Introduction
ENLIGHTENMENT
THE LONG HARD ROAD
(FROM SHAMANISM
TO QUANTUM PHYSICS)
Written and compiled by Ed Komarek
SHOESTRING PUBLISHING
Copyright by Ed Komarek
3301 Hwy 93 South, Cairo Georgia, 39828
ISBN: - 13:9781506014487
In this book, a significant amount of the content is compiled by the author, but is not the property of the author. So the author and Shoestring Publishing can only claim copyright on the writings of Ed Komarek. Anyone wishing to use material from these other authors need to contact these authors and seek permission, especially material that is under copyright protection. Shoestring Publishing and Ed Komarek have made a good faith attempt to find and seek permission to reprint material, especially information that does not fall under the fair use laws and is copyrighted by the authors.
The Long Hard Road to Enlightenment is the third in a series of books written by Ed Komarek to summarize the knowledge and wisdom gained during his lifetime so that others may build on his work as he as built on the good works of others. The first book written is UFOs Exopolitics and the New World Disorder that is available to be read for free or as a PDF download on its website. [1] Fire in Nature, A Fire Activist’s Guide is also available to be read on its website. [2] The hard copy and the Kindle edition of all three books can be purchased from Amazon with wholesale copies available from Createspace Publishing. To reach Ed, please contact him by email [email protected] or by Facebook message.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ash Staunton has created the excellent book design and cover for this book which is very much appreciated. I would also like to thank my friends Thomas Reeves and Jeffrey Bivins for helping me edit this book.
NOTE TO READERS
The source material for this book is referenced using footnote links for those reading this book free on the Internet at its website URL. Ed Komarek can be contacted on Facebook message, or email at: [email protected]
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to all those who have come before and upon whose good works I have built my life. I am also fortunate to have so many good supportive friends in this life that have helped me so much along the way. I especially want to thank Spomenka Vasic (Siddhani) for her loving support toward this book in particular even while away living on the other side of the world. Truly love knows no limits, be we together in person or have to communicate through the Internet.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One - The Fool’s Journey
(Culture & Lifestyle)
Chapter Two - Life is a School
(Life a Loving-Brutal Taskmaster)
Chapter Three - The Big Picture
(Reincarnation, Drugs, OBE, NDE & ET Contact)
Chapter Four - Evolution of Religion
(From Shamanism to Quantum Science)
Chapter Five - Consciousness Science
(Energy, Matter and Consciousness)
Chapter Six – Personalization of Religion
(One Size Does Not Fit All
PREFACE
“Those shamans had another cognitive unit called the wheel of time. The way they explained the wheel of time was to say that time was like a tunnel of infinite length and width, a tunnel with reflective furrows. Every furrow was infinite, and there were infinite numbers of them. Living creatures were compulsorily made, by the force of life, to gaze into one furrow. To gaze into one furrow alone, meant to be trapped by it, to live that furrow.
A warrior’s final aim is to focus, though an act of profound discipline, his unwavering attention on the wheel of time in order to make it turn. Warriors who have succeeded in turning the wheel of time can gaze into any furrow and draw from it whatever they desire. To be free from the spellbinding force of gazing into only one of those furrows means that warriors can look in either direction: as time retreats or as it advances on them. Viewed in this manner, the wheel of time is an overpowering influence which reaches through the life of the warrior and beyond.” Carlos Castaneda
I was raised in a family of early ecologists who mentored me in ecology and fire ecology hoping that I would follow in their footsteps. I went to college at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks majoring in wildlife management. I was disappointed after a year in a local junior college and two years at the University of Alaska that I was still struggling under a load of classes with little do with wildlife management. In three years I had taken not a single course on wildlife management. I had, however, been working for Alaska Department of Fish and Game in the summers and even co-authored the first scientific paper on the Fish of the North Slope of Alaska in the early 1970s. I was mainly responsible for the field work for this paper.
Little did I realize when I first began college that my life’s direction would soon change and that I would give enlightenment top priority in my life and develop a lifelong interest in the paranormal. A chance encounter with a small metaphysical bookstore in downtown Fairbanks amongst the bars and shops led to an existential crisis in my life that resulted in me quitting college to try to understand myself and figure out what was life really about.
Looking back on my life in old age, I now realize that context gives meaning to content and the greatest and most accurate context makes sense out of life complexities. Context (perspective) provides a model or roadmap showing us where we are, where we want to go and how to get there. Just as we are lost in the forest without a map showing us where we are and where we want to go, so we are lost in life without a comprehensive and accurate map or model. Most people live their lives with very limited context to guide their thoughts and actions. I see so many people madly painting content on life’s canvas without much perspective and so it’s no wonder that their lives are such a mess.
Most people just play the cards to which they are dealt, deal with situations as they arise, acting and reacting to stimuli moment to moment day to day. Folks rarely think about who is dealing the cards, or what the cards really mean, or heaven forbid, question the nature of the game itself or even see and choose alternative games and lessons. Yet, sooner or later this life or the next, this evolutionary system driven by rewards and punishments will put everyone on the path to enlightenment following in the footsteps of those who have traveled this path before.
Our lives are chock full of illusions and delusions created by limited perspective. On a simple scale we can see that the sun rises in the east, travels across the sky and sets in the west. For hundreds of thousands of years people experienced this illusion that earth was central to the cosmos where the earth was still and the heavens moved.
Folks were able to go about their lives experiencing seemly no ill effects from this perceptual illusion until modern times, except perhaps religious and spiritual people. Even then it was those that saw through the illusion that were threatened and burned at the stake for speaking the heresy that the earth was not the center of God’s universe. Most people now realize the truth of the earth spinning contrary to common sense direct perception and much of our modern technology like space travel is dependent on having broken this illusion and knowing this truth.
