The Illusion Of You: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

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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.

Openness To Feeling Our Feelings As An Awakening Process

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

By Jelelle Awen

tearsarethelanguage

The SoulFullHeart definition of awakening is not about being liberated from feeling anything negative. It is about having the consciousness and heart capacity to hold the reactions, move through them, and gain invaluable healing and understanding in the process.

This afternoon, I experienced a sense of feeling unhappy, which is admittedly rare for me most of the time. It was a vague feeling of unhappiness without a strong charge, but really felt more like a restlessness. I couldn’t feel specific content which created this feeling, but I sensed it has something to do with changes that are coming, both personally and for our community here at the Sanctuary. Changes that will provide a crucible for growth and self understanding, as change always does. It felt like part of me was tense about these changes and how they will impact us and what they will push up to be felt.

There was a rare breeze moving through this afternoon and it seemed to reflect my impatience back to me. As has been my spiritual and emotional healing practice for many years, I asked myself: “Which part of me is agitated?’ and ‘What is going on in my life right now or what has been previously subconscious to me that is now coming up?’ Finally: ‘What do I need to be open to feeling?’

This openness to feeling the source of my reactions has led me to the place I am now most of the time….can it be called, ‘awakened’? Or, even, enlightened? I suppose it could be, seen through a certain filter. Or, at least that I have had tastes of being awakened based on the experiences I have had and continue to have. Why, then, if this is true, am I feeling restless and, even, agitated? Isn’t all that supposed to be ‘behind me’?

I feel that these questions are at the heart of the distortion about being awakened or enlightened. As if, suddenly, like receiving a bolt from the sky, we are free of our feelings and reactions. As if, we are released from our humanity and no longer ‘plagued’ by shifting moods and emotional tides. Maybe for some souls this is true….maybe it was true for Buddha as he was described by others. And for Yeshua and for Krishnamurti perhaps. But, it seems to me that these saints and sages must have had passing moods and feelings too. They were human after all, even if they had ascended to a place of consciousness that is well beyond what most of us experience every day. While I admire deeply the great saints and sages, I don’t look to them for a model of being without feelings but rather as templates of how to hold higher states of consciousness and our humanity in one individual expression of Infinite Awareness and Infinite Love.

For those of us interested in personal and spiritual growth, I feel that what we are after is understanding and awareness about our reactions and moods. We want to understand and, therefore, ultimately heal our pain and suffering to experience more joy and wonder about our lives. And through this understanding, be able to make choices that feel more in alignment with who we authentically are and our soul purpose reason for being here. Perhaps some of us want to experience our nondual nature in magical moments freed from the tight constraints and filtering of our minds. Or, we want to feel the arms of the Divine around us, guiding and holding us, even as in moments It sets us free to fly our own routes, sovereignly following our passions and our desires.

The SoulFullHeart definition of awakening is not about being liberated from feeling anything negative. It is about having the consciousness and heart capacity to hold the reactions, move through them, and gain invaluable healing and understanding in the process. Being with my feelings in this way for over ten years is what has opened my heart and soul to let in the altered states of consciousness that I have experienced and the overall joyful and magical way that I relate to my life. Yes, ‘bad’ moods still occur for me, but they are held with sacredness and honor. And, they move quite quickly rather than sticking to a deeper, unconscious depression and suffering place inside of me as they did before I began my growth process.

Within the SoulFullHeart community, we invite everyone to share reactions and feelings that come up – as I will do at dinner tonight with my mate Raphael and others after checking in with myself and my guides to feel into the source of my feelings. Being able to share our vulnerable feelings with others who can feel us and love us is another key to awakening to our essence as Infinite Love. Without a support for our inner world to come out, our false self suppresses it and part of us pretends everything is fine. This suppression comes from a sense of feeling separate from each other, which then makes it necessary to hide what we really feel. When we are invited to be authentic with ourselves, with others, and with the Divine from a place of connection and Oneness about what we are feeling, we experience the reactions move and heal. We experience that everything about us can be held with love and sacredness, even what we would have previously judged as ‘negative’ or ‘unenlightened.’

Now that I am finished writing this blog, I feel better and lighter. My heart is filled with the truth of what I am offering and my desire to share this with others who are tired of suppressing their feelings and pretending to be what they are not. The agitated mood is moving along like the breeze, not gone for good but ebbing and flowing until I need it again.

