heaven without the price and seal of circumcision. Paul has his boatload of uncircumcised converts; wealthy; Roman; embracing what’s left of Jesus’ brand of Judaism; and he doesn’t intend to lose them.  But James has called it. It’s circumcision or expulsion.

DF:  Trim the cock or cut the flock…

W:  Totally. Paul had been betting that James was going to go with the flow as he had for some time, but obviously working his plan ‘b’ in case he didn’t. Paul had hoped that his continuing flow of shekels to the much poorer Jesus followers in Jerusalem would be enough to keep James quiet on the circumcision issue. It was all good until it wasn’t.  Now Paul’s cock was in compliance being born a Jew, no problem there, but his followers were not, and Paul’s life’s work would be in his own ambitious words ‘to have run in vain.’  This group that has been converted to what they’ve been led to believe is the Jesus sect of Judaism are now, surprisingly forced to choose between James, the sect’s overall leader, or Paul, their leader and teacher. Paul goes nuclear and claims that James, whom Jesus appointed leader before his death is in fact God’s enemy, along with the apostles who actually lived with and knew Jesus, because they are opposing what he openly calls his gospel. He in fact boasts, that he never knew the earthly Jesus ‘according to the flesh’ as the apostles prior to him did, but he knows the risen Christ ‘according to the spirit,’ and how that supersedes the ‘earthly apostles’ by nothing less than the decree of God. Holeee Moses, Wouldn’t you say?

DF:  “What is a preacher to do?”

W:  Hahaha, nice touch on the Indian accent, Father.  Paul decides to pull the God-told-me card in a way that’s really never been matched before or since. He makes the first ever claim to this group of people, that god’s son’s ghost appeared to him and called him to lead a new religion; that the apostles who met Jesus don’t count and circumcision is no longer the deal and the ones’ who are calling for it are in fact god’s enemies, and even the enemies of all men no less. Paul straps a rocket onto the ass of whatever exists at that time in the way of anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism in one fell swoop, and puts the Jewish heaven on sale for a bargain like no other. Only faith in a resurrected-after-death Christ is now the only requirement, which he calls ‘the true circumcision of the heart.’

DF:  You can just feel the men relaxing about now.

W:  I get to keep my beloved cock intact. Wow, I mean, maybe a toe or a finger, but who came up with the cock trimming idea and built a religion around it, I can’t for the life of me figure out.

DF:  That was that Heavenly Father dude man. He’s like the ultimate gang leader really, way beyond tattoo’s and piercings. It’s drop the drawers and prove it, or it’s get out the knife. I am God and there is NONE like me. He knew no one else had the balls to match those entry requirements but surely knew that sooner or later, someone would come along and try to reduce them…?

W:  Like a Paul, the very archetype of a con artist, who just so happened, by a very unique and well documented chain of events, in the Christian Bible no less, to need to save his swollen ass at any expense.

DF:  Sounds a bit like the Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Baker and Jerry Falwell debacle back in the eighties…

W:  You tracked that one huh?

DF:  Wouldn’t have missed it for anything, Wayne.

W:  Not that unusual at all really, just another coup d’etat in religion land really, other than the penis trimming. Any church split that we see today is pretty much the same thing. Paul is just a slimy salesman like no other and possibly never been matched in his ruthlessness to save his self image and power. His original draw to ‘The Almighty’ reflects NOT his devotion to God, but rather his lifelong and unrelenting worship of power.

DF:  You say this isn’t that unusual… but it’s majorly interesting I’d say…

W:  Majorly, with a capital M, because of where this deal is headed. Now Paul unrolls his plan b in the most careful and cunning and crafty language with very carefully planned stages and timings of what could be said to whom and when without caving in this house of cards deal, and the crazy thing is, he just barely does it, but he does it. As I said, he’s saving his own ass, trashing the person and message of Jesus in favor of his completely invented and connived Christ message.