Some of us believe that we are on the verge of a second Copernican revolution and are even now in the process of destroying the illusion that we humans are alone and central to the universe. We are finding that all intelligence in the universe does not revolve around us nor that consciousness arises out of matter but rather matter arises out of consciousness. Just as the Copernican Revolution had very profound and revolutionary effects on all aspects of our society, the Consciousness Revolution will have profound effects on future generations and most profoundly on our spiritual development being retarded by materialistic illusions.
By the same token, a long time ago, people thought the world was flat because that was what they observed every day, yet with a greater context or perspective, they were shown that in fact the world was round. Simple ship navigation worked fine under this illusion, but more complex navigation from the 1400s onward required the true understanding that the world was round and spinning on its axis.
Wise men for thousands of years have been debating if consciousness arises out of matter or matter out of consciousness. As it turns out, empirical understanding from NDEs (Near Death Experiences), reincarnation and meditative techniques is now being quantified by modern science which is close to proving that materialistic perspective itself is just another illusion. It is also true that the materialistic perspective illusion-delusion has led to great advancements in the material aspects of our collective lives but failed miserably in supporting true love and happiness. So many of us chase after the pot of promised gold at the end of the materialistic rainbow all our lives, only to be disappointed when the rainbow always stays far ahead of them no matter how fast they run.
While the shaman illustrates this greater perspective as the wheel of time and the need to break out of the limited illusionary perspective of only one groove on the wheel, world teachers through history have picked up the ball and continued to stress the importance to be in the world, but not of it! There is a general tendency to concentrate our attention and our lives in our own limited set, or on our limited part of the stage and ignore or downplay what lies beyond this limited illusionary perspective. This is one of the greatest mistakes we make and it brings great suffering down on us.
We may become so focused and captured by the drama and unfolding events of our lives so as to admire those who work hard onstage even as they rush about in circles creating more suffering for themselves and others. It is a great mistake to ignore the fact that hard work is not enough and has little value without perspective. Brush strokes on canvas mean little unless one is able to stand back for the perspective to guide the brushstrokes accurately. It’s not easy to convince an active person that activity can be a trap and that adequate perspective gives meaning to action. Often, active people think meditative, contemplative people are just lazy when in fact just the opposite may be the case. Anyone who has tried meditation knows just how difficult it is to calm the mental dialogue to enter higher states of consciousness.
It is my intention that this book be evidence based as are my two previous books. Just because somebody says something is true does not make it true, even if it comes from a respected religious, political or even scientific authority figure. One of the problems I have noticed in this life is that people have a difficult time discerning what is true from what is false and this causes much confusion and suffering in their lives. Simply repeating a lie over and over can manipulate and control the minds and bodies of others, but this does not make the lie true or liberating. In this case too, discrimination requires not only accurate information gathering and analysis, but accurate greater perspective as well
Fortunately I was brought up by scientists with a good understanding of the scientific method. The scientific method is a form of inquiry in which one observes, collects and studies evidence and from there one develops concepts and theories to be tested toward a functioning model of the reality that is useful and effective. I firmly believe this form of inquiry has merit and is superior to other forms of inquiry such as those that simply accept a concept or belief through repetition of lies and indoctrination in general. Those that are unable to question authority, observe and collect evidence and think for themselves are doomed to be slaves to authority having their thinking done by rulers at their expense.
I see so many people struggling and suffering in denial throughout life trying to force the evidence to validate the concept or belief to which they have been indoctrinated by authority figures in their lives be it parents, church, political or scientific leaders. I suppose one can even make the case that indoctrination is not a form of inquiry at all, but brainwashing in which the victims perpetrate the indoctrination of false concepts through generations, enslaving and brutalizing not only themselves but their children.
So in this book as with my other books I intend to back up the concepts of enlightenment with evidence. There is a huge body of evidence based on witness testimony that has accumulated over generations even thousands of years through all cultures. This evidence supports the doctrine of reincarnation including life after the death of the body and that we are in fact eternal beings that evolve toward enlightenment through innumerable lifetimes of toil, tribulation and suffering until we get it right.
Life is like learning to play the violin with terrible brutal screeches and squawks, until we can play life with true joy, love and happiness. Today many scientists and consciousness researchers are validating this huge body of witness testimony from reincarnation, NDEs, psychoactive drugs and meditation just as have our ancestors before us. They are in the process of proving that all matter, energy and life itself, evolve out of consciousness rather than the other way around. In other words, materialistic doctrine is just another case of viewing the world from a limited perspective with the result being the experience of an illusion as real rather than a true reality.
Thanks to consciousness researchers and religious leaders, we have many rough roadmaps or models inherent in scientific and religious doctrines that we can use to guide us through life allowing us to see where we and others are on the road to enlightenment and how best to proceed further. For instance, David Hawkins provides a useful scale or map of consciousness that stands out. I believe I encountered his map or scale of consciousness as a young man from a reincarnational specialist that came to Fairbanks Alaska to lecture on reincarnation. When I got a reading from her there was this enlightenment rating system from one to a thousand in which I was placed around 380. I had no idea at the time where this rating system had come from, but recently now at the end of my life, I was introduced to David Hawkins’ work by a friend and I believe it may be the same system.
Hawkins places humanity on average at a little over 200 on his scale, the point where he believes individuals begin to do more good than harm to themselves and others. Hawkins points out that this level 200 presents a major challenge where in order to move onward one has to stop blaming external forces, situations and people and take full responsibility for the situations one gets oneself in. It takes a lot of courage to break this barrier and he rightly calls this level “courage”.
I believe it is the suffering that occurs below the 200 level that essentially drives the process of individual evolution forward in an unconscious manner until the individual consciously takes the imitative toward a brighter future for themselves and humanity. Life is painful and really makes little sense to a person below the 200 level and no amount of deception and self-deception will alter this reality.