Jelelle Awen is co-creator and a facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Please visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about sessions.

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. 

 

A Drip Line Of Non-Dual

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

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By Jelelle Awen

A couple of months ago during an intense initiatory phase, I asked my guides for a strong infusion of energy while I was in a meditative state. My primary guide Morgaine, who is a high priestess who lives in the parallel dimension of Avalon, provided me with surges and pulses of energy, which ran up and down my chakras and slithered along my spine. It was familiar and yet, also, powerful. I didn’t realize how altered I was until later in the day when I was planting seeds in my garden.

I felt relaxed and yet, also, I was struggling to track anything mentally. At one point, I ‘lost’ my sun hat, which I had placed in the garden somewhere. I had to go up and around the paths many times to find it. This struck me as funny since I designed this garden; I know every path like the back of my hand, and it is not big at all! Then, I misplaced other things as well and it became difficult to even concentrate on the act of putting seeds in the ground. I got distracted by the wonder of a seed: how it holds all of the DNA for the plant to create itself in all of its form. A seed is in hibernation, just waiting for soil, water, and sun to burst free of its dormant shape and arise into its potential. Much like human beings, actually.

I finally decided that I couldn’t ‘do’ gardening anymore and needed to head back home. It felt like it was going to be a long walk, with my altered state of consciousness, yet I also felt a bit giddy with how different things felt. On my way out of the garden, I kept getting distracted by the leaves on the trees. Every leaf seemed to flash its molecular structure at me, a glittery burst of its real essence. There seemed to be a shimmer to everything. I was reminded of how tiny a spectrum of what is actually going on can we see through the narrow bandwidth of visible light.

Although it is normally only about a ten minute walk, it felt like it took much longer to get home. I didn’t have many words to share with my mate Raphael about what I was experiencing, but he could feel I was altered. I didn’t want to try to explain it too much as it felt like it would dampen the experience if my mind tried to understand it. And I couldn’t seem to do that anyway! When I helped him to get lunch ready, I struggled to get my body to do what my mind wanted it to do. And I couldn’t do anything at my usually brisk pace, even in the kitchen. I kept getting distracted by the ‘truer’ essence of things that seemed to have no relationship to anything else as I would walk by them or go to use them. For many moments, I held an arising wonder of black plastic in my hands before being able to remember that it was a ‘spatula’. This ‘state’ continued on until in the late afternoon when finally I could write again and think somewhat normally.

I feel that this condition was, to some extent, what I call a ‘drip line of the non-dual.’ The non-dual being a state of consciousness (even though it is not a state) where there are no contrasts, no opposites, and only essence or Arising Isness. The seeds, the leaves, even a common kitchen utensil all took on magical qualities when experienced through the lens of no-thing-ness. Before we were trained to use our minds to dualistically label everything with names and filter reality through comparisons, it feels like this is how we could have naturally experienced life.

In SoulFullHeart, we feel that it isn’t about the supremacy of the non-dual over the dual or that the ultimate attainment of the non-dual is the goal. Rather, it is bringing them into balance again so that our experience of reality flows between the two in a beautiful stream of ebb and flow. Raphael feels that we are 100% of both and have just overly focused on the dualistic side. To bring our consciousness back into balance and awaken to our essence of Infinite Love, we feel that opening the drip line (which could turn into a gushing flow over time) to the non-dual is a critical aspect.

For me, the best way I have found to open up my non-dualistic nature is during meditative journeys called immrams and energy transfusions which transcend the mind, engage with our true nature as energy, and bypass our defenses and false self to some extent. I have also had drip line tastes of non-duality through a dualistic relationship with Kuan Yin, an ascended teacher. Through my connection with Kuan Yin, I am able to receive transmissions of non-duality even as it is coming through a dualistic channel. I don’t feel that one cancels out the other and both can be used to experience the other. In this embracement of both, we aren’t making one ‘bad’, which is actually a dualistic way to see it.

It seems that when we resist one side of our nature in order to embrace the other that we become in fundamental struggle with ourselves. This struggle locks down our access to Arising Isness because the false self feels that we need to be ‘enlightened’ or ‘attained’ or spend hours and hours in meditation in order to transcend our dualistic nature. Maybe some souls do need hours of meditation every day, yet, my sense is that our false selves have made all of this much harder and more ‘exclusive’ than it actually is. In my drip line state of arising wonder that day, it felt as natural and easy as breathing. Because my mind was loosened and relaxed, it couldn’t evaluate or compare what was going on. It just ‘was.’

