Something Random Written

There are elements of stability present in my life at this point but things are certainly not as they were.  I miss my former partner, companion and partner in crime very much.  I wish her all the best.  Life for the past year or so has been getting tougher, and my two jobs - making money by creating and selling virtual reality landscapes to customers internationally has taken a beating due to effects from the overall economy (as well as the host company's foibles) and my other job at a local friend's dot com seems like it will be ending soon, which will leave me in a place that I haven't been in quite some time.  I'm trying to remain as positive as I can and take to heart the fact that this existence is a learning process that breeds spiritual growth.

I recently came across a paragraph that I had written several years ago, although I'm not sure quite when since it was on a page pulled from another notebook and placed into the back of a notebook that I happened to open.  It must have been from early 2004, as near as I can tell.  Ironically, it's also an example of me being at odds with my writing.  As I believe I stated somewhere earlier, I keep a lot of notebooks and also have a tendency to just throw some of them away after a few years.  I'd almost rather not write anything, much less read it back to myself.  The thing is, I have no recollection of writing this at all, which is strange.  I can usually picture where I was when I wrote something or heard a particular song for the first time.  Who am I talking to in this paragraph?  I have no idea.  I don't even know where the words came from or why.  Either way, in my present situation I find some sort of comfort in them...

"My words are like water, my thoughts like cheap wine.  Turn again Wind of Ways and bring to me Time.  Open your doors once again and begin to share with me the secrets hidden within your halls.  Open to me and pour yourself on to my body ~ Run through my entire being ~ Cover me with your flood and rush of all the universe's knowledge.  Speak to me like your spoke to me before - Like you spoke to the billions of stars as they formed so many billions of times.  I am a vessel, your vessel.  I do indeed know you and you me.  Let the circle once again remain unbroken and let us share in the grand infinite knowledge of all things.  Here I am.  Whenever always."

There were other ramblings at the bottom of the page...

"Spool.  Spools of time.  Wheels.  A Wheel.  The Wheel, turning."

"Here again.  For what purpose?  Again.  Always.  Nevermind."

"Is there any need to remember when I was asleep?  Is there?  Is there?"

"Like a familiar theme song of someone coming home."

"If someone should sing, is it... joyful?"

It's all just something random written, but sometimes coming across notes like that can help add some perspective to one's current state of affairs.  I don't claim to know much about anything, and as I said early on, I am only the sum-total of my experiences.  I take everything with a grain of salt, working on the mosaic, trying to make some sense out of what seems just as random as events in daily life can appear to be.  I don't believe anything happens by chance anymore.  Hermetically speaking, there is no such thing, as hard as that can be for my physical mind to sustain sometimes, especially when I feel things aren't going my way, so to speak.  There is just infinite possibility and situations are created by cause and effect.  This I must remember and take to heart.

Dark Night Of The Soul

Just when I thought I felt like writing more often, haha.  My personal life has taken a bit of a spin.  I am losing my partner of the past six years and that in itself makes me said.  She was a great teacher for me, from whom I have learned many things.  I will take them with me wherever the road leads from here.  I hurt myself pretty badly about a month ago and have had a lot of trouble with mobility, which has been something new to me.  I am now under some excellent wellness care and hope that my condition can improve.

When life starts to come at you from all sides, it's hard to stay focused on what's important.  Daily routines alone, including work and personal concerns, can be enough for one to lose focus, but toss in a few black swans and things can get rough.  I'm in a time now of upheaval.  I have been trying to meditate steadily, but it's been hard.  It happens.  Everything is cyclical in nature.  I try to remember the words of one of my early "gurus", Wayne Dyer, who is fond of saying that the answer is always to "go within."  All I have been getting back for weeks now in meditation is "Dark night of the soul."  I don't know what it means for me.  Wikipedia has an explanation, but as of right now I don't have context other than the general upheaval, frustration and an ominous unknown component in my life at this time.

I forget where I heard the phrase first, but I have kept it close in my being for over a decade now, "There is wisdom in uncertainty."  I will try and keep that in the forefront of my mind.

