I've been going around dropping lives and parts of lives like I was shedding skin. I can see them sort of floating around me and I can go into any one of them and feel the feelings, think the thoughts, etc, and then I just sort of let go of them and I'm disengaged from that life. Past and present lives all have the same weight and value, and I can see them as though they were composed of multiple layers of colored patterns and shapes that overlap and project images -- and I'm the light of the projector, so to speak. The layers are made up of layers inherited from the people and environment in my life-- my parents, society, the world. They're sort of like templates-- that's the word I used once when I was watching the 8 year old son of a friend of mine run across the field in front of me I could see very plainly a sort of crystalline, translucent shell around him and that shell was in the shape of his father. The boy had assumed his father's shell, and his father had given it to him, or perhaps even insisted on it's being there-- and I new that the boy would grow up trying either successfully or unsuccessfully to fit into that shell, that template. Attachment to and identity with the shells, the templates, is how we go from life to life, linking similar familiar shells, trying to recreate the pleasant ones and heal or avoid the unpleasant ones. Living with my brother for the past 9 months (until mid Oct) has given me a good opportunity to see the templates that make up our family and how he has assimilated and processes them.

A couple of days ago I'd come back from a bike ride and jumped into the shower-- as soon as the water hit me I felt like I was being washed clean-- more than physically clean. My immediate reaction was to sit down in the tub with the water pouring down over my head, and I spontaneously started chanting with all this water going over me. I must have been in there for an hour (good thing for gas hot water), and I felt like I was being reborn, and also being washed clean of my own birth, so that I felt as though I was giving birth to myself-- as though I'd washed away my parents, and my physical birth, and that I was now doing it out of myself-- being the father and the mother and the son, if that makes sense.

At night I lay in bed and hear a loud "om" sound in my head, and during many nights Haidakhan Baba is around-- I don't see him physically, but I can feel him. It's as though he merges with me and his energy washes me clean and breaks my ties with my lives. I wind up being this bright sun with all these lives around it, and my light shines through them and gives them life, but it isn't only life energy, it's consciousness. During the day I walk around in this body, seeming to be this body consciousness, and I'm aware of a bright sun inside me, but I also feel that I, as consciousness, am the sun looking back at itself-- as though I can see the sun through a window, but my body-state is the window and I'm looking back through myself at the sun, which is really me. Well, I know what I mean, in any case-- the consciousness is continuous, there's no break and no difference between my ordinary, in the world consciousness, and the sun. At night the whole thing switches and I become the sun with the lives around me.

Early this morning Oscar came in and woke me up and I lay there with him beside my head-- he's purring away (he's really loud), and I'm aware of him, and the bed, and the room, and being the sun at the same time, as well as illuminating everything in between.

Experiences, Krishna, etc.: I've been doing a lot of restructuring lately (talk about unloading and unloading). The past month or so I've been working out my relationship with my body. What I mean is that I've always found it more trouble than it's worth to take care of, but about a month ago I must have spent most of one night apologizing to my body because I came to realize that it was my attitude that was keeping it from getting what it wanted. What I mean is this back in 98 I wrote something about all bodies wanting immortality, wanting eternal life, and how all survival "tactics" were geared toward producing eternal life-- something that will live forever, either as an individual or as a species. This includes all reproductive tactics- sex, territory, attraction display, fear, fear display, aggression, aggression display, eating, hunting, keeping from being eaten, etc, etc, etc-- everything that every being, animal, plant, multi celled, single celled, blue whale or virus-- does in order to survive and perpetuate itself and others of it's kind. At some point in the past couple of months my body has become consciously aware of the "central sun"-- aware down to the cellular and even sub-atomic level-- and knows that everything it has ever wanted or needed is really an expression of what it wants and needs from that central sun-- I think we talked about this a bit? When I realized this, and realized that my body knew it even at the smallest level, then I also realized that my body and all the rest of me all want the same thing-- nothing is at odds with anything else in any part of me-- except for how I'm going to get my internal life and my external life to harmonize-- by "external life" I mean the way I make a living in the world, etc. This last bit has become noticeably harder since even my body knows what it really wants now, and so I don't have even the bodily anxiety driving me about "what will I eat" etc-- even my body wants the internal and external to harmonize.

What's been happening the past month is that I seem to have acquired a "new body"-- what I mean is that I very frequently experience myself as this large gold body with my head in the central sun and my feet on the earth. When I say "gold" I don't mean golden light, but what looks like solid gold, with gemstones on it at various places. The point where my feet touch the earth is the point where my physical body is, and there's this constant flow of light/energy from the central sun through me to my point of entry in the earth. And that's my purpose, to establish and maintain that flow, which means maintaining my feet in the earth, which means maintaining a physical body. So now my body has become not a burden but a fulfillment for me-- but I still don't know how to coordinate the inner and outer (except for those times such as what I described happening in Nelson).

But, yes, the whole this is not like Shiva, but like Krishna, or like Christ. I just need to find a way to maximize it, to gain maximum energy flow and still maintain my body here. As it is now, when I lay down to go to sleep, I just let go of my body and we all-- me, mind, emotions, body, whatever else-- immediately come into the presence of the central sun, and we want the same thing, and everything dissolves into bliss except for my sense of presence, which is always there. And that's where you'll wind up too. Feeling yourself becoming the same "I" that's in everything and everyone is part of the process-- by planting your feet on the earth you take up the "cross" of the earth and by doing that and making the connection to the central sun you "redeem' the earth, to use biblical phrases-- but that's what it is, that's the process. Why? Love, of course-- "for God so loved the world.... etc". But you already know that :)

Upon waking and feeling myself moving "away" from God (in any case, feeling my moving away from a very bright light, where I know I have been)-- immediate feelings of anxiety, fear-- all arising spontaneously as a result of the separation. I realized that these feelings DO arise spontaneously, and are the VERY SYMPTOMS of separation from the Center. We then go around in the world acting out these feelings, and because we all have them in common so long as we feel that we are separated from God, we all act in concert (?) with these feelings of anxiety and fear as the common basis for all our actions. These actions become "normal" (defined as what is "normal") and we base all our religious and spiritual beliefs and practices on this "normality". THUS-- the "return" to God is seen as having to give up what we are, giving up this "normality"-- this anxiety and fear-- when in fact it's a return to sanity. Further, "going back to God", to the Center, becomes a fearful and anxiety ridden endeavor until we learn to just let go. Parallel to this is the feeling of low self esteem, of self-loathing, that arises.