I look forward to more drip-line experiences (with maybe some gushers in the future) and bringing my nature back into balance between the dual and non-dual. And I look forward to experiencing and facilitating students here at the school in this exploration for which I am hoping that we will discover even more naturally arising ways to experience our essence as Infinite Love in both dualistic and non-dualistic forms.

Jelelle Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Please visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life

Another Revolution Around the Sun

Published on by Gabriel HeartmanLeave a comment
sunthroughclouds

New Year’s Eve, 2015. Tonight many people around the world are celebrating an end and a beginning. Our planet survived another trip around the sun and now we get to enjoy the ride one more time. But, I don’t think most people, myself included, have actually thought of it that way. It’s mostly been about a number. Pretty amazing what changing a digit can do to create this euphoria. I can feel a part of me wanting to go on a rant about the craziness of it all, but I would rather feel what lies underneath is for us as a human family.

In our relatively recent past, we came together in different groups to participate in the cycle of our sustenance. We offered prayer during times of sowing, and celebrated and gave thanks in times of harvest. It was a very human connection based on a very simple need….food. To me, it feels like a very significant relationship to renewal. Another relationship could be when a beloved elder is on their deathbed, while a mother is giving birth to a new member of the tribe. There is reflection and celebration of life and death. The most significant renewal.

As we have grown in numbers on this planet, we have had to find new ways to feed ourselves, which feels like the advent of the Industrial Age. Technology helped to grow more with less labor. Those who weren’t growing food were building machines that would help to do more with less labor. We began to make things that were farther and farther from our real needs. With this increase in population, we have also lost the close-knit bond of community we had when we were more tribal in nature. Both of these occurrences feel to have separated us from our human connection.

Enter our collective calendar. The one used to keep us all on the same page, so to speak. It is a solar calendar. One full revolution around the Sun. So, are all the fireworks and Jaeger shots about that cosmic dance? Hell, it wasn’t really that long ago that we thought we were the center of the universe. The biggest significance to me, near as I can tell, is the number got bigger and we had to buy yet another calendar.

So what is really happening tonight, New Year’s Eve? My heart tells me that we miss each other. We miss feeling connected to each other. The moment the clock strikes midnight we are all One. We all entered a new year together. People that don’t know each other will give each other hugs and a warm smile. For a brief moment in time, we are family again.

My heart also tells me we are off-gassing the pain of our past, both individually and collectively, and pray somehow ‘this year will be different.’ That maybe this will be the year we get to find our way home to the place we once lived, in love and harmony. Or maybe, we somehow know this is all going to come to a head soon, and we are just enjoying one last ride around the golden, shiny orb.

I feel both are true. I feel there are those of us who sense the coming shift and awakening in the unfolding human drama and are responding in our own way. We are offering sanctuaries both internally and externally. These efforts are making changes in our future happen now, in the present. I also feel we are not all going to make it, and that brings a sobriety to the celebration that is occurring tonight.

We have reached the end of a way of living. An end of a way of relating to each other and the Earth. An end of a chapter in our grand human story. But, at the same time, it is a beginning. A beginning we can choose to create with the help of those who are already here to help us. The guides and beings that exist in ‘other places’ that we have chosen to ignore. The plants and animals that we have chosen to dominate. And the planet we have chosen to desecrate.

Incredibly, they want to be with us again in the way it used to be. The love that they possess is more than we can let in, more than we collectively feel we deserve. But, to those who heal their own heart and seek to change the way they relate to themselves, humanity, and the Divine, and the planet, they will find a new reality awaiting them…along with another revolution around the sun.

Sequoia Heartman is a SoulFullHeart Apprentice Teacher at the SoulFullHeart School of Awakening And Sustainable Sanctuary in rural Mexico. Please visit soulfullheart.com for more information.

Awakening Is Like A Flower Bud Unfolding

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

heartflower

Awakening is less like a lightning bolt coming from the sky as it is like a flower bud slowly unfolding its petals in response to the warmth of the sun.