Above the 200 level the individual begins to understand that life is a journey and a school and that evolution is driven by a simple carrot-stick manipulative mechanism. Of course this concept in not new and has been around for thousands of years, especially in the East. If you refuse to learn the lessons being presented to you on a daily basis you suffer. If you learn, then you gain in love, joy and happiness. Hawkins also points out that the 500 level presents the second major hurdle where one must realize that all are learning at their own rate and in their own time. At this point we develop tolerance and quit judging others by our standards developing love and compassion for others no matter how screwed up they are.
When we realize this fact we no longer judge the experience and mistakes of others. We realize that all is unfolding as it should with different people learning at different levels. Still, this does not mean that one does not avoid or defend against the predator tactics of those suffering and living in lower states of consciousness. It’s just that we accept the right of others to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes just as we do also.
We protect ourselves while existing in a state of unconditional love and compassion, rather than as in the lower consciousness states by exhibiting destructive anger and hatred in the face of predation. We learn to deal with both human predators and prey just as we do with natural predators and prey in a loving compassionate manner. It’s important to understand at the 500 level that we see that it’s the very nature of those that suffer to harm themselves and others. It’s part of their lessons to be learned. This is an inherent natural process in nature and in man. As the suffering diminishes above the 200 level, individuals harm themselves and others less and help themselves and others more. It becomes the responsibility of the more evolved to reach out and assist where possible, but at the same time avoid being drawn back down the scale of consciousness into harm’s way.
I intend to get into the Hawkins scale in more detail later in this book and will just present the scale here and later we will come back to it from time to time as we proceed further into the book to explain how Hawkins arrived at this scale and how he uses reflexology to test and validate it. For now let’s just use it as a guide and just by looking at it we can pretty much determine where we are on the scale and where we want to go. The Hawkins scale or map of consciousness in brief:
“•20:Shame •30:Guilt •50:Apathy •75:Grief •100:Fear •125:Desire •150:Anger •175:Pride •200: Courage •250: Neutrality •310: Willingness •350: Acceptance •400: Reason •500: Love •540: Joy •600: Peace •700-1000: Enlightenment”
I think for many people psychological suffering and the corresponding destructive emotions will just seem as normal day to day experiences. However, as we will show throughout this book, the reality is that this is not normal or healthy. Instead these states and emotions are abnormal and unhealthy to the individual and society when viewed from higher states of consciousness. As I have shown in my Exopolitics book, there is a large amount of evidence that other stellar and planetary civilizations average much higher on this scale than earthly humanity and that we are evolving to their level.
The more advanced beings tell the contact people that we are quite primitive in our evolutionary development and that we still have a lot to learn from the school of hard knocks before we are ready to move our civilization into higher states of consciousness. As to the reality of extraterrestrial contact, polls have shown that about one in ten people claim to have seen a UFO about the same as those that claim to have had a Near Death Experience (NDE) or Out of Body Experience (OBE).
Looking back on my life I see now what happened to me with my existential crisis in my early twenties was exactly as described in the above quote by Carlos Castaneda at the beginning of the preface. The ecologist groove in the wheel of time into which I was born was not enough. I had to experience more and more accurate and greater context. There had to be more! In order to make this move, unconscious forces (karma) reacted to my struggling intent drawing me in my early twenties to the psychoactive drugs that temporarily stopped the internal dialogue that kept me stuck in that one groove on the wheel of time. The drugs broke me free to begin an exploration of those other grooves in the wheel of time through yoga discipline and meditation.
Interestingly, just before inserting this quote and these comments into this text, in typical synchronistic fashion, I found myself watching a mama turkey and her two chicks feeding in the field next to my camp-house in North Carolina. This support from the greater reality in response to my intent has become so common in my life that often I hardly notice these effects, but they are very much a part of my life and the writing of my books.
Suddenly through love and empathy of that turkey, I became her for a moment, alert and very perceptive of my surroundings looking out for danger that could appear at any moment for me and my chicks. I had been practicing slowing my internal dialogue to better work on this book, but it apparently prepared me for this unconscious shift of awareness into that of the turkey to illustrate this commentary.
As the turkey, I had no internal dialogue just an acute alertness and a constant preparedness to flee, protect my chicks and to feed. This turkey has become tame over the years knowing that I will do no harm and exists in one of those infinite groves in the wheel of time. I now understand how and why shamans move out of their normal awareness to perceptually experience other animals, beings or realities in this wheel of time.
I came out of this existential crisis a much different and wiser person several years later with whole new existential realities opening up before me that I could explore now without the use of psychoactive drugs. Looking back, I realize that this very difficult existential crisis that immersed me far below 200 on the Hawkins scale for two or three years was just the rough beginning of my personal journey to enlightenment that has slowly smoothed out over the years. Still, I have no illusions as to the fact that in lives to come I could easily fall back down the scale of consciousness until I can properly orient myself in these future lives.
Right after what I believe was an encounter with three advanced intelligences, knowing that there was much more to reality and using techniques of good mental and emotional health, I propelled myself through the 200 barrier never to hopefully return, at least in this life. In old age I now realize that my personal journey was and is a recapitulation of a collective societal journey, that all of us in our own time must make, if not in this life then in lives to come. It was necessary for me to drop back down in consciousness, shedding old indoctrinated outmoded beliefs and concepts for new more advanced well thought out ones. It also allowed me to appreciate the depth of despair and suffering that by Hawkins’ reckoning 85 percent of today’s population feels below the 200 level.
As part of this personal and collective process, I began writing later in life to inform others so that others can build on my knowledge and understanding just as I have built my life on the good works of others. I started out writing blog articles and articles for the Internet media and have progressed toward writing a series of books summing up what I have learned in a long, productive life. My first book UFOs Exopolitics and the New World Disorder was the first in a series of books on diverse subjects that I have been writing and publishing.
Fire in Nature, A Fire Activist’s Guide was the second book in what I am now calling the Enlighten Your World Series. I have made these first two books free on their websites in order to benefit as many people as possible all over world and to build up my reputation as a writer. There may be some fire managers, scientists, and others who may think I wear a tinfoil hat for investigating and writing about UFOs. However, I believe these books in the series should each stand on their respective merits, where each individual subject can or may act as a portal into a much broader understanding of life and the life sciences.