Several years ago I had a very vivid dream where I was sitting on a stool in the middle of a room with a light shining down from somewhere above my head. Rajneesh came in and handed me a folder, a booklet, titled "Spiritual Psychology"-- there were pictures of various people and some text. He then laid both his hands on my head and blessed me, and I felt like he was passing something on to me. He walked away and I followed and grabbed his hands and looked at his palms-- there were no lines on them, and the skin looked as if it had been burned (not black, but the way a burn scar looks), and I realized that this was from the sheer number of people he had blessed. I also realized that his whole "program", what he had done here, was a sort of exercise or experiment in spiritual psychology and that in his blessing me as he had he was passing on to me some of what he had learned in some way or other (not sure how much of it I actually got, though!) I've never been any kind of Rajneesh fan, always thought those people running around in terminal orange were basically strange and out to lunch, and the whole Oregon thing summed it up-- so I can't say I was looking for a Rajneesh experience. Anyhow, I've come to think of my past 15 years or so as a class in spiritual psychology. But I don't know it's purpose yet-- is it just for me or for others? I do know I've very tired of it and I want to get on with things one way or another.

The heart-- uh huh-- everything resides there, comes from there, and returns there. Last week I woke up in the middle of the night looking into my heart space-- like I was looking into a pool of water-- I could see the ripples on the surface, the reflection of the sun, and all of this life moving below the surface -- all life moving below the surface. Then I noticed the reflection of the sun on the water once again, and realized I was seeing my own reflection, and laughed. (There's a clue in there for you )

I was going to write about "immunity"- or developing immunity. I was in a very intense relationship about ten years ago-- the woman would get suicidal at times -- not actually, but just thinking about it with substantial emotional force. I'd find myself feeling those thoughts/emotions as my own and it was all I could do to keep from acting on them, especially in the beginning when I didn't know their source (I was actually hiding knives from myself -- work was a disaster-- me and a whole pile of very sharp tools). In fact I didn't know their source until one time when I was feeling that way and was talking on the phone to a very good friend of mine, who suddenly told me that I sounded just like Joan (the woman)- my choice of words, my phrasing, even my laugh-- and I realized I'd assimilated a large part of her, way beyond what I was conscious of. After that I began to notice her more. At one point I was again talking on the phone to my friend when I said off the top of my head that I thought what I was really doing was going through the process of developing an immunity to her-- to the way she was. As soon as I said that the whole room lit up, like it'd gone from a 25 watt bulb to a 100 watt bulb, and I knew I'd hit the nail on the head. This was also why I'd watched so much TV-- picking up the emotions and thoughts and then dropping them, watching which ones stuck around longer for me (and why those would last longer for me and not for someone else, etc). So I had to learn to protect myself, and that was how I did it-- not by "shielding" myself but by becoming transparent, or at least less "sticky".

1995: When I finished up that long string of work I was totally fed up with my life-- felt like I had to be anybody else but myself in order to survive, and if I was myself I'd starve to death. I'd got to the point where surviving was nothing but a nuisance, and a waste of my time. I'd been feeling that way for quite a while, but it sort of came to a head. I decided that what I wanted for my birthday was my own life back-- and I was serious. I went to bed one night, just started relaxing, but thinking intently about how much of myself I'd given away simply in order to make a living and to be able to be part of this local community, and I was lying there when suddenly this huge column of light came down on me from above and hit me just about mid sternum and then sort of radiated outward in large ripples all around me-- like someone pouring water into me. I could feel all sorts of things being 'rearranged'-- for want of a better word-- stuff sort of being 'peeled' off of me-- the ripples extended down past my toes and up over my head. For the next couple of weeks I walked around sort of spanning creation-- like I had one half of me in infinite light and one half of me in the world, and I was this sort of bridge between the two-- immersed in this overwhelming love. The past week or so I've been slowly sliding back into the world, and I'm trying really hard not to feel trapped, trying to maintain the bridge-- especially since I need the feeling of love, the contact with that, to be able to stay here. I need that more than I need food for my body. I can feel that my physical life is very different now, but I don't quite yet know how. I'm really hoping that my body changes-- there's nothing I'd want more for myself than for my physical body to be able to live off that light. Back in '78 when I had that initial experience my overriding concern was how I was going to make a living-- it was like I couldn't be in both places at once, and yet I couldn't leave here. Maybe now I'll be able to be in both places. I don't know.

The 'pole' thing-- I find what usually happens is that I bounce back and forth between doing clearing work 'down low' (legs, or below, for example) and balancing things 'up high'-- the more you clear and release down below, the more your vision clears 'up above'. If the human energy system is defined by the base chakra, the muladhara, at one end and the crown chakra, the sahasrara, on the other, a lot of work takes place below the base chakra and above the sahasrara in 'old guys'. I find that if I go down below the base chakra I start getting lots of images of animal life progressing 'downward' into plant life-- like sort of reversing the flow of organic evolution-- with lots of sexual energy, which is the creative energy of these levels of life. There are always lots of warnings in classical kundalini literature about the perils of reversing the flow of kundalini so that it flows downward-- they warn about becoming sexually depraved, etc. You can do it if you have the top end cleared enough so that you can maintain your awareness. You always have to maintain contact, maintain a link, with the one in the mountains that you experienced-- you can do that by being aware of your own awareness-- if you project yourself into animal forms, for example, you can get lost in them, but if you maintain your awareness as the one in the mountains experiencing animal forms, or human forms, or astral forms, or anything else, you can follow your own awareness back-- even when you feel lost, you're still aware that you're lost, and you can follow that awareness back. That works in all situations. You'll be that awareness aware of itself experiencing life as Joyce-- or anything else, or everything else, or everything with no 'else'.