As Above, So Below

When I was younger, I was quite the rebel.  I still am in many respects.  I don't buy society as it is.  Something - many things - are not right.  Sure, that's obvious to most of us, but when I say it, I mean it in the most expansive way possible.  One of my mentors, who is a brilliant individual, used to have a saying, "Says who?"  It used to go quite well with one of my favorite tee shirts at the time, which read "Question Authority."  We always have to question everything.  Take time to reflect and put things into larger contexts.  Otherwise, we're just sheep in this physical world, led by the beliefs, fears and often limited imagination of a select few or the collective at large.  It's my observation that if we let ourselves, our daily lives and our perceptions be governed by the media, the physical hive mind and earthly institutions, those entities tend to put our overall awareness into an ever-shrinking box.  I most often find nearly all of those institutions operate in a limited, contracting fashion, instead of being expansive.  It's so obvious when you stop and think about it.

You can see a brilliant version of the confluence of these hive mind memes in the 1976 Sydney Lumet film, "Network", where Peter Finch amazingly portrays Howard Beale, a fictional network newscaster who reaches the tipping point and takes his rage to the airwaves, setting off a harsh reaction to this type of mental contraction and conditioning.  It's always been one of my favorite films since first seeing it as a child.  Of course now it has a lot more perspective and seems somewhat prolific, if not prophetic.

Having now spent three years working in virtual reality simulators for 70+ hours per week, creating landscapes, trees, plants, buildings, and interacting with different environments, my world view has changed immensely.  Headphones for the virtual world experience are a must.  Listening to the ambient sounds, a breeze or wind, insects, water, etc. adds to the immersive element of the experience.  Maintaining your being in the air, floating and especially sailing across a vast landscape in the air while listening to music is insanely stimulating, as if there is a part of me that awakens and says, yeah... this is how it's supposed to be, because it always has been...  I remember.  I believe in the Seven Hermetic Principles, the second of which is Correspondence - As above, so below; so below, as above.  

If you are familiar with these universal laws or you are just reading them for the first time, consider the words of John Lennon in his masterpiece, "Imagine".  Then take a moment and subtract all of the world's religions, all belief systems, and consider that we exist truly within only a field of limitless possibility, of potentiality, and that we are only bound by the constructs, individually and collectively, of our minds.  My aforementioned mosaic (my post-inherited, liquid construct of the world) has been increasingly conveying such an overall concept to me, at least at this point, which brings me back to how this physical planet isn't right - far from it.  I increasingly get the feeling that we've been fleeced, robbed, and are somehow being herded as a race toward annihilation by a complicity of memes that are increasingly isolating us from nature and the planet herself, which I believe is a living consciousness along with everything we see, including the planets, sun and stars... as above, so below.

So I have spent this huge amount of time in virtual reality, and I have been awed at the feeling of deja vu and what comes as almost second nature to me.  This is evident especially as I said when flying within the world, and also when "teleporting", which is the fastest means of moving from one place on the grid (which is massive) to another.  There is an aspect of a failed teleport, where you can get "stuck" in between two points and have to retry the attempt.  I have found that this mimics a certain state I've found myself in stirring myself from sleep while a dream is still in progress.  I can awaken in the physical world in such a state where if I haven't moved my sleep position or opened up my eyes yet, I feel as though my consciousness is stretched across as vast distance - part in my body in bed while the other part is still actively connected to the dream state and I can sense great distance between the two points.  

It's happened a fair amount of times since I started with virtual reality, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about it because of the experience with failed teleports, which has given my brain some sort of reference point to stop and consider what that might mean.  When I am in that split state of lying in bed, awakening and feeling stretched across a great distance, the first thing that came to mind was, "Wow.  My consciousness must be far more expansive that I think it is."  I do know this:  it does move.  By that I mean that I noted some time ago that when I'm about to sleep, particularly when I'm physically tired and the environment is noisy, just before I drift off, the last thought I'll have is one of projecting my consciousness on to, most often, one of the walls of the room I'm in.  When I have that thought, I can see the process taking place and that's the last thought I have before falling asleep. 