These books, even while covering very different subject material, are written in a style based on exhaustive, credible footnoted link source material as is this third book in the series Enlightenment, The Long Hard Road. It would be a mistake to reject out of hand any one of these books simply because of a topic covered in another book. I am reminded of those respectable French “scientists” hundreds of years ago who refused to even look through a newly built telescope because, it obviously had to be some kind of a trick.
With the Fire and Exopolitics book now out of the way and in circulation, I am free to write this third book about what I have discovered on my personal path to enlightenment. Prior to stumbling upon and entering that tiny metaphysical bookstore in the dead of an Alaskan winter my know-it-all attitude on life had already begun to take some hits. I suppose just leaving a loving family and the land upon which I had been raised at 17 years of age and moving to Alaska completely on my own began the transformation to who I am today.
I was no longer under the influence of my parents, their security or their expectations and now found myself in a very demanding and rugged environment where a little mistake could cost me my life or my health. I felt like I had been thrown as molten metal into ice cold water to temper and discipline myself to begin my individual journey into life.
Soon enough I made new friends who helped me to adapt to the cold climate and to prepare me for a long cold winter with clothes that would keep me warm and free from frostbite. One of these friends was Matt Kelly who later became a smoke jumper. His parents had worked in Africa for the UN. One of the first shocks to my know-it-all attitude came when I brought up my southern prejudice against blacks that I had learned growing up in the south. Matt slammed his fist down on the table in an argument and would not talk to me for three weeks.
I had learned to argue intensely from my father and his associates who would “blow off steam” in arguments about land management but in ten minutes would be best of friends again. Matt forced me to really think hard about my prejudice against blacks and realize I had been wrong. Later my sister married a black man and basically got excommunicated from the family with me attending the wedding and being as she said her “bridge over troubled water”. Years later she and my parents reconciled.
The second and most serious blow to my know-it-all attitude came when I left one of the bars in downtown Fairbanks Alaska in the cold of winter where I had been playing pool with my college friends. I went out to get a little fresh air and stumbled upon the little new age bookstore on a back street. I entered to the sound of chimes and incense and inside there were bookcases full of books on the paranormal. Here were books on UFOs, Near Death and Out of Body experiences, reincarnation, world religions, paganism, and tarot decks of cards. I felt strangely right at home and began to buy and read these books that were so much more interesting than the repetitive boring stuff I was being taught in college.
It was not too long before all this began to push me into an existential crisis in a couple of years. I had to quit college and try to figure out what life was really about, not what I had been told or been impressed upon by others. This was the late 60s and early 70s with a whole generation trying to break free and beginning to revisit the collective spiritual journey of the ages beginning with the shaman’s path toward enlightenment.
We moved beyond psychoactive drugs and the shamanistic traditions and experience inherent in Carlos Castaneda’s books to transcendental meditation, yoga and world religions. During this process many of us lost our way finding ourselves having been caught up, even ensnared in a materialistic culture that values everyday survival, raising families, pursuing wealth, power and privilege over others. A very few of us have managed to maintain our focus and concentration to approach and achieve spiritual enlightenment, at least to some degree.
In our early years psychoactive drugs, the powerful allies of shamans, were plentiful in the late 1960s and 1970s. Several doses over two or three years managed to blow up my preconceived notions of reality. I fell into a deep depression and existential crisis from this loss, but later I emerged a more complete and better person firmly on the path to enlightenment.
Since that time I have never become distracted or wavered and my intent grows ever stronger. I have pursued the mental and emotional housecleaning necessary to move into an existential state of being that is difficult to describe to others who do not experience it. Teachers all throughout history have had this same difficulty and have had to develop disciplines to inform others. It is only now as I near the end of this life that I feel capable of properly articulating in this book what I have learned.
INTRODUCTION
“We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, and we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop the internal talk.”
“To change our idea of the world is the crux of shamanism. And stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it.”
"When a warrior learns to stop the internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become attainable.” Don Juan Matus
Unless we make enlightenment a priority in our lives we are bound to suffer immensely. There is just no way around this fact and the sooner we get on with it the better for us and for humanity as a whole. Too many people live haphazard, depleted, stressed out lives of intermittent illusionary happiness and often great mental and emotional suffering. Simply lying to ourselves that we are happy and that we do not suffer just throws us into denial which makes our situation even more precarious and debilitating. We find our supply lines to our source quantum reality are pinched and overextended, keeping us fearful and afraid that we may suffocate or starve, losing everything.
One way to think about enlightenment is that of a diver in an ocean connected by an air hose and lifeline or a baby in a womb connected by an umbilical cord to its mother. What is in common in both cases is that both the baby and the diver exist and are protected and sustained within an environment in which they cannot normally survive separate from a greater reality. Oxygen, nutrients and the removal of waste are exchanged through the umbilical cord and the baby is carried within the mother’s body until such time as it can exist outside of her body on its own.
There is something very fundamental here that involves a projection of influence from one sphere of existence into another sphere of existence. It’s the same way for an expedition, or a military campaign into enemy territory that requires supply lines that if cut or broken, spell disaster and defeat. The shaman, the religious scholar and the consciousness researcher of today, are finding themselves in agreement in that our material existence is somehow being encompassed and being supported by a greater immaterial or quantum domain.
If too much of our attention becomes overly focused in either realm, the exchange or flow between the realms become constricted and damaging, even deadly to the individual or a society of individuals. What seems to be happening in Western societies is that the balance of the attention is focused on the material world resulting in a materialistic perspective and a restriction of information flow back and forth between the greater immaterial universe and the known physical universe. The result is a culture that supports mental, emotional and physical distress and suffering in the isolation from the greater whole. In Eastern societies, there can be too much attention to the universal realm which also is destructive in that the ability to survive in the physical world degrades from neglect.