Then he decides to take it to the next level, and teaches that obeying the Roman authorities is the equivalent to obeying god. Paul curries the favor of the Roman occupiers. Paul himself is a Jew, but an honorary Roman citizen by birth because of his father. He knows an opportunity when he sees one. Judaism and Jesus, both of whom clearly stood opposed to the Roman occupation, are left in the dust, and the followers of Paul, now called ‘Christ’-ians are off to the races, even courting the favor of the Roman regime. Problem is though that the Romans are on record for killing Jesus for sedition against Rome.  Paul knew the Romans couldn’t embrace a religion, whose founder they had in fact had killed. That would leave the Romans guilty of deicide, which is killing god. Paul is forced to change this story, by blaming Jesus’ death on the Jewish leaders in order to absolve the Romans of any blame in it, saying that Pilate and the Roman soldiers simply carried out the demands of the Jewish leaders.  It’s now late in Paul’s life, and many decades after the murder of Jesus, with Paul’s non Jewish followers not having much sensitivity to such racist claims, that such a ludicrous idea could hold a shred of credibility.  Paul would have been himself crucified if he had tried to pull of any of this earlier in the game. So there you have it, Christianity now went Roman.

DF:  Triple wow, so now, 2000 years later, the story is finally unraveling…

W:  Big time, Father. For me, this story rings really true, but still, many questions came up for me around my conditioning. What about the accounts in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?  But then I learned that these were all written decades after Paul unveiled his new religion, not prior, as they appear to be because of their placement as the first books of the New Testament. By the time of the gospel writings, Paul’s gospel has for decades been center stage, Jesus following has long been marginalized and even demonized and now it is Paul’s own loyal followers, who set out to write accounts of Jesus life to fit their very Pauline agenda. Not one of the gospels are written by any supposed disciple and contemporary of Jesus, as most Christians assume.  Had they been written anytime near the life of Jesus when the readers who knew of Jesus or his movement would have loudly protested and rejected these accounts would simply have not found the light of day.  Instead, now, 5 and 6 decades after the life of Jesus, we have a perfect climate for the writers of those gospels to insert into the mouth of Jesus the necessary pieces to make this all fly. Like the saying goes ‘History is written by those in power.’

DF:  And by now, those in power are jumping onto the best boat afloat and that meant Paul’s deal.

W:  Totally, nothing else was paying the bills and to this day, nothing has compared, in western society at least, to what Paul got off the ground over his lifetime and others took up and grew it to the mammoth proportions of Big Box Religion. Even business patterned itself after Paul’s deal, not to mention morality, or most all of our social structures, money, and on and on goes the list…

DF:  And you once thought Paul was the most devout and holy guy in the room.

W:  I did. I really did. I didn’t just think it. I ‘knew’ it way down deep inside. It’s what I was taught, and believed and gave my life to, and drew my self-worth from, along with the 2 billion people who presently call themselves Christians of one stripe or another.

DF:  Until you saw through it…

W:  …and Paul’s Christ became nothing more than a con artist’s farce perpetrated upon the human race for the last 2000 years.

DF: This is so striking and far-reaching. It changes so much. I can’t even begin to comprehend all that this now reveals.

W:  I can’t even begin to know what to do with it, Father.  For anyone who isn’t ready to see it, it is likely to remain hiding in plain sight, or at least that’s the way it has been up till now.

DF:  This is one of those things, Wayne, where just one soul, and one more, seeing through this hoax, and taking it into their hearts and lives, and coming free has a multiplication effect. You will see the complete downfall of Christianity in your lifetime. I firmly believe that. I’m surprised every day that its’ inertia keeps it coasting along as it does.

W:  What is there that I can say to the Christian reading this, and who suspects what I’ve shared is true?