Feelings of warmth, comfort, and joy course through me; these are the feelings of the energy that move in response to my beloved mate Raphael. The feelings are familiar but the intensity of soul frequency is new. Our relationship is eight years old and brand new, both. The marriage between Jillian and Wayne (our previous names) is complete and a new union is arising between Jelelle and Raphael. This is not just semantics, changing these names, but a symbolic decision to represent the stunningly new sense that we both feel about ourselves. We also retired the inherited family name of Vriend and have chosen the last name of Awen, which means Divine Inspiration and is also the fifth element.

Who are Jelelle and Raphael Awen? It is unknown and familiar; it is us in our best moments and us in our letting go of the past definitions. It is the result of years of process work, devotional connection to the Divine, and, recently, meditative astral journeying to our true soul home called Golden Earth and the parallel dimension of Avalon. In one way changing a name is easy; it is getting to the place of genuinely wanting to inhabit something new that is challenging.

This is the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. It is about change and transformation, life arising anew at every sunrise and sunset, we get to arise anew along with it, even changing our names if we are called to. It is about nature’s beauty matching and holding space for our own inner beauty to respond and bloom.

We’ve rejected feeling that earning money should be the goal of life and embraced that money represents love and can come in many forms (including gift exchange) and shouldn’t be the meaning of life. We’ve rejected pressure to conform to the rationalist, five sense picture of reality and embraced that our reality is much more vast, mysterious, and multidimensional than we can even imagine.

We feel that you have to say ‘no’, to push back on what you’ve been conditioned and programmed to believe about life, in order to experience what your meant to experience: yourself as an expression of Infinite Love. The SoulFullHeart Way Of Life operates from this foundation of Infinite Love, it overflows from this well spring, and it gushes from this pulsing vein. Any other source is an illusion created by the false self. Saying ‘no’ is only for a phase of time until you are made bare and new with only ‘yes’ as your necessary response to what you are offered. Yes to desire, yes to learning, yes to connection, yes to love. You become a student and teacher of Yes.

This came to me this morning as one way to describe the process of awakening that participation in the SoulFullHeart calls us to inhabit: Awakening is less like a lightning bolt coming from the sky as it is like a flower bud slowly unfolding its petals in response to the warmth of the sun. We provide the warmth of the sun in the form of love, support, guidance, and a setting in which you can truly focus on your process. You are the flower, each unfolding petal revealing the essence of your heart and soul expression. And the Divine smiles on it all, caught up in the goodness of our efforts and desire.

Jelayan Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information.

Invitation To Embrace A New Way Of Life

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

It is a time of deep excitement and anticipation to be offering together with Jelayan and Christopher a deeply expanded and clarified vision of SoulFullHeart, turning now, after some very momentous months internally and relationally to the SoulFullHeart School Of Awakening And Sustainable Sanctuary as our focus.

In contrast to the excitement, it’s also tender to await and see what response we draw. Who will be the first students to come and ground in this unfolding vision of never ending learning? How will they be drawn? What journeys will life have taken them on to be ready for this step?

I can feel how tender it must feel for the person drawn to us as well. You might be asking: Will I be received with an open heart? Will I be able to embrace a new way of life? What will it be like in such an intimate setting? Do I have the capacity to open out in these ways? I hope these questions can be felt and held inside of your self alongside of an ‘I couldn’t actually do anything else’ kind of compelling guided response. It’s been nothing less than that for us.

Jelayan in particular has been bursting with a momentum of desire and soul passion that is so contagious. You can feel it in her recent blog entry. She’s been a lot to keep up with (She claims it as the other way around between us), and a staggeringly huge gift to my soul journey and learning this life. I feel myself opening out into territories that have been my deepest heart and soul longings. Christopher is on the same frequency. And it’s time. It’s time to invite others in.

It’s time to invite you in.

What do you suspect about the fact that you are reading this? Why does it call to you the way that it does? How did you even find your way here? Your miracle story is no less than ours, and is meant to be part of what is unfolding in consciousness awakening and personal/global healing.

I invite you to fully consider all the ins and outs about joining us. Ask for guidance, plain and simple. Come, come for a visit, come for one or more of the four-month seasons we are offering, or come and never leave. Just come.

Please visit soulfullheart.com for more information about the school and contact us by email soulfullhearts@gmail.com (pretty much the only way right now as remote as we are, though we can set up skype contact for when we are in town from an internet café) and tell us your story. Who are you? What draws you? and, of course, bring all your questions.