Being able to identify with awareness and to follow your awareness back-- perhaps it's better said as 'being able to follow yourself "as" awareness'-- is important when you start getting into areas of stronger polarities. For example, if you go into some areas, notably what are usually thought of as 'lower' areas, you'll get into strong 'life' energies, sexual energies-- you'll get into areas with an all-consuming desire for LIFE-- wanting to live at all costs, wanting to reproduce at all costs in order to continue to live at all costs. At the opposite end, you'll get into areas that want to die at all costs, that do not want to live-- for any reason. The Eros-Thanatos polarity. The micro-cosmic counterpart of this in humans are the first and second chakras as wanting life at all costs-- and the areas around the upper chest and throat areas, specifically the throat chakra as wanting freedom from life at all costs. When the throat chakra is active is also when you begin to experience the full effect of astral planes-- instead of just seeing them, you feel them, you feel the blissful energy of them, so they can be extremely seductive. To a great extent, balancing energies means balancing these two polarities. You can see the manifestation of this polarity in 'normal' spirituality-- on the one hand, the mass of beings on this plane involved in 'life at all costs' , whose greatest fear is death, and on the other end, the usual sort of spiritual practitioners who are bent on renouncing life, at all costs, in order to pursue 'higher purposes' or to simply lose themselves in nirvana or whatever. In fact, what has to happen is that the 'lower end' has to rise up in spite of it's fear of dying and losing everything, and the 'upper end' has to go down, in spite of it's fear of life and fear of entrapment. The 'upper end' has to go into the chalice well if it wants to find the Grail-- it has to go into the heart of the world.

What does 'Non-Being' mean to you? Are you talking about death? Do you feel the 'terror' on a bodily level? When you're out of your body do you still feel the terror? When you had your initial experience was the 'terror' there, or was it only later, when you came back to 'normal' that you felt it? Is the one who experienced herself in your initial experience different from the one who feels the terror-- how do they relate, how do they connect? If you experience yourself as the ocean, and then experience yourself as the water that's filled up a bottle on the bottom of the ocean, aren't you the same water, the same ocean? What would it feel like to be the water in the bottle looking out, as it were, at the ocean? How would the bottle determine and influence how the ocean looked to you from inside the bottle? Is it YOU that initiates and produces the terror, or is it your body? Your body has its own consciousness, and the primary drive of that consciousness is to survive at all costs-- to survive as an individual, to survive as a species through reproduction-- all life wants to live forever-- all life wants eternal life-- all the sexual politics, all the species adaptation, all the territorial disputes, all the inter-species competition (including competition among human sub-groups and the 'negative' tendencies of greed, selfishness, theft, etc, etc)-- all express the desire for eternal life. Anything that is SEEN as counter to that desire (note the emphasis on 'seen') will induce 'terror'. The irony is that even the experience of eternal life will induce the terror because it means the end of the pursuit of eternal life-- the end of 'normal' life. Isn't that how you experienced yourself in your initial experience-- as eternal life? When you experienced yourself that way, aren't you also the same as the one who experiences the 'terror'? Aren't YOU the continuity between the two states? Aren't YOU the thread that links them?

You asked about dream work, etc. To be honest with you I've fooled around with it, done the Tibetan stuff, done the Monroe stuff, but mostly got bored with it-- at least with the *active* pursuit of any sort of experiences -- I was happier just to let things happen -- or even happier to have "dreams" where I really learned things, rather than just 'explored' and fooled around. Note that I put "dreams" in quotes, because those *dreams* are much more than dreams -- in the stuff I wrote that's at Spiritweb I used the term 'dreams' to mean much more than mental cartoons. "Dreams" (note the quotes) are ways of communicating with other aspects of yourself and also with others at a much different level and in a different way than we normally do. In the case of both out of body experiences and "dreams", I found that pursuing a technique of one sort or another mostly just got in the way -- it was easier in the end to "just do it" (with appropriate credits to Nike) ) -- rather like trying to figure out how it is you can chew your food and not bite your tongue-- when you start watching what you're doing, or worrying about technique, you wind up biting your tongue (try it!)

However, more and more my entire life-- my physical, emotional, mental, supra-mental, whatever-- seems to be slowly, or not so slowly, being absorbed into the *sun* that I kept talking about in the Spiritweb stuff. Most of my "dreams" now, at least the ones that mean anything to me, are of seeing a brilliant sun above me and either I'm being absorbed into it, or it's shining down into me and sort of transforming me, sort of flushing out all the remaining dark or obscure parts-- I usually experience this on a bodily, physical level, while I'm lying in bed -- i.e., I'm physically conscious of it. At times I'm aware of a sensation of looking at myself in a mirror, seeing my body image, and the mirror image is full of light -- not colors, but just bright sunlight, sparkling -- sometimes the mirror image just stays in front of me and sometimes it merges into me, into my physical form (this happens with my eyes shut, of course) The more the remaining dark and obscure parts are turned to sunlight, the clearer the mirror image looks.

So, with this going on I don't really have a lot of interest in simple out of body experiences -- returning to the *sun* and becoming one with it are what everything in existence wants to do-- all life strives to do that-- the entire "fight" for survival, on both an individual and species level, is a fight for life, a fight to live as long as possible--hopefully to live forever -- a striving for immorality and 'eternal life' that can only be really fulfilled by returning to the *sun*. And once you've experienced that, and know it, everything else just gets in the way. So, I just answered your very first question to me-- about "where is this all headed" -- hadn't planned to do that, but there you go)

I don't think, however, that this really answers your questions about dream work-- but maybe so. Latter on in the day I'll probably get a bunch of ideas that I can't think of right now, or think of things I should have said. Its' been a while since I've thought about actual techniques -- I find that most anything that works for you works for you if you have the right attitude -- if you think of yourself as being a body, or of yourself as being in a body that you have to get out of, then that's where you start, because that's where you have defined your starting point. I don't really experience myself as 'going somewhere' anymore-- as an entity in a form, ether physical or non-physical-- but rather as a *presence*, for want of a better word-- it's more a matter of where I turn my attention and seeing what I want to see-- than of being 'here' and going 'there' in some sort of vehicle or form. If I want to be in a non-physical body then more than anything else it's a matter of *thinking* or *imagining* ('imagining' is the better choice) myself in one or as one. Or remembering what it feels like to be in one and then imagining it strongly enough that it happens. (While at the same time remembering to forget what it takes to navigate in a physical body, and remembering to relax away from my physical body -- no small feat, in fact, where most people get stuck)