DF:  You can tell them to honor themselves, and honor the people around them by choosing to leave, putting feet to that choice and letting their lives be a part of a new day. You can tell them to honor the time they needed to be beholden of Paul’s Christ, as part of their own search for the divine, and to honor this time the human race needed, and to graciously accept this dawning knowledge as their soul’s graduation into more life, more learning, more quest into what’s real and what isn’t.

W:  Thank you, Father. Thank you for feeling this story.

DF:  Thank you for telling it.

W:  I’m not sure we got to what’s tweaking me though about this story.

DF:  I think we did, Wayne.

W:  What’s that?

DF:  It’s a prophetic sense of what is soon time to be dawning on collective consciousness. You sharing this is part of the undermining and collapse of the pillars of the faith, and those reading this and taking it in, is all a part of the great change. If you thought Christianity’s stranglehold on the human race was intense, wait till you behold humanity’s liberation from Christianity.

W:  So, it’s a wait and see, then.

DF:  In one sense, yes, but in another, it’s a living and alive reality unfolding now. You get to see it now because it is given to you to see, and to help others ready to see. This is a first-fruits of deep and profound change. If you’re up for it, that is?

W:  I’m up for it.

DF:  Then fasten your seatbelt and get ready for the ride, because it is going to pick up noticeably and surprisingly.

Raphael Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit the SoulFullHeart website  for more information about virtual sessions with him.

The Cult Of Family: Dialogues With Divine Father Day 23

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

 

Wayne's Mandala

W: Hello again, Divine Father.

DF: Hello again, Wayne.

W: I wondered, Father, if we have more to talk about regarding cults.

DF: I’ll bet we do.

W: Okay, let’s go there then.

DF: What about the family cult, Wayne?

W: The family cult is the first cult we join and as such is so engrossing, that we are so embedded in it, within our larger cult of society.

DF: I think maybe you need to lead this on a personal note, Wayne, to make it more real for anyone reading this. Tell a bit of your story around family if you feel okay doing that.

W: Okay. I think I can do that. For a number of years now, I have had almost no interaction with any family. It was not the typical ‘we don’t see eye to eye on things’ that led us apart. It was me advocating for change within the family dynamic, while letting go of the faith I was raised in. My mother tried to keep that together by suggesting we all could get along in the midst of our differences. Which essentially meant, still being apart of family gatherings and just not talking about any of the differences. With me leaving the Christian faith, and in their judgments of me, and me being in judgment of them for being so unwilling to look beyond their borders, it left us only in clash, covered over with a polite, but toxic pleasantness.

DF: What’s been the difficult part of your choices?

W: I chose to leave the family cult, but I didn’t want to leave any one of them. I was attached to them, and largely couldn’t imagine my life without them. I raised my daughters into their late teens with the hope and desire that these would be two treasured women enriching my life into my mid life and golden years. The family connection spread through parents, grandparents, sons and daughters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews was and is a potent connection with many nourishing things that I to this day miss, but also with a huge toxic element that I am relieved to no longer be a part of. The difficult part of my choices has been knowing that in all likelihood, most wouldn’t be able to join me on my journey, and with me not willing to be any longer in any kind of falseness with them, that this meant parting paths. This means lovingly letting them go, and letting my bond with them go, but with an open door.

DF: Say more about the open door.

W: The door is open in that I would welcome contact from any family member if there were genuine curiosity and respect for me, including my choices and values. This is the same condition that I wish that they would hold for themselves in every relationship they have.

DF: Can you say more about what it’s like now for you to be in life without the family connection?

W: I feel a peacefulness inside of myself, as well as a love for each one of them. There isn’t the conflictual tugging on each other.

DF: So why is family rated so highly, Wayne, when admittedly most find it so hard to tolerate, and even dislike with a passion?

W: This feels like an interview, Father, I think I feel your tack here and I’m really enjoying your interested questions, and your desire I feel to put this out there for anyone ready to embrace it.

DF: Nothing like the learning that occurs in the university of true curiosity in relationality.

