I'd like to write about my experiences and changes in a more direct mode than I had in my previous writing of 1995. In those letters I sometimes intentionally didn't elaborate and sometimes suggested things or used metaphors because I felt it was important for the people I was writing to find their own ways of thinking. Metaphors are excellent because they tend to change shape and meaning along with and according to the perception and growth of the person reading them, and they give the person a strong "ahhah!" boost of discovery so they can see their own progress and growth. The last thing I wanted was to have someone memorize what I had to say and ingest it as some kind of final word or gospel truth. What I did want was to act as a prod, an encourager, a reinforcer, as someone who gave someone else the permission and encouragement to be themselves, and perhaps at times to be a midwife assisting in someone's rebirth. The Greek word "metanoia" is appropriate here: it means "spiritual rebirth". I've had the privilege to attend a few metanoias: some are quick and easy, some are slow and painful, but they always result in "oh thank God" and sheer joy. So, in that spirit....

Much of what follows is going to be in the first person, and will be only about experiences. Grand spiritual theories or systems don't really do much for people in the throes of metanoia any more than theories about the biochemistry of digestion do much for hungry people, so I hope this will give those who need it something substantial to chew on.

In 1978 when I had my initial major experience my reaction to it wasn't one of surprise, bewilderment, or panic. On the contrary, I felt as though I'd been waiting for it to happen all my life and it was about time. Finally! It was the first time in my life that I felt "normal", that I felt like I knew who I was and what I was doing. When I looked at the world and saw the "central sun" shining through it I knew I was seeing myself; and when I sat in the rain and saw tiny Buddhas in each raindrop I knew I was seeing myself. When I read accounts of "enlightenment" that talked about kundalini rising to the top chakra I knew I'd been there and done that for many life times, but what I didn't know was where to go next because I knew that those accounts and descriptions of "enlightenment" were only partially true; in fact they were descriptions of views seen from false summits. For the past twenty years I've explored and grown into the "next".

After the 1978 experience I began meditating regularly and sometimes intensely, and a fairly regular sensation would be that I'd start off being in my physical body, sitting there meditating, and I'd feel the energy change-- sometimes as if rising up my spine, sometimes just as a sort of blip, after which I would distinctly feel as though I had a body inside my body, but not as a second body that you might use in out of body experiences. Rather, it was as though I was in a large body with my physical body extending from the tailbone of that body to the solar plexus, and I would experience both bodies simultaneously. From the larger body I could see the smaller body, and could see all the classical signs of kundalini rising in that body-- I would experience the crown chakra of the small body, my physical body, at the height of the solar plexus of my larger body, and see the energy rise up the spine of the smaller body to reach the crown chakra of that body (at the solar plexus of the larger body). (I think I should say here that while I'm using the term "physical body", that term actually includes the whole body-mind continuum-- physical body, thoughts, emotions, etc.) Sometimes, instead of either experiencing the kundalini going up my spine and then going to the larger body, or "blipping" to get to the larger body, I'd experience myself as moving with the kundalini up to the crown chakra and then I'd move to the larger body. When this happened I'd usually experience myself to be moving through a tunnel of lights, or rings or wheels of lights, or spheres of lights, with a very bright light at the end of the tunnel. This latter experience directly parallels accounts of near-death experiences, except that I've always experienced myself as moving inside myself and into the larger body.

I've taken to calling this larger body my "universal" body because I tend to experience it as filled with stars and space, as filled with the universe. I can also expand and contract myself inside this universal body in much the same way that we become conscious or unconscious of parts of our physical bodies by paying attention to them, by being in them. This is a body I enjoy very much -- I enjoy the feeling and sense of complete expansion, and find it a huge relief from being focused and located in a physical body, which I'm coming to regard as more of a nuisance than anything else. In this universal body I can feel myself moving through the universe, and physical life more or less springs up in suitable environments as I pass through those environments and interact with them-- an example of this: I'm moving through open space and find myself sort of rising up through a planet from underneath it; as I finish my pass through the planet I see a small organism on the planet's face, a sort of sea anemone creature, but on land, and half covered with a coating of ice. I realize the planet can only support life to this level and that the ice coating helps to preserve the organism's core temperature during the planet's night. I also realize that the organism is there as a result of my interaction with the planet-- the organism is the best life that I can produce in that environment. I love the little ice covered anemone intensely.

(This has caused me no end of grief being physical in this world because I basically have to make myself very numb to my feelings about the beings here if I want to participate in this life. Beings here survive by eating each other, either directly or indirectly-- directly by literally swallowing and digesting each other; or indirectly, consuming each other's money, property, and so on. When I participate in this and allow myself to feel much of anything at all I distinctly feel as though I'm eating my own children, and that my own children have been reduced to eating each other in order to survive on this planet. And I don't know what to do about it, I don't know how to change it.)

Some corollary experiences to the universal body in the physical world are that I frequently feel other people's emotions as my own, and in very many cases also feel their physical sensations as my own. In some cases, usually with people that I am particularly fond of, I can look at them and have the very distinct feeling that when they are looking back at me I am actually looking at myself looking back at me-- not that I am in two places at once, but that I am in both them and me, like the ocean being in two underwater bottles at the same time.