Last night I had a dream-- better, an experience-- where I was in a room with a bunch of people-- I got the sense that you and your friends were there also-- and I wanted to demonstrate something to you, so I told you I would consciously die. You were all horrified, but I went ahead and laid down on the floor and preceded to let go of my body. Someone in the group insisted on performing Last Rites (don't know what the Swedish for that is, but I hope it's close enough so you know what that is)-- so whoever that was started waving a rosary over me, and someone else held a crucifix over my face, etc. That annoyed me, but I kept going. From my point of view, all I did was to dissolve my body back into myself by just relaxing my body back into myself-- so that instead of being a body lying on the floor I was a pool of light. Nothing changed for me. And this is what I experience more and more-- for a long time I've sometimes experienced creatures and people dying as dying back into me (when my oldest dog died I had a dream about him running toward me and jumping into my heart-- three days later he died)-- but the past year or so I keep having the experience of giving birth to myself and of dying back into myself-- and yet I stay the same. Anyhow, no one in the room understood what I was doing, and what I had done-- even when I gave birth to myself again so that I was a body again lying on the floor in front of them.

I related the above dream to you because in order to get to that point of feeling yourself give birth to yourself you have to get past thinking in terms of living and dying-- which means you (a general "you", not necessarily you "Ulla") have to get past your fear of death (even though you can go through that tunnel under the wall when you remember that you can) and you (a general "you", not necessarily you "Ulla") also have to get past life, either in terms of chasing it at all costs , or trying to avoid it in pursuit of something more or better. It's easy to see the fear of death issue-- your friend Ulf runs into it when he hits the blue star zone since being there automatically reminds him and his body of every time he's died-- which is why it comes across as a near death experience. What frequently happens is that you (again, general) wind up rebounding back and forth between the blue star zone with it's memories of dying and an intense life energy who's only purpose is to reproduce and create at all costs to avoid death -- and that intense energy usually comes across as strong sexual energy since that's how life reproduces for the most part. What also happens is that you (general) wind up realizing that it's basically futile, so you get depressed, intensely depressed at times, because nothing works anymore. And along with the depression you get anxiety because, if nothing works anymore how the hell are you going to stay alive and what will happen to you? The good news is, however, that once the polarities of life and death get integrated-- which is to say, once your lower chakras get cleared out enough so that you can more or less integrate with respect to the blue star energy-- you'll find that the depression lifts.

"Later, the sensation I'd been getting at the third eye (vibratory) began to make itself present at the crown chakra, only at first it was like a low voltage of electricity from the crown to the back of my tongue!"

This is quite common-- the usual model for kundalini is that it starts at the base of your spine and goes up to the crown of your head, but this is incomplete. What it does is to make a loop circuit through your body and one of the connections that it makes when it's working it's way through you is through the roof of your mouth and your tongue. Sometimes you'll have your tongue curl up and backwards to the roof of your mouth (way back, so your tongue is almost touching your uvula). Sometimes you'll get a sensation in your mouth like you're tasting and swallowing honey or a sweet fluid, sometimes like something sweet is dripping from the roof of your mouth. These are all good things and good signs. You may also find that you get red marks, lines, down each side of your mouth and down onto your throat. The energy will work itself down your front and eventually wind up back at the base of your spine. As this happens you may be very aware of the energy flow and of various physical, mental and emotional effects and changes. The energy will also go down your arms at this point (so you'll wind up being bitten in the wrists by kundalini snakes ) )

But frequently, I have been feeling lost. I am unusually tired all the time. Feel only like sleeping. Can't seem to stay focused enough to do any one thing well at home."

Yep, this happens when you get too much of your physical energy in your head, so you feel tired and like sleeping -- this should change when the circuit clears itself so the energy doesn't pool up so much in your head. If you get a lot of excess energy in your head you'll also feel disoriented and lost, but this can also happen when you become ungrounded -- when you lose the energy balance in your feet and lower legs -- which can happen when kundalini naturally demands more energy to do its work, but also if you do any sort of traditional eastern spiritual practice which has as its model the ideal of collecting the energy in the crown and ajna chakras and disassociating oneself from the world (i.e., the 'lower' chakras). If the ungrounding is a natural result of the demands of the kundalini process then that's one thing, but if it's because of your learned or acquired attitude toward the world then that's quite another. You may want to do some work to ground yourself a bit more -- even going for walks works well -- watching TV with your feet up doesn't ) and in fact will unground you very quickly. Also, if you are going to school and doing a lot of reading and 'head work' you'll naturally draw energy up into your head and eyes - you may want to increase your physical activity -- not in a gym or on a treadmill, but do something to touch the earth, find someplace where you can walk and feel the ground and see and hear and smell the natural world (having said that, I don't know where you live and if this is possible for you).

I know that my wavering in and out of this world is not from some kind of "will to ground myself," but happens because the world obviously must still hold some attraction for me"

So you see the world as something you have to escape? I wrote the stuff about grounding and spiritual attitude before I had scrolled down to what I just quoted from your letter. Did you ever stop to think that perhaps you're here not because the world holds some attraction for you (and from which you have to escape), but because the world needs you here and your being here in itself is a gift to the world? You may experience it as a sacrifice, even a crucifixion, because you have memories of other places, but that in itself makes your being here as a gift even more important, even though most of the people in the world won't recognize it as such. Perhaps your rebuilding of your complete kundalini energy path is a way for you to take up part of the world and rebuild it, redeem it? I find it interesting the way some words fit together and express something more-- for example, the words "Krishna" and "Christ" both come from the root word 'kriya", which means both "to purify" and "to redeem"; kriya yoga is a purification yoga for the onset of kundalini...