W: I feel the death grip we have on the family cult and why it is so pervasive has to do with the deepest vulnerability of being human. We are clearly meant to be in family. It’s just that if we settle for the current working definition of family, that only ensures that we will never be a part of true family.

DF: Why’s that?

W: It’s interesting that the word family and familiar are so close in origin, yet the energy of family is conformity to belong rather inquiry into individual uniqueness, which would lead to real familiarity with oneself. For the individual to grow, they must chose to become familiar with themselves outside of the family. I feel why family as we know it today is so praised and so valued and revered in and across our many cultures is that it serves as the perfect excuse for the individual not to grow, to not risk, to stay safe where they are.

DF: Wayne, okay, now you’re tweaking me so much I have to jump in.

W: Good, I was feeling a bit wordy.

DF: What I wanted to add was that only as an individual is in exploration with themself, or as you and I like to say, with themselves, as in getting to know their parts, are they out of the flat line existence where they have something alive to bring to relationship.

W: …where they could be valued as interesting and meaningful because they are contributing to something alive instead of cosigning a pact to stay dead as is the case of what we agreed is family today.

DF: Co-signing a pact to stay in deadness. Is it really that stark, Wayne, to you?

W: From my experience, and inside of me, it is nothing less than that. All wounding and all healing happens inside of relationship, and as we said yesterday, all relationships are in fact a cult unto themselves. It will take new cults and new relationships to take us out of the old and into the new. I feel I have inhabited that and lived my way into that to prove it to myself, and offer a landing place to anyone else who feels this is also their truth and who’d like to live into this reality for themselves. And you know what, Father?

DF: What?

W: Christopher has prepared dinner, and I’m hungry.

DF: This was perfect, Wayne, go eat. We’ll pick up soon.

W: Thank you, Father, for the interview.

DF: You’re welcome.

Raphael Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life.  Visit the SoulFullHeart website  for more information about virtual sessions with him.

Ending The Money Madness With Wayne and Yeshua- Day 1: Money Is Energy

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yeshuamoneymadness

Money never lies. It can’t lie. Want to see the truth? Look at the dashboard of the money. Money is always and forever only energy. Energy that can flow in abundance and be impeded in scarcity.

Wayne – Yeshua, This is Wayne. Are you there?

Yeshua – I am always here. Where have you been? 🙂

W – I’ve been busy, too busy, but I miss you. We talked last about talking about money together and I wanted to see if it’s time.

Y – Time?

W – You know what I mean…

Y – I do, and sorry for being testy right off the bat. I miss you and I miss our connecting.

W – I miss you too. Christopher [Gabriel] tells me he misses my conversations with you. Jillian [Jelelle] and Kathleen [Kalayna] tell me they are waiting. Fran says she took notes from our last conversations.

Y – And you are waiting for the right time?

W – Well, I don’t know what to say about that. I could go off on how busy it’s been or how full it’s felt having adjusted to living for a couple months now in an RV in a campground.

Y – Time is an illusion.

W – Okay…

Y – I’d like to hear the RV stories, I just wanted to dive in.

W – I like that about you. ‘No pissing around,’ we said last time. Partly to offend the offendable, and partly out of a desire to blow shit up…to get on with something that so wants to be gotten on with.

Y – And Money is an illusion too.

W – I know that. I should say I’ve heard that before and even made some sense of it, but inevitably the illusion becomes more of a reality. My time, energy and anxiety seem to default to something like ‘my life revolves around money.’ Part of the reason I’ve waited to have the space for this conversation with you was waiting for a time when the money concerns are looked after in the moment. As In ‘now I’m free to be creative and give what I truly have and want to give.’

Y – And have fun giving?

W – The funnest fun actually.

Y – So you’re saying that it feels like a lot of the time, or most of the time possibly, it feels like you don’t have the time or money to have fun?

W – Pretty much.

Y – Why would you do anything that you don’t have fun doing?