The key to an understanding of the enlightenment process is to understand this balance of information flow between the lesser and greater reality in which one exists. In Western societies too much activity and focus on materialism result in an ever increasing internal dialogue and increasing levels of fear. The fear and internal dialogue are symptoms of separation isolating the individual or society from not only the greater reality, but the more limited one in which we are embedded. The internal dialogue is the incessant mental activity that keeps us awake at night thinking about one thing or another but continues both day and night.
In observing ourselves or others, we can see that where there is too much focus and activity in holographic reality, connectivity breaks down between the individual and environment. The result is that there is only a limited exchange of perceptual information between the person and his or her surroundings. Who has not seen mentally ill people on the street talking incessantly to themselves in situations where the internal dialogue has become so strong that these people have become mentally ill, isolated from both quantum and holographic reality?
The Culture Trap
We should note that this incessant, debilitating internal dialogue does not exist in isolation from the rest of our society and culture. It is connected to the internal dialogue of others in society. It tends to be a self-reinforcing destructive feedback loop throughout our culture driven by the inability of citizens to detach from culture. Detachment allows an individual to become selective as to involvement in those things that benefit him or her and separate from the destructive aspects of the society or culture. Those who have taken the path to enlightenment like the Buddha have had to detach from the society in which they were drowning only to reenter it more selectively.
So the opposite of an enlightened, perceptive state of mind is a state or degree of mental illness caused by separation from our existential roots and an over emersion in materialistic culture. The major symptom of the situation is too much mental dialogue, both in the individual and amongst all individuals. An enlightened individual, or one firmly on the path to enlightenment, is a person who has learned to slow down the mental dialogue through meditation, reflection and a relaxed rested lifestyle that allows for a strong perceptual and intuitive connection with reality. As the mental dialogue slows, fear, anxiety, depression, anger and frustration begin to dissipate.
We can think of the mental dialogue as a kind of waste product that accumulates over time from too much mental, emotional and physical activity in the material world. This waste product restricts the flow of information between the individual’s lesser and greater surroundings causing the person to mentally and emotionally wither away into mental illness if it is not removed. In fact, most people live with varying degrees of mental and emotional illness and consider this normal as long as they are still functional enough to raise a family or hold a job.
What happens to us as we become more and more isolated from our existential roots and trapped in our tyrannical mental dialogue? We usually end up in the criminal justice system, a mental ward, commit suicide or end up on the street being supported by a welfare agency if we are not of the privileged class. If we are in the privileged class we may even move up unchecked to the very apex of power in society acting as a danger to both ourselves and others. As psychopaths and sociopaths in such a capacity, we control essential resources, military and religious power and we may justify in a number of ways the murdering of millions of people for reasons of political expediency, religious intolerance and even prejudicial ethnic cleansing.
Tens of thousands of years ago shamans understood the need to slow or stop the mental dialogue for healing purposes and they discovered psychoactive drugs in plants that would do this. These drugs lead to a temporary trance state of greater connectedness between the greater and lesser embedded reality. Today’s scientists are proving scientifically this very same thing; that these drugs break down the separation between the conscious and subconscious mind and have mental healing properties.
The shamans learned that there were dangerous side effect limitations to these psychoactive drugs just as with other types of drugs that healed the body, so care in using them was important. Shamans also learned other techniques to slow or stop the mental dialogue like music, repetitive drumming, meditation etc. that have been developed and refined in ancient and modern religions and consciousness science.
However, I must stress the importance of living a lifestyle that supports the pursuit of enlightenment, one that has balance between rest and activity. The internal dialogue and excessive focus in the holographic realm seem to feed on each other in a kind of negative feedback loop. It’s the old, which came first the chicken or the egg concept, where excessive focus and stress on the holographic reality projection causes an increase in the internal dialogue which then causes more focus and stress in holographic reality.
So the key is to reverse this process and make it a healthy process of less focus and stress leading to a decrease in the internal dialogue etc. Even when one goes on a retreat, it’s good to just lie around and sleep the first couple of days before beginning intensive meditation practice. The reduction in stress and focus the first couple of days begins the reversal of the negative feedback to a positive one. This allows for the meditation to be more effective within the context of a more relaxed body and mind slowing the internal dialogue faster and easier as the body is more rested and relaxed.
I think a lot of our problems arise because of this increased focus on holographic reality not allowing enough hours in the day to process the information we gather. I suspect that this unprocessed information is a good part of the internal dialogue problem of separation from the greater quantum existential reality that surrounds and nourishes us every moment of our lives. It’s like we are living energy depleted lives always running on empty and in a state of crisis and this is also why spiritual teachers, especially shamans, place emphasis on building personal power and not being sapped by trivial things moment to moment, day to day. The emphasis it on a powerful intent of purpose to build power and use is wisely rather than wasting it like most people do on things that don’t really matter or that we cannot change.
Developing a balance between our material or holographic universe and the greater immaterial or quantum reality is no easy task. This is especially true because earth humanity is still so primitive and out of balance existentially, even as technology develops exponentially. Technology and power, today’s impotent materialistic gods, cannot bring us enlightenment and free us from mental and emotional suffering. Only self-knowledge and understanding can do that, along with a good dose of discipline and strong intent to become enlightened and free from suffering.
The road to enlightenment is long and hard and takes many lifetimes of hard work, but the suffering that comes from not being enlightened drives us forward into a more enlightened state of existence. We can fall into denial, scream and yell, become overcome by depression, anger and hate, lifetime after lifetime, even commit suicide, but there is no way to escape the forces that drive our individual and collective evolution forward using this simple system of reward and punishment. If we get things right we become happier and more content and if we don’t we suffer until we do. More often than not more suffering is necessary until we get it!