Have you ever seen a slow motion movie of a lightening strike? Most people think that lightening hits the earth wherever it wants, hitting the highest point in an area, or the best conductor, or whatever-- in any case, it's the lightening coming out of the cloud and hitting the earth -- the lightening strikes the earth, the earth just sits there. However, if you watch a stop action movie of a lightening strike the whole event looks very different-- way before the lightening comes down out of the sky and strikes the earth, the earth sends up what's called a ground leader-- you can't see it with your naked eye, but you can see it on a video/movie-- this ground leader reaches up from the earth to the sky, and if it's strong enough the lightening "senses" it and connects with it. What you see with your naked eye is only one-half of the event. I wonder if the earth has a desire to reach the sky and sends up the ground leader, and the sky has a desire to reach the earth but can't until a ground leader goes out?
So you send out your ground leader to God, your desire to be with God, and what you feel in you and around you-- the love and the glow -- is what you can sense so far of God's responding to your ground leader. I'd wager that as your awareness grows you'll sense more and more-- and you'll change-- and your thoughts about God will change, and your perceptions and ideas of God will change. The trouble with your changing is that at some point it'll be very hard to be "here" when everything you want is with God. But you can't be one with God or "merge" with God the way you can with another human or soulmate, or whatever-- it's not that kind of thing. I think you'll discover that God isn't the supreme object, but rather the supreme subject-- so that if you want to merge with God what you have to do is follow yourself-- your Self-- to God. If you do that you'll probably find that the ground leader going out and the lightening coming down are one and the same.

About the way of Knowledge and the way of Communion -- they're different sides of the same thing-- in the end you have to give up both in order to go beyond them, because both cause you to assume a position of duality -- knower and known, communer and whatever-the-hell-the word-is-for-that-with-which you commune (or is it the 'communee' and the 'communor'?). The bottom line, and the way through the door, is knowing the nature of the one who does the knowing, or communing, or seeking. Knowing is through the head, communion is through the heart -- you have to have a marriage of the head and heart.

About knowing -- I find that the 'normal' world is off to my left, and that I connect to it and participate in it via my left side, via my left, physical, heart. Most people operate in the world off to their left. If you change your center of interest, your point of focus, by moving to the right you begin to perceive the world more than you participate in it-- you begin to "see" the world. At this point you can watch the world being made, and experience yourself as contributing to the creation and maintenance of the world. For example, one of my favorite things used to be (don't do it too much anymore for some reason), sitting someplace alone-- a mountain, beach, etc, and shifting my focus to where I can see the world being made-- it's as though there are, for example, huge tree-forms that extend infinitely up into the sky, and then inside those are slightly smaller tree-forms, then smaller ones still, and so on until you get down to the condensed tree-form growing on the horizon ( I think this is why I like fractals -- it's how I perceive the world being made). You can experience yourself as contributing to the creation of this by watching the world being made and at the same time paying attention to your solar plexus area -- if you catch it right, it'll feel as though you have a movie projector in your solar plexus and you're watching the movie at the same time. We all participate in doing this.

Another way is to pay attention to how you maintain your center of focus in the world. You'll find that you usually maintain a center of vision, a center focus of your field of vision. If you do an open-eyed meditation by sitting and relaxing, and *softly* (note, *softly*) relaxing your vision on one area, then putting your attention on the outside corners of your eyes and paying attention not to your center of vision but to your peripheral vision, to the far left and right of your visual field -- if you do this you'll see how your vision tends to come back to center -- if you practice this until you can maintain your awareness at the outsides of your vision and not return to the center you'll find that the world will sort of 'pop out' for you -- you have to practice so that when you get the opportunity (in the mountains, etc) you can do it. I should also add that you should also pay attention to which eye you tend to look out of, which side you use more for seeing -- try to move from one side to the other to see how it affects what and how you see (beyond the fact that you may have one eye better than the other). Also pay attention to the tension in your face and neck, if there's more on one side or the other --try to relax and equalize both sides. You may also notice the sounds in your ears, that one side is louder, or different, than the other, or that they change as your vision changes.

Be aware, however, that the results of practicing this will sneak up on you at inappropriate times- I can remember driving to work and suddenly having the world 'pop' and I'm experiencing everything as though I'm sitting still and the road and scenery are moving towards and around me, and the whole thing is being projected from my midsection -- hard to handle driving a pickup truck at 60mph on the highway-- I had to pull over and refocus. This is the point, though, of always being able to find yourself, because if you can't you can get lost in the 'dream', in the creation -- if I hadn't been able to find myself as distinct from the experience and the body-in-the-circumstance, I could have done some serious damage -- at other times it's ok to let go and let things develop. The way back out of the door to "freedom" is being able to find yourself and follow yourself, your own scent, your own footprints, your own presence of being, back out -- like following a string back out of a cave. It's one thing to be lost and be aware that you're lost, it's another to lose yourself -- to lose your 'self'.

Anyhow, basically the shift is something that you can do without doing the 'visual' thing, but which will also happen *when* you do the visual thing, if that makes sense. You can do the right shift on perceptual levels other than just the visual -- it's a life saver on the emotional level because you can shift and "see" your emotions, i.e., understand them, rather than getting lost in them. This is especially valuable when you're dealing with universal creative processes like sex and survival -- it helps you to see their 'universality' as well as how that universality works itself out in and through you and all individuals. In fact, you can see from that perspective how 'individuality' is a universal process at this level of things.

A bit of a short answer to your other mail about the space, etc-- I've never had a problem with 'space' -- I find voids very comforting and relaxing -- I like looking up at the night sky and feeling the space in between the stars. On the other hand I find the 'normal' world incredibly claustrophobic. Expanding into space is like going home to me -- I have nothing to lose. I most definitely don't lose myself -- if anything I tend to lose myself in the 'normal' world that most people find so secure, and I find that I'm most myself when I'm expanded. No fear there -- not for you either once you get comfortable with it. You're still you, aren't you, regardless of where you are, or who you are (i.e., what body and personality you're occupying)?