W – You mean ‘fun’ as in gaining reward and pleasure, doing what we most deeply enjoy…

Y – Anything less isn’t fun. I’m not talking about the boring trash that passes as fun for so many people. Most people have no clue what fun is. It’s like anyone who’s had an orgasm thinks they know what it’s about.

W – What is it about?

Y – It’s about not knowing what it’s about, and knowing you don’t know. Which is what allows you entry into real unending learning.

W – I like learning about orgasms.

Y – I know you do.

W – Do you think we’ll be able to stay on track and uncover some really cool shit about money together?

Y – I do. And we’ll kill some sacred cows about sex and time while we’re at it, too.

W – We’re not sounding too smug right now?

Y – Too smug for some for sure, but most of them will never find this writing anyway. To those who do find this writing and find being direct and plain and transparent offensive, I’d say that you need to live some life for the sole purpose of coming to terms with what you really want. Because until you know what you want, what you really want, you are not of much use to life, love, others, or God. You are use-less instead of use-full.

W – I’ve wanted conflicting things for much of my life and I’m sure I still do.

Y – And is it fun?

W – No, it’s conflict.

Y – The only conflict worth having is conflict that brings you back to real fun.

W – And all this has to do with money I’m sure…?

Y – If money IS anything, It’s an agreement. It’s an agreement about how we will exchange energy. We’ll get into that I’m sure, but for now, I want to come to an agreement about we will exchange energy in this dialogue.

W – Okay.

Y – For starters, I definitely don’t want to do all the teaching, more like half teacher, half student.

W – Okay, then we’ll have a half a series on money?

Y – No wise guy. You get to do the other half.

W – I get it only works that way.

Y – And why does it only work that way?

W – When any one of us give over all of our power over to the teacher and see ourselves as students only, we abdicate our sovereignty and our power and that just hurts.

Y – And been there, done that right?

W – Enough lifetimes to be finally done with it.

Y – Good. This is an exchange of energy. At times you bring the questions, at times I will. That’s coquesting.

W – ‘Co-questing?’ You’re just gonna keep making up words aren’t you?

Y – What word do you know that wasn’t made up?

W – If the human race is anything, it’s making itself up as it goes.

Y – Yes, teacher.

W – There’s the ‘Word Of God.’

Y – There’s the word of Wayne.

W – Where’s this going?

Y – You started it.

W – Yes, I did. Maybe all of my former esteem for the bible as the Word Of God was really about a journey of coming to terms with the fear of my own bigness, with the power of my own words? With being a god and a man at the same time?

Y – Maybe?

W – I’m using the power of suggestion here and of being in ‘not-knowing’ as well.

Y – Okay, fair enough as long as it’s not a shrink from hiding your truth. The world is starving for your truth. Men and women have hidden their truth under a bushel of ‘thee truth’ for so long, and that time is now up. That’s why we are in the midst of a great shift, and we need conversations like this one to assist in the birth of what’s coming.

W – And money has been a container for the power of our truth, hasn’t it?

Y – Money never lies. It can’t lie. Want to see the truth? Look at the dashboard of the money. Money is always and forever only energy. Energy that can flow in abundance and be impeded in scarcity. Yes, much of the truth of one’s life can be seen in our relationship to money. Whether you’re stuck in a rat-race, or you’re unfulfilled with all the money in the world, money only and always reflects an internal reality.

W – I think we opened up this question more than we addressed it today.

Y – Insight can only come in response to the quality of the quest. It’s a flow, a current, a currency. No question, no quest.

W – I have lots of questions.

Y – Good. Treasure them. We need them. Guard them.

W – The deadest man is the man who still breathes, but has lost his quest.

Y – Wow, Wayne, looks like we started something.

W – ‘Walking with Jesus,… talking with Jesus,… all along the way…’

Y –  ‘Turn in your hymnals please to the third stanza of hymn number 389.’

W – ‘All together now.’

Y – We’ve so ached for so many centuries to find something. We’ve given our hearts and souls. Our lives, our time, our money.