The Religion Trap
We all need a religion, a set of valid values, concepts and beliefs to be used as guidelines to living a good life, an enlightened life. However, these religious values and morality should not be imposed upon us as indoctrination by authority figures to be accepted without question. Unfortunately much human suffering is based on incorrect or errors in religious doctrine that actually hinder or suppress the process of enlightenment as a form of enslavement. These religious errors get passed down through unquestioned indoctrination for generations to be used as mind control by so called political and religious leaders whose unconscious or conscious intent is predatory rather than supportive of an individual’s search for enlightenment.
For this reason many people have become disillusioned by religion altogether and are apt to dump the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. I believe this is a serious mistake of judgment because we do need moral and ethical guidelines and an ability to learn from more advanced civilizations and beings than ourselves.
I also believe I have had advanced beings intercede in my life when asked for and when they were most needed. I feel very strongly that I was and am being guided out of the morass of despair and suffering, something that would be impossible or very difficult to do on my own. Sure if we are lost and if we work at it long enough on our own, we may get lucky if we don’t die for lack of water or starvation in the process, but how much simpler it is to meet and be guided by someone who is familiar with the terrain we are lost in and furnish us with maps.
There is plenty of evidence and witness testimony as to the existence of more advanced intelligences willing to help a fellow traveller on the path when it is necessary, but not to incur dependency. Its best to teach a man to fish than feed him for a lifetime and more advanced beings abide by this concept. On the other hand it is a mistake again to deny this reality of advanced intelligences just because some folks may be fooling themselves by following imaginary advanced intelligences as part of their unquestioned religious upbringing and indoctrination. Yet even here more advanced intelligences don’t seem to mind impersonating these imaginary intelligences as a means to work with those in lower consciousness states.
It becomes even more problematic and dangerous for the unwary and uneducated religious seekers when religious con artists work their way into leadership positions in all religions and use their positions to prey upon people rather than guide them to enlightenment. In my opinion world religions have become havens for corrupt and self-centered individuals over many generations so as to make them almost useless.
My thinking is that each individual needs to build his or her own individualized religion based on factual evidence and useful information gathered from world religious culture disregarding the dross. I think we need to get away from this one size fits all in regards to religion realizing that each individual is unique. What is needed is an individualized customized religion for each individual suitable to individual needs and consciousness. This is part of the process of taking responsibility for one’s life away from collective consciousness as indicated by moving above 200 on the Hawkins consciousness scale. One must take personal responsibility for one’s religion, politics, finances etc. and not blindly follow predators only to blame them for the suffering eventually incurred.
I believe it is a mistake to think of oneself as a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or faction thereof but rather one should say, I find value in one or more of these religions, but I am a free and independent individual where no religion or politics owns me. I believe it’s the same for other fields such as politics. When we identify too much with any doctrine we become enslaved by it and when doctrines collide we find ourselves killing each other in the name of a particular religion or political doctrine. This is all lower consciousness thinking and acting and we must rise above this foolishness if we are to enlighten ourselves and end our suffering from wrong thought and wrong action.
Religious traps and snares aside, let us move to build our own religious doctrine and model of reality starting with the very basic concept that life is a process, a journey and a school. As we move forward in the enlightenment process, let’s study the evidence, the very factual information and concepts that support these higher consciousness enabling concepts and ideas.
We should also in the process remind ourselves of our own conscious and unconscious bias in our search for enlightenment. I thought Sylvia Cranston in her book Reincarnation, The Phoenix Fire Mystery, articulated this bias problem very well.
“Tough-minded thinkers are apt to maintain that all theories of immortality should be dismissed as comforting illusions projected by wishful thinking. Obviously, where reincarnation is concerned, if someone believes in it simply because he or she wants to come back, that does not make it true. However, if another, weary and bitterly disillusioned with life, says, “What, one more round? Never!” that does not make it false. Furthermore, the latter person may understandably resent the thought that the vicissitudes presently experienced result from his own actions in a prior existence, and that the misdeeds of this life must be paid for in lives to come. The Christian fundamentalist has his bias too: He prefers an everlasting stay in heaven to the painstaking work of going on with the evolutionary process.”
We can’t just ignore other knowledge and perspective trapped through our internal dialogue to our individual perspectives of science, religion or shamanism. We have to step out into the unknown every moment of every day and try to free ourselves of our bias by engaging and experiencing others in their shoes rather than our own. As I have stated previously there are many ways to break loose and expand our consciousness beyond our current limits with the study of reincarnational and NDE doctrine, science, meditation, extraterrestrial contact and even psychoactive drugs.
One of the most powerful and dangerous tools in a shamans toolbox are the use of psychoactive drugs on their students. I am just beginning to appreciate why shamans past and present have had to resort to the use of these mind altering drugs on students trapped and held hostage by overly strong cultural beliefs or other insurmountable issues. From personal observation I see where people get to a certain point in their spiritual and psychological evolution and then get stuck in some strong belief, fear, materialism or other issue for the rest of their lives.
Shamans are repositories of tribal wisdom and knowledge and as hunter-gathers the tribe learns through trial and error which foods are good to eat and which ones are poisonous. In this process of feeding off the land, people also ate some foods like mushrooms that had this psychoactive mind altering effect and this did not go unnoticed by shaman healers who used plants and fungi to heal the body and the mind. They also knew that these psychoactive drugs were dangerous in that they could cause dangerous irrational actions as well as loss of identity and as such were not to be used indiscriminately. The article How Psychedelics Saved My Life potently expresses the value of psychoactive substances in the hands of capable practitioners. [3]
“Ayahuasca is a medicinal tea that contains the psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The brew is rapidly spreading around the world after numerous anecdotes have shown the brew has the power to cure anxiety, PTSD, depression, unexplained pain, and numerous physical and mental health ailments. Studies of long-term ayahuasca drinkers show they are less likely to face addictions and have elevated levels of serotonin the neurotransmitter responsible for happiness.