Just a quick note about your 'dull sphere' that you kept seeing -- I hadn't really focused on it before, but the other night I was laying in bed and did a conscious shift to the right. Usually what happens is that I notice my awareness increasing, as though I am beginning to see wider and farther, as it were. I usually have the sensation of my awareness being a sphere expanding in all directions at once. At some point I begin to see images, places, people, etc. This time, however, I paid attention the interior surface of that sphere, and guess what it looked like to me -- yep, dark with white specks. I never really paid much attention to it, it was always just there and I took it for granted. It never starts close to my face however, but rather about 3-4 ft out around my head. And the 'dark' is usually sort of a midnight blue. So, here's my guess you experienced the same thing, only it was close to your head because you haven't had it develop quite as much, and that it's 'dull' for the same reason, and that as the energies balance in your third eye area the sphere will become larger and will clear up in color. And you'll become more comfortable with it, and with the perceptual changes it brings-- although perhaps 'perceptual' is the wrong word, because the changes aren't just about 'seeing', i.e., visual stuff, but about knowing, about awareness. And yes, your awareness of your everyday world will change, including a de-emphasis of things you once thought important, etc. So if this rings a bell with you and you feel "oh yea, holy shit, that's it!" then that's good, because this is a good thing and a good change -- exactly what you want, because it will allow you to see things from the perspective of your third-eye area. Don't confuse this with seeing auras and so on; it's a much higher way of knowing -- like looking at a pond from above the surface, as opposed to swimming around under water -- although that change of perspective may take some getting used to -- you might be a bit disoriented until you get the water out of your eyes )

Anyhow, the right-shift thing. I tend to use my body as a mandala-- what I mean is that I use it as a reference point to initiate conditions, etc, that may not be body related at all, so when I talk about something happening on the right side of the chest it isn't necessarily something that takes place physically -- although you can focus your attention in a particular area and generate physical symptoms such as tightness or warm or pressure. What this means is that there isn't necessarily a cause-and-effect thing happening -- if you focus on the right side of your chest then this thing will happen because you've focused on the right side. I can bring on the right shift very strongly by focusing on the right side of my neck, relaxing it up into the occipital region behind my right ear. Similarly, I can do it by imagining myself sort of reaching out to the right and pulling the space to the right of me over toward my left, or imagining the space to my right flowing toward me. It doesn't *have* to be me who's moving into something or somewhere else -- I can pull the space to me, or the somewhere else to me. This is something that's important, that's *key* -- in the 'sphere' state, where you have the sphere around your head and you get to the point were you feel your awareness is in all directions, you can forget about being 'here' and going 'there', because you can draw 'here' and 'there' to you. You don't need a second body to 'travel' because you don't need to go anywhere, you don't need the sort of classic OBE scenario anymore. A couple of very good examples in the stuff I have at Spiritweb there's one point where I wrote about the rubber glove thing that you mentioned-- just above that I said "I looked out over the meadow and found I could change my vision to see anything I wanted--I could look at the distant mountains, think that I could see them up close, and suddenly I could see every detail, and they appeared to be right in front of me." -- what I was describing there was being able to pull space toward me -- I could see to whatever level of detail I chose, only I was doing it with my eyes open. I'd done this before several times -- once I was sitting in a sort of cave/alcove space up in the Canadian Rockies near Jasper, on the side of a cliff that overlooks a large hanging glacier, and my vision shifted and I could see the ground a couple of hundred feet below me as though my nose were pressed up against it -- at the time I was *very* tempted to step off the rock and onto the ground below -- it was so close and I had the distinct, but probably very foolish feeling, that I could make that step -- I chose not to, but I still sometimes wonder what would have happened -- beyond the big splat I would have made as I hit the ground from 200 ft.

You asked about what happens on other perceptual levels than the visual-- first and foremost, being able to be aware from that level allows you a 'safe haven' , and overview, so that you can both participate in the events of your life and understand them -- because with that shift of awareness you also gain the shift of understanding. This is especially important when you have emotional issues to deal with because it will allow you to both experience them and understand them from a larger perspective. Somewhere in one of Castaneda's early books he talks about Don Juan watching his son die -- I remember it as being Don Juan's son, but in any case I think it was someone close to Don Juan-- and Don Juan says something about his (DJ's) choosing to shift his awareness to watch the person die. It's like that, and it works in all arenas. I think, though, that each individual has their own particular 'brand' of perceptual mechanisms under the 'shift' -- some people are more visually oriented, some more auditory, some more sensation/feeling -- and you have to find the most comfortable combinations that work for you. Sometimes I find that one or another 'mechanism' seems to predominate depending on what I've been doing/thinking before making a 'shift' -- the awareness that arises from the shift will also help you to recognize where you were 'standing' when you made the shift, and eventually you can learn to choose your position. This is also very valuable because it'll help you become aware of how you interact with the world, and especially with the people around you that shape/shaped your life -- parents, brothers and sisters, significant others, etc. In this regard it's especially valuable because it will help you to see through the unconscious areas of your life -- and help you to set yourself free from whatever traps you in negative patterns -- when you find yourself in such an area you can do a 'shift' and 'see' the underlying patterns and structures rather than just react to them. The third eye burns karma.

The problem with a lot, if not most traditional spiritual pursuits, methods, schools, etc, is that they have next to no knowledge of human psychology, much less human biology or physiology. So when someone is going through something like what I've described above the usual answer is to control your thoughts, control your emotions, fast, pray, curse the devil, whatever. And of course none of that works and the person in the depths of the transformation, with the accompanying depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, and so on, thinks he or she is doing something wrong, or is cursed, or has bad karma, or whatever. And worse yet, these spiritual traditions tell people to renounce the world, give up the "low" life in favor of a "higher" "spiritual" life, etc-- and with that attitude just about make it impossible for people to go into the mental and emotional spaces they need to go into to deal with the depression, anxiety, etc that comes along with the transformation-- they make it impossible because they make it "wrong" or "unclean" or "fallen" or "sinful" to think about sex, or anger, or rage, or anxiety, or fear-- and those are the very things that need to be dealt with during the transformation. So this is where "normal" and "spiritual" psychology interface and work in concert with each other.