Another wonder element in virtual reality is in the ability to see in a 360 degree fashion, knowing (within a mini-map popup window that's sizable within the larger viewer/client) window... all of the nearby lifeforms, their relative distance to me and a two-tone view of the surrounding landscape that can aid in further navigation of the territory or region you are exploring.  It seems to me that I've done all of this before, probably many times.  The resonance is off-the-charts for me in so many areas.  I can't help but think, in a Hermetic sense, if we as humans create virtual worlds, why wouldn't those virtual worlds reflect back to us the larger universe and potential order of things?  It stands to reason.  Certainly there is something to the virtual world experience.  It's all about ideas, creation and interaction.  One conceptualizes and creates physical form by manifesting basic geometric shapes through one's avatar that are ultimately conceived by the mind of the person controlling said avatar from this physical world. 

The virtual world experience contains something, some secrets that can be realized as hidden from view in daily life on this planet.  Are such virtual creations simply reflections of the holographic universe in which we live?  I would say it's highly likely from a Hermetic point of view.  And if I listen to "Imagine", and thus conceive of such a world without divisions, I am left with just the reflection, which tells me a lot about the universe.

Write It Down Anyway

I've learned to always keep a notepad nearby when mediating, just in case I feel the need to remember anything.  I can't over-emphasize the importance of writing things down.  Our society today tends to herd our minds like so much cattle, repeating memes and so much (what Robert Monroe would call M-Band Noise - a cacophony of uncontrolled human thought energy that surrounds this planet) that it can be hard to tune into, let alone spend time in, stillness.  Monroe makes note in his books where during times of astral travel or OBEs, one's consciousness needs to pass through this "ring" as he calls it, to ascend into calmer, more peaceful states of awareness.  Meditation is simply calming your mind, slowing the thought process almost completely, to the point where you are embracing stillness in an expansive way.  Once you've done that for a time, you'll notice that certain things may come to mind during or after said meditation.  I suggest to always write them down, as random as they might be.  

Shortly after reading "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron back in the mid-90's, I began a regular period of journaling.  I followed her advice and forced myself to write almost every day for several years.  I generally have a love/hate relationship with writing.  It has served me well professionally on a few occasions and I can enjoy it, but I am easily tempted to judge it and/or turn off the flow at any given point.  It's been somewhat of a struggle to even maintain this blog, which I don't promote at all.  This has been more of an outlet for me at least to this point.  I used to have a more extensive blog on another site that I maintained for years, which was a mix of comedic musings, observational humor and computer tips.  I started this blog about a year after entering into virtual reality, and initially was going to write about that, but the VR experiences were so profound, so endlessly joyful and time consuming that I thought I'd rather experience things than write about them, so this blog turned into sort of a non-frequent consciousness diary more than anything else.

Recently I meditating in the evening, room darkened, the last fleeting image that I had was of a vast expanse of green trees in a hilly landscape.  During the mediation, a word keep appearing in my mind, Coquica.  Then, as I was coming out of the meditation, another word, "Esayi" was repeated even more than Coquica.  I had a notebook nearby, and wrote both words down for searching online at a later time.  I don't particularly get words like those very often.  My prior "Mihika" experience being the only other time in the past year or so than word messages came through such as this.  I was fascinated to find that Cocquica is a small village in what is now Mozambique, on the southeastern portion of the African continent.  To my further dismay, the word Esayi, which is also a first and last name in the middle east (Armenian and Persian cultures), means Amen... May it come to pass... in the language of a native tribe with roots located in that area, the Maasai.

I also found a link to a page online saying that Esayi meant "first generation" in Sanskrit, yet I have misplaced that link and subsequent checks of various online Sanskrit dictionaries do not show the word appearing as such.  I'd love to find that link again though.  Does it mean anything?  Who knows.  It could be anything.  I do have to wonder though, in a larger sense... do I have ties to that region of the world from a past incarnation?  It's funny, but fifteen years ago I wouldn't have even entertained such a thought, but from a more expansive place, sitting in stillness and listening, it's interesting what emerges from the void of stillness, which is one of the reasons that I try and write it down anyway.

Mihika - You Are Mist

I was working with a shaman journey CD recently, and spent a couple of weeks developing a routine for guided meditative exploration using spirit animals and then indigenous tribal members somewhere in South America.  Like anything else, I approach each type of exploration with a heavy sense of skepticism.  If my skepticism is too heavy, and as a result I can't calm my mind enough to enter an exploration state, I just try another time.  Daily stresses can damper such experiences from reaching any level interest and I bore super-easily.