If I had any reservations, doubts, or disbeliefs, they were quickly expelled shortly after my first ayahuasca experience. The foul-tasting tea vibrated through my veins and into my brain as the medicine scanned my body. My field of vision became engulfed with fierce colors and geometric patterns. Almost instantly, I saw a vision of a brick wall. The word ‘anxiety’ was spray painted in large letters on the wall. “You must heal your anxiety,” the medicine whispered. I entered a dream-like state where traumatic memories were finally dislodged from my subconscious.
It was as if I was viewing a film of my entire life, not as the emotional me, but as an objective observer. The vividly introspective movie played in my mind as I relived my most painful scenes - my parents’ divorce when I was just 4 years-old, past relationships, being shot at by police while photographing a protest in Anaheim and crushed underneath a crowd while photographing a protest in Chicago. The ayahuasca enabled me to reprocess these events, detaching the fear and emotion from the memories. The experience was akin to ten years of therapy in one eight-hour ayahuasca session.”
Sometime people just need something to grease the skids of their mental machinery but no more. From there on mental, emotional and physical discipline should carry the day as it was known that psychoactive drugs could only open up the doors to perception and spiritual understanding. Any more use could and would be self-defeating as to incur dependency and or mental and emotional disintegration even insanity. The objective is to skate that consciousness boundary between materialistic over identification and insanity opening up the subconscious quantum reality using more disciplined controllable tools like meditation, yoga, dreams etc.
Once we become open to the greater universe in which our materialistic universe is imbedded, we begin to see our life as like a book, with a beginning, middle and end. Each life is as one pearl on a string of pearls that make up a necklace with that necklace a link in an even greater chain to infinity. We begin our life like the first card of the Tarot Deck represented by the fool, the ignorant one, who is so ignorant that he or she does not even know that he or she does not know. Then we proceed through the middle of our life gaining experience as represented by more cards in the Tarot Deck. At the end of our lives comes the time to pass on what we have learned for the benefit of generations to come. For me this is to write down in my legacy series of books what I have learned in this life.
Finally we come to the end of our life and end up with the world card; the cumulative effect of not only this life but previous lives as well. Many there are that begin this long hard road to enlightenment, but few will reach the world card in this life. Sooner or later in more lives to come they will, but it’s just a matter of time till the need to alleviate suffering and find true love and happiness drives a person to enlightenment.
Each life is a step in the direction of enlightenment with each person having their own unique pace and lessons to learn that only they can come to know and understand. With wisdom comes the realization that we should not judge people too harshly, because they are exactly where they should be learning their own self specific lessons.
On the other hand we can’t allow others to prey upon us either in a parasitic way by slowing covertly draining our personal power, or overtly manipulating even to enslave us. Nature is full of predator-prey relationships and so is human society. But as a counterbalance there is also sharing and win-win relationships in nature and human society and these we learn to cultivate. By so doing we and others grow in love, wisdom and understanding, becoming better individuals and a better society.
It is my intention in the beginning of this book to travel back in time to find our collective spiritual-immaterial roots by inquiring into the shaman’s tribal world. It was here that the search for meaning and personal freedom began tens of thousands of years ago, maybe even hundreds of thousands of year ago. Because both our material and spiritual lives are a reflection of our culture, our collective experience passed down from generation to generation, it is important to understand our history.
Once we gain some understanding of our earliest shaman roots we can move forward in time to where the shamanic teachings evolve as society evolves into the early religious teachings still being impacted by our collective experiences involving reincarnation, OBE, NDE and extraterrestrial contact. Finally toward the end of the book we arrive in the present where science and the world religions Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and the Muslim religions predominate and compete with one another.
Once we gain in understanding of our history we can use that knowledge and understanding to gain insights into our personal and collective present. A present that while more complex and sophisticated than our past, is nevertheless still driven by the same simple fundamental forces or laws that affected us in simpler times. Once we understand these fundamental principles guiding and influencing even manipulating our lives, we can then use this knowledge and wisdom to gain more influence and control over our lives for the better.
It’s important to understand that tribal society is and was being influenced by the same environmental and spiritual forces as our complex global society of today. What has changed is that because of our individual and collective experience we can better define and clarify through scientific disciplines what our material and immaterial reality is and how it came into existence. These new scientific concepts have been well articulated in the article Proof That the Human Body is a Projection of Consciousness. [4]
“The thing is the quantum level of reality isn’t a local and insignificant aspect of creation. It is all around us, and it is the most fundamental level of creation aside from the unified field itself. The human energy field is interacting and influencing the quantum field all around us at all times and the energy of our beliefs and intentions are infused into our energy field because they are defined by the energy of our thoughts and emotions.
Thus the fusion of our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and intentions, which I will call the human energy field for simplicity’s sake, is perpetually informing the quantum reality within us and around us at each moment of our existence.
And because reality is flashing in and out of existence (hypothetically at Planck time – 1044 times per second – as explained by The Resonance Project biophysicist William Brown), every time our reality oscillates between form, and the pure energy state of the field, our awareness which is constant and doesn’t flash in and out of existence informs the field what to reappear as when it makes its transition back to form at the quantum level.”
While science has evolved far beyond the simple inquiry of tribal society we nevertheless have and act in a much more tribal way than we are prepared to admit to ourselves. The tribe has not disappeared as its remnants are strong still in the undeveloped world and pervade our global society as well. In writing the book Fire in Nature I realized that some of the most simple plants and animals going back hundreds of millions of years are still with us today flourishing in environmental niches among much more complex organisms.
For instance, we have about two and a half pounds of bacteria essential to our digestion surviving and flourishing in our gut. In our forests we have the same lichens going back over 500 million years that once broke down rock into soil now growing on the trunks of large trees. Because man is part of nature he and human society evolve as part of nature in the same way as other organisms. One of the most important insights about life is that all is interconnected so that what influences one aspect of society or nature has a cascading effect across the whole of society or nature.