You get to a point in all this where you're not really dealing with personal issues so much as universal issues, at least as far as being on this planet is concerned-- you're dealing with survival, you're dealing with species issues as well as national and racial issues, and you're dealing with all the subconscious issues of the human race. How big a jump can you imagine it is, and how much work can you imagine it takes, to go from seeing and relating to yourself as someone born into the world from human parents to feeling like you're giving birth to yourself. Beyond the basic biological issues involved, there are also the issues of being parented-- including being loved and nourished and sustained by your parents-- and a host of other things.

I find that a lot of people who get involved in spiritual groups are very afraid of facing any of the things I just mentioned, so the promise of something more, or better, or whatever, is very appealing. And these same people can form very tight knit groups that don't tolerate differences very well-- they need to have all the answers.

About raising your own level-- you can't raise your own level any more than you can pick yourself up by your own bootstraps. All the good works and karma burning exercises in the world won't do the job-- what you need is what you've already got-- an active kundalini, which has its own mind and knows what its doing -- you have the grace that you need, you just have to learn how to work along side it, how to pay attention. Kundalini activity on the physical level shows that something is happening at a higher level-- it doesn't much matter that you understand what's going on, or *how* you understand it (you can understand from a cultural level-- Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, etc). Information, teachings, practices don't change things unless the person is already *active* and needs to know so they can cooperate with the process that's taking place on a higher level. If you have an active kundalini on the physical level it means things are happening at a higher level and that you are effecting beings at that level (you experience yourself as 'them' partly because you are effecting changes at that level)-- by just *being* you effect other beings who in turn effect others-- but this is done at a level prior to creation, so you effect the level at which the beings who create and maintain the world in fact create and maintain. Whether you actually *teach*, i.e., pass on information, etc, is not as important as *being*. And one of the hardest things is to *be* in the face of all the bullshit of the present level of creation-- you can look at it from your own level of 'comfort' and think 'who needs this shit, who would ever want it', and it's very hard not to either give up and 'terminate' yourself because you don't want what's here, or succumb to it and just go along with the 'norm' out of loneliness (or run around trying to save everyone from the world-- and so become a participant in the melodrama). At this point your being in the world becomes a sacrifice.

Remember I used the image of a central 'sun' ? And remember I wrote to you back in November about being immersed in this overwhelming love, and how I got there, etc? If your attention and identity are focused on the body, as most beings here are, you'll experience the sun as the fulfillment of bodily goals, which is primarily eternal life (all life strives to live forever, all life develops infinite survival strategies to try to guarantee a chance of living forever, either as an individual organism, or as a species, or as an ecosystem, or as a creation); if your attention and identity are focused on your emotional center, your heart, you'll experience the sun as infinite love, as the fulfillment of everything you've longed for in terms of emotional nourishment (everything wants to be loved-- heavens and hells are defined by the presence or absence of love); if your attention and identity are focused on your identity, your third eye area, then you'll experience the sun as your true self, as who you really are. A lot of traditional yoga paths follow this last way to the sun-- which is why there's such a strong emphasis on developing the ajna chakra-- and the ajna chakra is also where you begin to experience 'witness consciousness'-- the more you isolate yourself in the ajna the more you'll experience the witness state-- but the more you isolate yourself in anything the more you'll begin to experience things solely from that standpoint. The problem with the witness state is exactly what you've run into-- well, here I am, what do I do now? And right there is the main thing-- what do you DO? All life, all planes of existence from the physical to the mental to the super-mental to the buddhic to nirvana, are all DOING, they are NOT Being. All spiritual striving, all yoga practices, all going from discipline to discipline, teacher to teacher, life to life, is DOING. You can hang out in witness consciousness and look for what to DO next and what you will get is more doing. What you have to do is not do-- you have to let go and just be. I'm not talking here about how you live your everyday life, I'm talking about letting your awareness let go of looking for the next doing-- especially when you're in the witness state. It's like trying to fall asleep-- the more you try, and the harder you try, the more you'll stay awake-- when you finally stop trying to fall asleep is when you usually do. You have to go from the witness state and trying hard for the next doing to a sort of falling asleep into the sun, and you do that by not doing, by just being. And then you'll experience yourself as the sun, as the source of being, as the source of consciousness, and as the source of love. After that it's between you and the sun-- you may simply merge into it-- the classical samadhi thing; or you may become a sort of bridge with one foot in the sun and one in the world, which is where I seem to have wound up-- I experience myself as both the world (as a person in the world) looking for and at the sun, and as the sun itself. That seems to be where the sun wants me and what I was made for.......probably so I can write letters like this :)

Anyhow, about having your sperm dance up your spine, shaktipat, etc. I think the idea of sperm or semen actually going up your spine is a sort of eastern way of saying that the energy from the base chakra turns and goes up-- the energy is transmuted, as it were. Transmuted from a base metal into gold (you know about the kabbalah, so you know about alchemy, so you know that the transmutation of base metal into gold -- you need the caldron and the heat, etc -- the heat is a byproduct of the spiritual marriage-- sometimes called the 'alchemical marriage' -- you once mentioned about producing dumo, or body heat-- when you've got the transmutation underway you find that your relationships with women will be a sort of acting out of your relationship with your own feminine -- and you'll probably notice, or she'll notice, that you get very hot, physically hot, when you make love -- she'll probably notice it-- "are you ok, you're just burning up, it's like you're on fire, do you have a fever?" ) The full transmutation occurs when the energy from the base chakra steadies itself in the throat chakra (and in the heart with the culmination of the spiritual marriage -- the union of opposites as shown by the Star of David at the heart level)-- when the energy steadies itself in the throat the creative energy is sort of transferred to a higher octave and this is when you can begin to create using letters and words--and it's also when you can begin to give shaktipat, although I don't really like that term very much. I don't like it because it has connotations of power and will. I like the Sufi term 'baraka', which means blessing or grace. If I recall my kabbalah correctly, the Aleph is made up of three aspects, three groups of letters that I can't remember the name of, one group stands for love, one for will, and one for creation-- you can read the letters from left to right or from right to left, and depending on which way you read them you get a different message-- if you read from 'will' to 'love' you get something like "destruction" but if you read from 'love' to 'will' you get something like 'continuation' -- the point being that you have to start with love and not will. You also need 'wisdom' in there, which means you need to know how to use and not use your shaktipat or baraka-- what all too frequently happens is that someone gets a hit of shaktipat and then either mishandles it or lets it die, as it were -- as the giver you have to recognize fertile ground in which to plant the seed-- although most of the time you plant by the broadcast method and some seed lands on rocks, some in weeds, some gets eaten by the birds, and some hopefully lands on fertile ground. Then again it can be like teaching an egg to fly if you give shaktipat to someone who isn't ready-- you can keep the egg in the air, but only by your own will-- it won't stay up there on its own, and when it falls it makes a mess. If you go from 'will' and power, you run the risk of running a flight school for eggs; if you go from love you give the eggs time to hatch and grow wings.