Awaiting your reply,

Raphael Awen, SoulFullHeart Teacher, Love Ambassador, Author

Digesting Christianity’s Surprise Demise: Divine Father Dialogues Day 28

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

 

Wayne's Mandala

W:  Hello, Divine Father.

DF:  Hello, Wayne.

W:  How are you digesting our last talk, or should I say ‘my last talk?’ I was a bit long winded wasn’t I?

DF:  Not long enough as far as I’m concerned, Wayne. I could listen to you tell this story over and over. When you consider how many times, and how far and wide the Christian gospel has been preached, what now cannot be called anything more than a really cheap lie, born of a really slimy intent, and how it’s been crammed down the throats of the gullible, it’s going to take some long windedness and repetition to undo.

W:  Thank you, Divine Father.  I feel some foreboding to be this outed around all this. These are fighting words for so many.

DF:  My sense is that your words will only come into the awareness of people whose hearts and souls are ready to take them in.  There’s no need for a holy war around any of this.  The fate of Christianity and Paulianity is sealed and it is in collapse now, all on it’s own accord.

W:  Yeah, and I get that’s important for someone who has been deep into Christianity, for him or her to not feel totally invaded, and left unsupported by having his or her faith shown to be a complete farce if it wasn’t something their soul was ready to see.

DF:  While that’s true, we are also fast approaching the time where Christianity itself is about to implode in on itself, of it’s own volition, as well as on account of the focused and collective energies of the human race simply wanting to learn and know and grow. When more of this collapse of Christianity happens, there will be many people simply coming unhinged in despair, anger, and chaos. It would be so much better if they were ready, but many simply won’t be.

W:  I’m curious for your digestions about what I shared yesterday.

DF:  A big dawning awareness for me, Wayne, is the realization that at the time the lie of Christianity was concocted, it was in a palpable climate of fear for one’s eternal destiny. Judaism had come to be about gaining heaven, but the price for entry for the non-Jew, as you talked about was pretty unreal. Paul’s message of ‘all you need to do is believe’ addressed this leading fear of gaining heaven and avoiding hell.

W:  And it seems that in our times, this leading fear has largely subsided for most people, even Christians.  The message of ‘turn or burn’ has lost its’ appeal in the church world, even though that message completely lines up with the tenets of the faith. It just isn’t that effective in filling pews or collection plates like it used to, so leaders necessarily play it down.

DF:  When we look at what is filling the pews today, it really is evidence of a movement in steep decline. Big box religion in it’s many varieties is becoming more and more bizarre in it’s attempts to stay afloat, and this awareness is going mainstream.

W:  What I’m curious about and wanted to discuss with you, Father, is the question of how this ploy of Paul’s became the embryo of what Western Civilization was founded upon.  Some of the things that I can see a huge resemblance in are money, business, capitalism, patriarchy, education, family, patriotism, to name just a few.  There’s a common denominator of being obedient to some form of ‘the almighty’, along with the idea that ‘non-compliance’ will surely be punished.  It seems those thematics and reality picture came from Christianity.  Other influences certainly influenced Christianity’s formation that preceded it, but Christianity it seems encapsulated and launched some really big things.

DF:  Things like duty, obligation, penalty…

W:  …and the idea that came with that is when all of these are satisfied, you’ll be allowed a measured dessert of happiness.

DF:  Do you really feel, Wayne, that Paul’s worldview, or the Paulianity he created from his worldview, became the foundation of Western Civilization?

W:  I don’t know. I thought you’d know.

DF:  You sounded like you knew a moment ago.

W:  That was just a part of me trying to sound academic. Truth is, I don’t know, and I’m certainly not an Academic, but, I do suspect it may be way more true than any of us have realized up till now. More than suspect it, I feel it to be true.

DF:  Well, I’m with you on the not knowing, as well as the feeling.  Let’s see what we can sort through of it.

W:  I figured you’d be up for it.

DF:  This one is way too important to pass up.

W:  Especially when we consider that western civilization is so evidently near the end of whatever it is and that something new is in the making.

DF:  Where do we start, Wayne?

W:  Well, for me, what comes is the question about why did I have such a deep implant for most of my adult life that said ‘When I get ahead, then I will obtain the life I really want, then I will explore my creativity and gifts.’