The trick is to relax to the point where you have stopped your mind.  This takes practice, and I'm convinced that in today's world it is something that is and will continue to be difficult to do, almost in a sadly ironic way.  Once you have calmed the mind though, and can enter into a meditative state where you start to not-think, when you can slow the thought process almost to a complete hault, the gate is near.  You get to a point where the thoughts that pop up are much less frequent, and as such are easier to just observe without judging or becoming engaged in a circle of thoughts. 

I didn't like the CD itself very much, but I'm hard to please in that area.  I decided to use it anyway, since it was the first disc of that type - a shamanic journey - that I had bought.  Sometimes I chuckle when I read or hear some people talk about the worlds the shaman move in.  I wonder if they really know.  I wondered if the guy who was guiding me on the CD really knew.  I have known several people who have journeyed using Ayahuasca and other intense methods.  Part of my background includes some extensive unguided journey work in my younger years with similarly potent chemical assistance.  Those experiences are now etched in my mind as some of the most profound feelings, sounds and images that I have ever been exposed to.  From the total of my past intense experiences with such journeys, coupled with those of friends, what can frighten you most is ultimately yourself.  Maybe in a future post I'll talk about that further.
 

Most of the nights that I worked with the disc were fruitful, I guess a bit to my surprise.  I had an intense astral experience several weeks earlier, feeling the presence of energies that I hadn't felt since I was a child.  My "them" were back.  That was part of the reason I bought the CD to begin with.  Robert Monroe and/or Michael Newton talks about a similar concept in his books, among which is a Council of Three... energetic beings assigned to us in higher dimensions to guide us on the path of spiritual development.  The premise there being that we have all agreed to spiritual contracts, are here to fulfill a purpose and will go on to further development work in our next vibrational level, wherever that is.

On the second night of the second week with the disc, after flying, albeit guided, to the Amazon to meet my tribal guides, my consciousness had settled back in my living room and I remained in meditation in the dark for about an hour.  I thought it had been fruitful.  I met two guides named Puht and Muh.  I distinctly took note of their painted faces in the hopes that I could find a match somewhere online.  White paint overall with mostly blue and a little red.  Thick blue lines came out from their eyes.  I have seen a few documentaries about tribes in the Amazon such as the Kayapo, yet these facial markings didn't trigger anything in terms of something I'd seen in daily life.  As I started to come out of what was a very deep meditation, within my mind's eye all I could see were transparent bubbles much like champagne or soda.  I felt a very slight vibration in my body, a slight buzz.  The bubbles covered my mind's eye and I could see them for a second or two after I opened my eyes in the dark room.  "That's new," was my first thought.

"Mihika - You are mist," squelched that thought immediately thereafter.  As I heard that in my mind, I felt as if it was the last thing that my tribal guides were telling me, although during the meditation we didn't speak, but rather exchanged thoughts.  I immediately grabbed my notepad, that I keep near me while meditating, and jotted it down in lieu of Googling the word to see if it had a meaning.  I sat for some time after meditation thinking about the experience.  Although I had a physical image of my guides, we traveled during the meditation over some distance.  I realized that perhaps they were saying that we are all like mist in our essences and certainly within the realm where I experienced them.  It turns out that Mihika is Sanskrit for fog, mist, snow or dew drop.  What are the odds?  Not such a bad disc after all.

Seeing Blue Lights

I have been seeing flecks, sparkles and flashes of light for the past few years.  The intensity has increased a bit over time, but they are mostly small and last for a fraction of a second.  They are often blue, sometimes white.  Sometimes they appear almost as tiny orbs, but mostly like sparkling sand.  I remember when I first started to notice them.  They mostly appeared to my left at first, and at a distance.  Now I see them from time to time on both sides.

They're not what's known as eye floaters - those spots you may sometimes see moving across the surface of your eye that appear within your field of vision.  I've seen those from time to time and they're quite different, being dark grey or black in tone and have a symmetry of movement that can be observed for several minutes and is easily predictable.  These light flashes are different.  They are intense enough that they get my attention every time, forcing me to look at them before I realize that I'm looking, and by then they're gone.  Several friends have told me that they see these kinds of lights occasionally as well.  There's an interesting forum page in Pavlina where people share some possible explanations.