More about the throat and dumo (heat)-- I find that I can consciously generate heat by relaxing and energizing my throat chakra-- usually by focusing on the large cervical vertebrae and relaxing the muscles in my shoulders (the trapezius, etc), and then imagining an energy flow coming from both sides to the center in the throat. (You can tell when your base chakra energy is beginning to transmute at the throat area because of the color changes you'll "see"(internal vision) at your throat area -- it'll start off blue, then go to green, and then to red when the energy is fully transmuted. Sometimes there's also a sort of technicolor, or multi-hued phase, in there as well.) But, and a *big* " but", you'll probably find that you gain the most when you stop trying to control-- it's like making love with someone-- if you try to control the situation, and control your partner, you lose more that you gain, and if she senses it you'll alienate her also-- you have to go from 'love' to 'will' rather than from 'will' to 'love' -- and when you do your throat area loosens up and the energy flows properly -- if both partners do that you wind up making incredible love. You'll also find that you'll "heat up" (dumo) more easily, and you'll be able to carry it over into other areas of your life like your mediation. At least that's been my experience.

Listen to me YOU ARE NOT A FUCKUP! You just don't understand who and what you are. Yes, you are moving in the opposite direction, from enlightenment to darkness, but for a reason. Yes, you will feel as though you're going in the opposite direction from everyone else on the "spiritual path" because you ARE -- you're coming *from* the place everyone else is seeking --you already have what they want -- what they want is where your home is. It's like bringing light into the darkness, or as I said in the stuff you got from Spiritweb, it's like you wind up with one foot (or half of you) in the world, and the other foot (or other half) in the light. Your act of establishing yourself in the world, of putting your foot down in the world, feels *to you* as though you're moving in the downward direction-- and it's very hard to do because it's not something you'll want to do naturally or with any kind of pleasure -- ALL of you will want to go home again -- and there will be a lot of local resistance to your putting your foot in the world and especially to your putting any kind of weight on it, if you know what I mean (hence, the malevolent beings you encountered -- but the more you know who you are the less they will bother you). But it's what you came here to do.

When I had that stuff happen to me in '78 (the stuff in the "resume") I had the immediate feeling of knowing for the first time in my life what I am -- the way I thought about it to myself is that I felt like a kind of spy called a deep sleeper, or that I was under deep cover-- meaning that I'd 'infiltrated' a local area, and had established myself as one of the locals and lived the life of a local, and then one day 33 years later had gotten a phone call telling me it was time to go to work -- at which point I started remembering all sorts of stuff that I'd more or less filed away-- I could read accounts of yoga, of enlightenment, of yoga practices, and it was all old ground to me-- in fact in most cases I discovered I knew more and had done more, and that the traditional accounts hadn't gone far enough. But even with all that I still found myself looking for validation, so I read spiritual literature, did spiritual practices, until I realized that I didn't have to do that, that I didn't need anyone to validate me or initiate me in order for me to be me -- I just had to let it happen -- I just had to BE. And then I could do what I came to do, which was to act as that bridge, with one foot in the world and one in the light. And that's all you have to do. Your inclination to do kriyas, etc, is your way of clearing out a place for you to put your foot down in the world, and your way of making a clear conduit into the world -- I did that also. But you don't need any more validation or initiation to be *more* than you are, or to get something that you don't already have. If you *think* that you need things you've already got then you wind sort of walking around the world looking for your feet, if you get my drift.

Here's a dream I had about a year ago that's very relevant-- I'm sitting in a room behind a desk, and I'm opening what looks like a can of sardines-- I have the can in one hand and the key in the other, and on the can lid is a fish symbol-- like the Christian 'ichthys' symbol -- I peel back the lid and inside are a whole bunch of what look like small rods, thin and black like pencil leads-- and there's a line of people passing in front of the desk and I'm handing out one of these rods to each person that passes by. Suddenly the scene changes and I'm outside standing beside a house-- green grass, sky, a woman outside hanging up laundry, a kid playing in the yard-- but coming down 'out of the sky', sort of semi-transparent, are all these beings-- who are more or less passing through the objects in the scene-- the trees, the house, the sky, etc-- like the beings aren't fully physical-- and the woman and child (and others) become aware of these beings and start running around trying to prevent them from coming into this particular world -- the woman grabs something that looks to me like a large piece of chicken wire and sort of stretches it out like a net, trying to prevent all these beings from coming down, it doesn't work and the beings pass right through it and keep going. And I immediately know that the "Sons of God" are coming back-- that was my immediate thought.

As something of a footnote you again referred to yourself as a screwed up/fallen Yogi. I don't think so -- you may not conform to the eastern models anymore (see my last paragraph), but that doesn't mean you're fallen or screwed up. You can't integrate with your 'feminine' if you keep isolating yourself from what's contained in the feminine, and you can't be in a relationship if you think that you're fallen and screwed up and not worthy of love. Yogi's always talk about infinite bliss, but that's only the beginning, kind of like the infinite rapture of cosmic sex. But there's more, there's also infinite love, which is really very quiet. The thing is, you have to open the eye of your heart in order to find it and experience it, and that can be really scary because then you get into issues like trust and openness.

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