DF:  Let’s try and feel that together on its’ most fundamental level. ‘Ahead’ feels like a form of obtaining heaven, wouldn’t you say? Or is that too simplistic?

W:  That rings true for me, Father. Paulianity was all about addressing something missing or lacking. Wow.

DF:  Which raises the question if there really was anything lacking.

W:  That one is really so big, Father, when I feel it. That energy permeated my entrance into Christianity and my focus inside of it. It also really speaks to how I entered my first marriage and raising 2 daughters, with a big ideal of being a good father. It certainly speaks to the focused and intense input of energy into learning and growing the painting business for me.

DF:  So, Wayne, What do you now feel is the underneath that energy of getting ahead?

W:  It goes so much deeper than mere thinking I need to get ahead, but to a much more primal feeling of wanting to feel something about myself that I couldn’t access or experience, way down in the basement of my being. It was a feeling that I was somehow on the wrong side of all that is good and alive and meaningful, and I needed to find my way there, somehow, some way, to something utopian.

DF:  Sounds like that favored verse in Romans; ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but the gift of God is life eternal.’ A hundred and ten percent Paulianity again to the rescue, wouldn’t you say?

W:  Totally. Another Wow. The very idea of being separate from all that is good…, Can we really credit Paul with that much influence?

DF:  These deep feelings were a deep part of humanity’s search long before Paul, but no one coalesced them into such a potent force with as far reaching effects is my truth. The first and most successful corporation isn’t McDonalds or Apple, it’s none other than the Roman Catholic Church.  Roman Catholicism asserts that the apostle Peter was it’s first Pope, but only as a way to hide the fact that it was Paul’s ruthless life’s work that seeded it’s reality into being, and in turn seeded all of Christianity that flowed from its’ Roman beginnings to this very day.

W:  …and in turn, seeded a pervasive way of life into my being, 2 millenniums later.

DF:  Wayne, this is really important to feel and to take stock of, and to own. That who you are, and how you feel about life on so many levels, was passed on to you through the DNA of a culture, which originated in a feeling state, in this case the feeling state was and is separation from divinity. This formed the reality in which you swam, but left you without a conscious relationship with the water. You became the reality of the cultural conditioning that was handed down to you on so many levels, and in so many ways, until you began to consciously feel your way through that conditioning.

W:  The beginning of a great awakening…

DF:  The beginning of great awakening, yes, and one that really never ends.  The human race needed to come to know itself and fulfill itself in all of it’s potential.  The only way to this was by collective journey and discovery, and it seems really evident to me, that that journey had to begin with an externalized god. Paul was only championing a new and better way to gain access to and favor with this separate out-there God.  Deep in collective consciousness was a felt sense of separation, so deep that it is still felt today.  Paul’s ploy, born out of his own felt sense of wanting to bridge his own feelings of separation, in his case through power and dominance in the name of god, could only find traction because of where humanity was at collectively.

W:  So then Paul isn’t to blame quite like the way I want to give him a really swift kick in the ass?

DF:  You’d have to kick yourself along with all of humanity in the ass if you needed to carry out a punishment.

W:  That would be a lot of ass kicking.

DF:  The paradox here though is that even looking for whom to blame, and the need to blame and punish comes from this felt state of separation.

W:  Like how?

DF:  Separation presumes a gulf between humanity and divinity. In that presumption is of course a guilty party, and of course, this ‘God’ is designated to be perfect in the infinite sense, so that leaves humanity culpable.  Oh, and don’t forget, it was here that nature was blamed and made bad and dirty, along with humanity. It was human nature that was said to be fallen. From there it seeks to offer a bridge, which is its’ good news amidst all the bad news.

W:  Good news amidst the bad news, that’s the ploy of all of slimy salesmanship today.

DF:  And from start to finish, all of this is conceived and has its’ reality only as long as the story of separation holds dominion.

W:  So then what’s the reality of the matter if it isn’t separation?

DF:  The new story is that humanity was never separate from divinity, and never separate from nature, and nature was never fallen.  It was just the power of the old story that was endorsed in the collective that gave it a deep and pervasive felt reality.

W:  It’s like, Father, that, we are not so much in relationship as we are relationship itself.

DF:  Try and wrap your mind around that one, huh?

W:  I know I just said it, but I can’t quite really imagine what it means.