Another example: I've just completed an out-of-body experience and I'm above my physical body looking at it when I suddenly realize that my relationship to it has changed drastically-- instead of the normal sensation of looking at a sleeping organism I realize that I'm looking at a shell, a husk, much like a cicadas shell or a shed snake skin, and that I've "downloaded" all the information stored in the DNA of that body into me. I know that I can recreate all of the life stored in all of that DNA information, and that I can do it by making that life out of myself.

Still another example: when I was living in the cabin in Nelson I once heard a small squeaking sound and followed it outside the cabin to a tiny baby mouse who had fallen from a nest and landed on a window ledge. The little guy would have fit in a teaspoon and had obviously been out there for some time so I carried him/her inside and just sat there holding him in my hands trying to warm him up. It became obvious that he wasn't going to last long and he eventually died in my hands. When he died there was a sort of tiny explosion in my hand, a flash of light and a release of what I can only describe as joy, and the light rose up and disappeared into me, directly into the center of my chest. Some years later I had a distinct dream in which one of my dogs was running toward me and then jumped into the center of my chest. Two days later my dog died and returned into me just as the baby mouse had.

When I move beyond the universal body I experience another distinct "octave" change, as I call it, much in the same way there's an octave change between the physical body and the universal body. This time, however, it's a bit more difficult to describe so I'll resort to an analogy that I use to think about it: what comes to mind for me is the image of a tennis ball turning itself inside out so that the fuzz is on the inside, without the ball splitting or deforming in any way-- just "pop" and the fuzz is on the inside, or maybe "pop" and the fuzz is on the outside. In any case, what I experience is the "pop" and then being in front of a huge white luminous sun, the same sun that I saw shining through everything, and I'm this huge white luminous face that's the other half of this huge white luminous sun-- the sun and I are the same, we are the same "entity", the same being, there is no difference between us, except that as this face I'm "sweating", for want of a better word, in the presence of the sun, and the beads of sweat roll down my face as brilliant blue stars, blue-white pearls. And I experience each blue star as a creation, each blue pearl as an "everything", and there are drops of my sweat as numerous as there are grains of sand on the beach, there are oceans of blue stars, there are seas of "everythings". During the "tennis ball pop" I have jumped from being the universal life of one of these stars (and all of these stars) to being the source of these stars. And yet I'm continuous from the presence in the physical body to the universal body to this first body-- I am the same all the way through because I am the same as the central sun.

When I move beyond this first body giving birth to creations I do so only because I am continuous and the same as the central sun -- and I become ONLY "presence", again for want of a better word. When I wrote in the original letters about following yourself back, this is what I meant. At any point, from physical body to universal body to first body, you can always, always follow yourself back because first and foremost we-- you and I -- are "presence".

A lot of my energy and focus in the past fifteen years or so has been to come to terms with and try to heal or at least integrate life here on this planet, bearing in mind what I wrote above about life arising on planets and my feelings about life here. In the past few years I've been doing a huge amount of "house cleaning" and sorting-- much of what I said in the 1995 letters about sexuality, male/female polarities, the spiritual marriage, and so on, have to do with that. When I first started doing the house cleaning I realized that it was entirely voluntary, and I really didn't have too much sense about where it would take me. In hind site it has been a huge ordeal, a major gut wrenching undertaking, and I seriously doubt I would have been able to do it if I hadn't first been able to follow myself back at least to the level of the universal body simply for some relief.

I want to write about that next.

A dream: I'm looking at an ocean of stars and I can see the ocean narrow down and turn into a river, and I follow the river until it comes to a place where it's narrow and congested and most of the river of stars doesn't get through, only a trickle. I follow the trickle down until I come to a town. The main street of the town has all kinds of buildings and stores with their names on the fronts, but any building or store I go into only seems to be a barbershop and all the barbers are women. They all want to give me a haircut, but I say no thanks.

For the longest time I thought this dream was about life on this planet in a planetary sense, and in that context I could make sense of the river of stars turning into a trickle, but the barbershops, women barbers, and haircuts didn't really fit in. What I immediately associated with the haircuts was the story of Samson and Delilah, but I couldn't integrate that into a planetary scenario. Later on, after I had gone through the whole process of the "spiritual marriage", of reclaiming my left side, and so on (you'll have to re-read parts of the 1995 letters for this), I came to realize that the dream was personal rather than planetary although in most instances it applies to most people on this planet.

This how I understand the dream now: the ocean of stars is my universal body, as I wrote about above. The ocean turning into a river is the interface, if you will, between my universal body and my individual existence. The river should have been flowing freely all the way into the town, but it had been congested at a certain point and reduced to a trickle. It had been reduced to a trickle because of my relationship with women, because I saw women as other than me, because I gave myself away to women because I wanted to be loved. I wrote this to my brother:

"Remember we once talked about giving away your left side to someone and then having your life revolve around them? Or WANTING to give away your left side and not finding anyone, and not feeling complete until you've given away your left side? After you've been in a relationship for awhile, especially a long while, you forget what it feels like to own all of yourself -- the very first relationship, the very first time you give away your left side, is to your mother. Most men try to recreate that, continue that, or fix that relationship in the women they meet and have relationships with.