Update: June 2010 - See update in post "More Blue Lights" as these appearances have started to increase for me once again.

Reflections From The Ether

With everything happening in the world right now and not much to say I have been going back reading some earlier entries from journals over the years.  I've thrown away most of them, but I'm glad for the handful I've saved.  I found this particular notebook from 1999-2000, in which was written ten spiritual ponderances or contemplations.  These came to me over the course of about eighteen months, mostly in meditation after I had met my first spirit guide.  Tama, my guide and I had met after a long period of me sensing a presence, meditating, getting what I believed was the impression of a name.  Despite how strongly I felt Tama's presence at the time, I demanded that the only way I would acknowledge such a thing was is if I saw the name Tama somewhere (and not using the drums of the same name).  The first response at my challenge was, "Like a billboard?"  To which I said, "No. But it has to be put in front of my face.  I want to see it like that, in my face."

Several months went by and I was at my then job where part of my duties was purchasing music.  My EMI sales rep came in for his weekly visit, and before sitting down on the couch opposite my desk, handed me a copy of that week's New Release Book, which is a magazine (or was, lol in what used to be the music industry) that would feature major record distributor's upcoming releases for wholesale orders.  We went page by page until coming across a release from a duo of artists in Africa called Tama.  There the name was, about three months later, right in front of my face.  I still have the page from the book.  Whether it's a coincidence or not, which is entirely plausible, Tama gave me a lot to think about during the longest contemplative period that I had had until that point.  I couldn't have come up with any of this myself.  Over the years the two or three times I've looked at the notebook, I've valued the fact that this was shared with me.

  1.  Belief starts here.  Consider the tree.

  2.  Consider the sky.

  3.  If you don't take time, time will take you.

  4.  Take a moment and find the attitude.

  5.  It is not me who knows, but that which is that knows through me.

  6.  Let the spirit through.

  7.  There is no end to love.

  8.  Consider the flowers.

  9.  You already are.

10.  Everything that rises must converge.


When I looked up Tama, aside from drum, I found other meanings behind the name, including "to walk", "globe", "perfect" and "jewel", among others.  Many instances have arisen in my life since where one of those ten statements above has come to mind.  I believe my association with Tama might have been when I was a Native American in a previous incarnation, but I'm not sure.  I have some Iroquois blood in this life, but that's all I know, no history.

Another Interesting Book

Over the years, despite any particular spiritual discipline being practiced (or not), I have read many books about near death experiences (NDEs).  Authors Betty Jean Eadie and Danyon Brinkley immediately come to mind.  It's a subject that's fascinated me as much as astral projection, or out of body experiences (OBEs).  I've woven parts of people's experiences into my mosaic over the years, discarding anything that doesn't resonate with me.  Having finished Dr. Michael Newton's book, "Journey of Souls", I am once again adding to my mosaic.  His studies have provided some deep personal insight and have further magnified certain things that I came across while reading Monroe and Van Dusen, among others.

What I like about Newton's book is where the content comes from - a series of case studies presented from hundreds whereupon he attempted to access parts of the inner self of his patients through hypnosis without offering suggestions thereto.  Sure, I take everything I read with a grain of salt.  I enjoy being the skeptic, however, when a particular reading seems sensible to me, I trust in my ability to feel the resonance of such information with my inner being.  It's a process that I can't thoroughly articulate at this time, but its underlying nature is mathematical, as if I can sense the information being absorbed as it's scattered across a giant wall in my mind that is my mosaic, and multiple calculations take place, some taking longer than others to complete, but very many.  Depending on the outcome, I will either feel a resonance, a vibration and see in my mind where pieces of the new information are indexed within my overall mosaic or I will feel nothing.  The commonalities and corollaries between experiences in Newton's studies is profound, suggesting that there is something at play in the universe that is far greater than what we have typically been taught to understand.

Sidebar - I just thought about the last paragraph before posting where I said the mosaic is like a giant wall - It would be cool if if the mosaic turned out to be something that when filled with the necessary data, would unlock keys to further understanding and/or ascension.