W – Only to find out that what we thought we knew, we don’t know.

Y – And not knowing is only and always what leads to knowing…

W – Which in turn leads to more not knowing.

Y – Exactly.

W- So this book might turn out to be one big disappointment?

Y – Only for those allergic to fun.

W – I missed you, man

Y – I missed you too.

W – How much of this can we stand?

Y – We’re about to find out, aren’t we?

In this blog series, Ending The Money Madness, Wayne Vriend shares his unedited, journal conversation with Yeshua.These blogs offer an exploration of money, what it is, how to relate to it, the financial collapse and transition to yin-based currency, the false self system created around money, etc. Visit www.soulfullheart.org for more about the SoulFullHeart Way of Life and read 90 Days With Yeshua: Modern Message From An Ascended Teacher for more enlightening conversations between Wayne and Yeshua.

Ending The Money Madness With Wayne and Yeshua- Day 2: Feeling-Based Currency

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

yeshuamoneymadness

The fear of the flow ending is real. The money madness we want to speak to is where we offer that the fear of being out of the flow, inherent in simply being alive, has created a false world. A world that doesn’t appear very false at all, yet is designed to remove us from feeling the inherent vulnerabilty of being human.

Wayne – Good Morning, Yeshua. Wow, where to start today?

Yeshua – Start with what you are feeling. Feeling is current, as in flow. So is money, as in currency.

W – I’m feeling a mixed bunch of feelings actually this morning, more digestions and anxiety around RV living, moving more and more towards community with SoulFullHeart as compared to a more sterile ‘healing offering,’ then I’m feeling some press towards a number of ‘to dos’ for today. I’m also digesting the awkward talk I had with a man over tea yesterday bringing my truth in the face of his unfeeling, brilliant, mental genius…

Y – A ton of content for sure, can you feel a container of any kind to hold it all this morning?

W – Well, yes, I feel my own vulnerability underlying all the change, parts of me seeking reassurance that this all isn’t heading to an undesirable place. That leads me to reach out to the Divine Mother simply asking for that holding and love and care and guidance and energy to respond.

Y – And what response have you felt?

W – So far, I felt a sense of that ‘yes, I am being held.’ And I felt guided to open up our dialogue, to make finding and seeking my way something I do out loud as a gift to others who resonate.

Y – So why care about others when you are feeling admittedly close to the edge?

W – Because all of us are actually very vulnerable to changes. Most of us are too medicated to feel that though. A big medication of choice in my past has been a watertight relationship with money that was about ‘getting ahead’ at all costs, and we’ll give attention to other things when we are elusively somehow ‘ahead’. Living free of this unhealthy relationship with money for me involves a process of being transparent with where I am really at, inviting others to feel with me their changing reality, and giving what I have to give now, instead of waiting for some right time.

Y – And why do it through talking with me?

W – You get right down to business, don’t you?

Y – …No time to waste and all the time in the world. Though I’m leaning towards no time to waste at the moment…

W – I get that me authoring a ‘well written’ book, with a well crafted scope and table of contents, and great arguments, as if the guidance and knowledge I would share somehow came from my superior learned humanity, would be the only way that many people could take in what I have to offer. Me the brilliant author and them the brilliant student/resourcer. But dialoguing with you, Yeshua, instead as a means of giving seems way more interesting to me. Of course, for so many, the very idea that I am talking with Yeshua is a leap that they can’t take……at least, not yet. I’m looking for those who are ready to take this leap. Into themselves. Into new relationality, with themselves, with others, and with the Divine.

Y – Okay, long answer. Where to you put me in the relationality list you just gave – yourself, others or the divine?

W – Hmmm’ 🙂 Where would you like to be?