The pain of the emptiness of an empty left side is all the stuff you've been feeling, and all the stuff anyone feels after a broken relationship. In the end, everyone wants to find a relationship that will be permanent, eternal, and that will forever end that emptiness. You can only do that by reclaiming your left side and your own other half (feminine in this case). No mother and no other woman can do that for you, but they can all be vehicles on the way since they'll contain and mirror your projections of your relationship with your (supposedly) missing side. Note "supposedly". That entire process of reclamation is the "spiritual marriage", the whole thrust of alchemy and kabbalah and tantra.

The left side thing-..... do you remember the dream I had that I describe in the stuff I wrote-- about going down into the cathedral? Here it is again-- note the line "I suddenly felt quite lonely and remembered that there had been others there at one time--- my first thought was 'where's everybody else', and immediately I heard this voice say "they either got married or succumbed to self-inflicted wounds". That's what happens a lot (most) of the time when people come face to face with that left side pain and emptiness-- but there are other choices than those two-- unfortunately the world runs, recreates itself, and maintains itself through the coming and going of that pain, so if you really want to make those other choices you immediately find yourself at odds with the world. I personally prefer to be at odds...

(here's the dream again:)
All of this is the process of the 'spiritual marriage', the 'alchemical marriage' in western spirituality, the 'union of red and white' in tantra. The most important 'dream' of my life is the one that explained all this to me when I was in the midst of it-- perhaps I should say the 'throes' of it, because a lot of it was definitely a descent into hell. In the dream I was sitting with some people in a sort of court yard in an old Romanesque church -- at the same time I could see the scene from overhead and I could see that there was a wing of the church that could only be seen from the air-- you couldn't tell it was there from the ground. So, on the ground, I decided to see if I could find the wing and I wandered around until I came to this descending passageway which I followed. I came to the end of the passage and there was a door at the end and I started towards it when this large 'dragon' suddenly appeared as a sort of guardian of the door and it started toward me with menacing gestures. I suddenly realized I had a large key in my left hand and that I was entitled to go through the door-- I held the key up to the 'dragon' so show it to him, and then I walked through him as though he had become a hologram and went to the door, unlocked it and opened it and went through. The door led to the hidden wing of the church-- I went down a sort of hall way and into a large round room with large pillars around the edge forming large open portals looking out into a vast blue space. In the middle of the room was a large round table. As soon as I saw the table I realized that I'd been here before and I realized that I had made it back from 'something'. I suddenly felt quite lonely and remembered that there had been others there at one time--- my first thought was 'where's everybody else', and immediately I heard this voice say "they either got married or succumbed to self-inflicted wounds". I said 'I don't get it' and immediately remembered a dream I had had a couple of months earlier, and then I 're-dreamed' that dream as if it were for the first time . In that dream I was once again going down a long passageway and came to a door at the end-- as I approached the door I became more and more anxious but I sort of willed myself through it. The door was very ancient, studded with nails, and I thought 'man, I haven't been in here for a long time'-- I finally forced the door open and went into the room, which was very dark and musty and I was still anxious so my first inclination was to make some light , so I started pulling off all these old worn out tapestries from the walls and the walls underneath were bright white. The more tapestries I yanked down the brighter the place became until finally I could see a rough rectangular table in the middle and I realized there was an opening in the ceiling of the room. I had no sooner seen that than a shaft of light came down from above the ceiling and shown on the table. Immediately in the shaft of light there was a sort of holographic image of a large chalice or cup and as soon as I saw it I said "that's what I've been looking for" and jumped on the table and grabbed the image to my chest. As soon as I did that I started to go up the shaft of light with the image clasped to my chest, and the farther I went the more solid the chalice image became. Now I flipped back to the church, only I was both in the room and looking at the scene of the room on a large tv screen and there was a small blue person standing beside me and he said "now do you understand" and then reached out and fiddled with the tv image to make it sharper. As soon as it was sharp, I stepped through the screen and into the scene again. I looked out through the portals at the blue light and began to realize what I had done, and suddenly the blue light changed to this intense white and the scene began to dissolve and I dissolved with it into this overwhelming love. The end.

If you were to ask me where I got the key to unlock the door, I'd have to say that I took it from my mother when she was asleep-- it was mine, and I gave it to her when I was born, but I forgot about it and thought it was hers."

I simply cannot describe to anyone how hard it has been to navigate between the two usual choices of getting married or succumbing to self-inflicted wounds, as well as to maintain a physical existence that basically requires me to numb and disassociate myself from my true feelings and even from what I know to be true about existence. However, I seemed to have survived.

Now I find that the river of stars goes clear down to my toes. When I go to bed at night and relax my physical body I can feel it's outline changing into the earth, becoming a body-shaped line of hills covered with green growing things of all sorts. Then it becomes open and spacious and fills up with stars and the dark blue-black of open space and the stars and the space fill my body. And then I do the "tennis ball pop" and my body becomes the first body, white and luminous-- only now the blue stars pour from my whole body from head to toe instead of just from my face. And then I fall asleep.

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