DF:  Humanity was and is inseparably a part of, not apart from. Being in relationship requires 2 or more in separation is how I’d say it. Being relationship itself presumes oneness.

W:  I like that, somehow, what looks a lot like 2 or more has in fact become one.

DF:  This is the dawning awareness of Jesus actual words ‘as you do to others, so you do unto yourself,’ rather than the moral prescription version of those words that made it into the bible of ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ One presumes a separate self, and projects obligation and duty and the other version presumes oneness and love.

W:  That’s totally cool.

DF:  Like majorly cool.

W:  So then, me wanting to fix blame on Paul is evidence that Paulianity is still alive and well in me, though I left Paulianity 10 years ago now, and as fast as I could, I might add.

DF:  True, but these are the cultural realities that pervade the entire culture, the things you live and breathe in every day that are invisible. You may have personally moved a long way from this consciousness, but while humanity is still largely beholden to the culture of separation, you cannot be totally free of it. If you could, that would mean separation is real.

W:  So how and when do we move on from this yawning trap of separation then? Do we all have to wait for everyone to get it?

DF:  The truth is that you already are moving from the grip of separation.  If you are feeling it personally, that means humanity is feeling it. The soul of humanity agreed to enter the dark night of the soul of separation so as to complete it and graduate from it, into what comes after it.

W:  Which is?

DF:  Which is an entire world made knew, by a new story, it’s inhabitants and participants living from oneness, one with self; one with divinity; one with each other; one with all of nature. Change the story, and you change everything.

W:  So it’s like we need a new Paul to come along to seed and birth this new story then?

DF:  Actually, this story could never be born into consciousness by one hero savior figure.  It’s being born by many hero’s, changing many worlds and many cultures.

W:  Sort of sounds like a Messianic deliverance?

DF:  Except, this Messiah has already come. It just is.  People just living their way more and more into this consciousness, as their every day reality is what is ushering in this sea change of reality, a whole mass of Messiahs if you will.

W:  With a current world population of seven plus billion, that’s a whole lot of souls. That should make for a pretty good show.

DF:  Best to show up early and get a good seat, I’d say.

W:  But its’ also, Father, a great death of the old way in which many souls will perish in the chaos of all this collapse.

DF:  Souls cannot perish, Wayne. Lives can be lost, and that is tragic, on the human level. But a soul doesn’t feel it that way. A soul doesn’t consider it a great loss to live a life with a tragic human end. For a soul, this can be a great turning in what they chose to come here to learn and feel. Many souls asleep to what is befalling the world is actually necessary for it to manifest.

W:  Necessary? Ouch!

DF:  I know that sounds harsh to your Pauline ears, as if God had decided that it should be that way. No, nature decided it that way. Nature doesn’t mind evolving. Nature doesn’t mind trial and error, and instead sees it all as simply learning.

W:  Wow, I must have a part of me still pretty into some Pauline conditioning as you call it, because I’m not all the way on board with that.

DF:  It’s not that nature is sadist. The inherent value isn’t in the suffering; it’s in the learning in the midst of suffering. And all of the learning is about returning to essence.

W:  That I’m more on board with.

DF:  Good.

W:  Do you think we just sorted out a bunch of the world’s problems?

DF:  A pretty good chunk I’d say.

W:  No wonder I’m tired, that was a lot.

DF:  Well, go rest then, so we can do this again.  We may not be done.

W:  Will do. Thank you, Father.

DF:  Thank you! That was awesome.

Wayne Vriend is a co-founder of Soulfullheart Community, healer and author of 90 Days With Yeshua. Visit soulfullheart.com for more information.

 

Christianity’s Surprise Demise: Divine Father Dialogues Day 27

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

 

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.

Healing to Healthy, Conscious Mate Ache

Published on by Gabriel HeartmanLeave a comment

By Sequoia Heartman

In the moment I feel lonely. This is true even as I have my soul family with me, an arising and strengthening relationship with myself and my parts, and a sacred beautiful connection to the Divine in both its masculine and feminine energies. I have what many souls are longing for, yet haven’t been willing or able to actually feel it. So, I am far from complaining. I feel blessed and gracious. But my heart and soul is missing something big. A mate to share it with. The other half of my other half.