Y – I asked first…

W – Sometimes you feel like this really cool part of me that has laid dormant for most of my life, that when I get the self permission to just connect with you, I can obtain all the guidance and energy and resource that I need to find my way. In Soulfullheart, we call this part of us our Gatekeeper. But then, at other times, you feel like an Ascended Teacher. One who has returned to source from several earth journeys who at present makes yourself available to help whoever is ready and willing. Then I feel that it is my Gatekeeper, my inspirational muse is the one who likes to connect with you, as the Ascended Teacher. That’s as sure as I can be at the moment, which isn’t mentally that sure, much more so a feeling-based surety.

Y – ‘Feeling-based surety’…you’re feeling a little backed up with all the ideas your throwing around so quickly here. It’s a bit hard to keep on track.

W – It’s meant to be. Feeling-based cognition is meant to interrupt the mind through chaos.

Y – Yes, teacher…continue…

W – What did I get myself into?…okay, I’ll try. The mind seeks line upon line solid answers to afford a sense of security and dependability. The heart which is more an expression of our Divinity needs no such surety to feel safe. The heart feels safe and secure in chaos, for it knows that chaos is never only a death, but always a death and a rebirth. As humans, we are huge expressions of this re-creative force in the earth. How did that sound?

Y – Like major enlightened shit, man. How does it feel?

W – Like I have a lit rocket strapped to my ass sometimes and scary as hell.

Y – Sounds like currency flow to me.

W – Huh?

Y – Being in need, which was your essence since the chromosome and the egg came together, and getting your needs met has been the underlying vulnerability to all of your life. The fear of the flow ending is real. The money madness we want to speak to is where we offer that the fear of being out of the flow, inherent in simply being alive, has created a false world. A world that doesn’t appear very false at all, yet is designed to remove us from feeling the inherent vulnerabilty of being human.

W – Which is another way of saying that all too often the more money one has, the deader they are…

Y – Mostly true, no doubt. The reason though that any soul chooses to come into any given life is to work this fear of death. It’s the underlayer that underlies all the activity of life. It’s even written in the Divine’s essence as well. The divine itself doesn’t believe it has a guarantee of never facing a complete demise, a ceasing to be. Being is such a great opportunity, so it naturally fears loss of the privilege. The Divine lives in the unknown, feeling its own vulnerability, and when we are up for tuning in that frequency, we can get on with some really exciting living.

W – Wow, you just like rewrote the whole cosmos thing.

Y – If we’re going to end the money madness, we’re gonna need to get to the root of some things.

W – Just between you and me, Yeshua, I can definitely feel a part of me who is not so sure we are going to uncover anything.

Y – And I like that part of you, because it’s way more real than a false-self bravado claiming to have some answer. It’s not the one with the biggest answers who wins this race, it’s the one with the biggest questions.

W – Like the child who annoys his dad by asking ‘why’ to every answer he gets…

Y – Except here, you won’t get annoyance. You will get childlike wonder and awe and transparency, and in that, you get trans-parented into a new reality.

W – Okay, there’s the second word created: ‘transparented.’ Are we going to keep a dictionary on these?

Y – I like just launching them instead. Dictionaries are bit boring, to me at least. Words are currency; they are flow. All of them are made up and so is money.

W – Feeling full again, Yeshua. You’re a lot, you know?

Y – I’m a lot? You never stop asking questions.

W – But said you wouldn’t get annoyed…

Y – Unless I do. Conflict isn’t such a bad thing, you know. Way underrated. Conflict is what moves us. Another currency. Feeling-based currency. All currency begins as feeling.

W – For tomorrow?

Y – For the rest of your life.

In this blog series, Ending The Money Madness, Wayne Vriend shares his unedited, journal conversation with Yeshua.These blogs offer an exploration of money, what it is, how to relate to it, the financial collapse and transition to yin-based currency, the false self system created around money, etc. Visit www.soulfullheart.com for more about the SoulFullHeart Way of Life and read 90 Days With Yeshua: Modern Message From An Ascended Teacher for more enlightening conversations between Wayne and Yeshua.