Reflecting back on my romantic life, I can’t really remember healthfully and consciously aching for romance. In high school I wanted to be like the other cool guys and have a girlfriend. It was, for a part of me, a status symbol in a way. It was also a way for this part to feel worthy about himself even though the relationship itself was full of unworthiness. Love took me by surprise in college when I met my ex-wife Jillian (now Jelelle). Parts of me resisted, as it was such a different kind of love that I had ever experienced, but the depth and sacredness of it won out. After our marriage completed, my next relationship was in response to feeling depressed, not a desire for true love. So I drew a depressed mate. I’m sure you can guess how that went. After that, I was out of the romance business for a good seven years while raising my daughter.

When she moved to Canada I had a desire to date again, but it wasn’t that deep ache for courtship. I had a sexual affair that turned into a year long relationship. I wasn’t in love and needed to be honest with that. When that ended, I began to wonder if I needed to have more of a relationship with myself, but again became surprised by a younger woman from Canada. For those of you who have read my blogs, you know that to be Kathleen, and the history of our time together is well documented on this blog.

I recount my past to remind me of how I have related to romance compared to what I feel now. It has been some time since my last incarnation with Kathleen. Through all that time I have been healing my way to a more grounded sense of Self. But I had to go to the wounds. The mom wounds, the dad wounds, past relationship wounds, and past life wounds. From there I began to ask the questions who am I really and what do I really want? When I started to feel the edges of those answers, a sense of self-awareness and self-love took shape. When I began to fill my own cup with the help of Jillian, Wayne, and Divine Love, I started to feel a missing piece. But the missing piece wasn’t me. I used to identify with the missing and I felt void. Unloved. Unworthy. Now I feel the piece that is me. That has always been there, but I just couldn’t feel. So when I say I am lonely, I don’t feel alone. Now I feel the desire. The desire for the yin to my yang. The queen to my king. The peanut butter to my jelly. I feel it in a way that is healthy and conscious. I couldn’t have done that without healing my way there.

Now, the irony is that while I have found my mate ache, I have found it while living on a remote, off-grid ranch in Mexico. A part of me could list all the reasons why it feels almost impossible that I could find a mate. But those only serve to leave me in a suffering loop about it, a piece I am trying hard to heal. There are a lot of criterion for a woman to resonate with. Collapse, dirt, work, heat, vulnerability, parts work, past lives, leadership, community, limited technology, gardening, gift economy vs. fiat currency, lots of sex, curiosity, conversation, cob housing, occasional impassable river, rain, sun, seeing the context to the content, connection with the Divine, Sunday circles, energy healing, creative vegetarian cooking, horses, bugs, sheep, dogs, mangoes, bananas, limes, lemons, papaya, noni, moringa, neem, laughing, crying, conflicting, hugging, cuddling, walking, praying, building, watering, and above all…loving. But one thing is for certain, if she does, then I can honestly say she may be the one.

I realize this is starting to sound like a dating site profile. So be it. In the age of collapse, what isn’t truly you gets burned away and the really important things become much clearer. There isn’t much time to play hide and seek from each other. My heart aches for her and for the love she holds. I can feel her, but cannot touch her. I can talk to her, but I cannot hear her. I can imagine her, but it isn’t enough. When I feel all that, there is a pain. A pain that is unfulfilled desire. I let it come through me. I don’t deny it. My eyes fill with tears and I cry. For as long as I need to. Sometimes for a brief moment, sometimes for several minutes. I feel lonely and sad, yet I am held in it. Held by the Divine, my own self-worth, and the knowing that I have love, just in a different form. The ache moves through me, I dry my eyes and continue through my day with my desire still in tact, a bit stronger than it was before.

I don’t know when it will happen. I don’t know if it will happen. Not even the Divine can tell me that. All I can do is feel it, express it, and send it out to the universe. It is not a passive place of waiting, but an active vibration that I emit and respond to possibilities. This article is one of them. Who knows where it lands. It is like the proverbial message in a bottle, cast in the ocean of Love to see if it lands on the shore of another heart. In the meantime, I continue to build my cob home, help to tend the gardens, and heal more of what still needs to heal in my heart and soul. It’s a pretty damn good life. But it could get infinitely better.

I can be reached through the SoulFullHeart website or email at soulfullhearts@gmail.com if you know anyone that resonates with my call. Thank you for taking in my writing.

Sequoia Heartman is an apprentice facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit the SoulFullHeart website for more information and connection.