Tribal society like today’s society is composed fundamentally and organized around a small privileged affluent class of people who exercise enormous political and spiritual power over the lower classes for the benefit of themselves. This fundamentally tribal autocratic structure works best in more “primitive” societies; but as society becomes more complex and sophisticated, serious organizational flaws become apparent causing an endless cycle of creation and disintegration of civilizations best symbolized by the proverbial Phoenix that sows the seeds of its own destruction and renewal in its life.
In tribal society past and present we have several fundamentally different types of people. The chief and his family council govern the political aspects of tribal society while the shaman resides over the spiritual aspects of the tribe. We also have the trader who accumulates wealth evolving into the banking institutions of today as the financier and banker. The hunter-farmer-producer of the past evolves into huge international production corporate monopolies of today. In addition the feudal worker or slave in tribal society evolves into the wage slave of large multinational corporations and world governments.
In another book (maybe called The New World Order – Disorder) on international and national politics, we will follow these other types of people and groups as they evolve. In this book, I will concentrate on the shaman or spiritual practitioner as he or she evolves into the religion and science of today.
In the case of the shaman, we can see that the shaman and tribal life are not only being impacted by the more material aspects of a holographic universe, but also by the more immaterial aspects of what has become known as quantum reality. Out of Body (OBE), Near Death Experiences (NDE), dreams and UFO experiences are not unique to our time but are an inherent part of our history. It’s easy for us to get caught in the provincial trap of a too narrow focus on the immediate aspects of our lives ignoring the more substantial, less obvious aspects of quantum reality that also have a great impact on our lives.
As we move from shamanism to more complex religions and modern science we can see that these fundamental experiences shape and mold our more complex institutions of religion and science just as with shamans of yesterday. I have covered extraterrestrial contact well in my previous book UFOs Exopolitics and the New World Disorder but not these other areas impacting on individual human and collective consciousness.
Sufficient to say that cases of extraterrestrial contact go back to the beginnings of recorded history as other stellar civilizations come to earth and impact not only our politics but our religions. Hinduism gives a very early comprehensive account on extraterrestrial contact influencing earth politics and religion that continues into the Christian teachings and even the Muslim religion. While Buddhists believe in life on other worlds I was surprised to find a rare account show up on my Facebook feed the other day that I would like to share here. In the article Buddhist Master Describes UFO Sighting in 1884 is this account: [5]
“Chan is often described as Chinese Zen Buddhism, of which Hsu Yun was one of the most influential Buddhist masters. He is believed to have lived for 119 years. He was born in 1840, and died in 1959. Online you can find a pictorial biography of the life on Master Hsu Yun, and also his autobiography, titled Empty Cloud (the UFO sighting is on pages 47 and 48 of this pdf).”
“I climbed the Da-luo Peak, where I paid reverence to the ‘wisdom lamps’ said to appear there. I saw nothing the first night but on the second, I saw a great ball of light flying from the Northern to the Central Peak, where it came down, splitting a short while later into over ten balls of different sizes. The same night, I saw on the Central Peak three balls of light flying up and down in the air and on the Northern Peak, four balls of light which varied in size.”
“The Master bowed to the Wisdom Lamps on top of Ta Lo Mountain. People often came to this spot to witness what fortune they might. At first there was nothing unusual, but then they all appeared: “Large ones, small ones, and in between – each fireball was unique.””
But wait, it gets even better for all you Buddhists. J Here is a second article that showed up on my Facebook news feed about the same time called A Description of an Alien Visit in the Buddhist Lotus Sutra: [6]
“The Buddhist scripture called Saddharma Pundarika or the Lotus of the True Law was first written circa 300 A.D. (Note that the word “Sutra” means “scripture.”) The exact date of the original Sanskrit version from India is not known with certainty, but the first Chinese translation was made sometime between 265 and 315 A.D. Buddha himself was born in 563 BC, so the Lotus Sutra was obviously written by Buddhist monks around eight centuries after his death.”
“As background before proceeding, Buddhist cosmology is surprisingly modern. Buddhism recognizes the existence of millions of other worlds and casually asserts that they are inhabited. Indeed, each inhabited world is stated to have a Buddha of its own. (The word “Buddha” means an enlightened being. In Buddhist teachings, anyone is theoretically capable of becoming a Buddha, although actually accomplishing this goal is rare.) One Buddhist scripture mentions in passing that on earth sermons are given with words, but on other worlds sermons may be given with light or with scents or by other non-verbal means.”
“Buddhist cosmology also overlaps modern quantum theory, in that the Buddhists think that the void or emptiness is the source of both material objects and energy. As in quantum theory, particles can flash into existence from the void. The fact that material objects are constructed from millions of small particles is also part of Buddhist teaching. A central teaching of Buddhist philosophy is that all objects composed of such particles are fated to decay. This entropy or decay applies to living creatures, material objects, and the universe itself. Since Buddhist cosmology dates back prior to 525 BC, it is interesting that there are so many similarities between Buddhist cosmology and modern cosmology.”
“Chapter 23 of the Lotus Sutra is entitled “Gadgadasvara” and begins on page 393 of the Dover edition. Because the original 1884 translation uses many Indian names and very long titles (such as a distant world called “Vairokanarasmipratimandita.”) I will paraphrase the section that deals with a visit by an alien from another world. In Chapter 23, when the terrestrial Buddha was about to give a sermon, he darted a flash of light from a circle between his brows. This flash of light was seen on other worlds, including the one with the very long name cited in the previous paragraph.”
“On this other world the resident Buddha (who also has a very long name) perceived the ray of light from earth. One of his students, named Gadgadasvara, also sees the ray of light and realized what it meant, i.e. that the Buddha on this world was about to give an important sermon. The student asks his master for permission to visit earth and listen to the sermon of Sakyamuni, the terrestrial Buddha. Permission is granted, but the master gives Gadgadasvara some interesting cautions about what to expect on earth:
“On coming to earth you must not conceive a low opinion of it. The earthly Buddha Lord Sakyamuni will seem small compared to you, as are his disciples. He looks different from us and he and his followers will seem to be ugly, so do not behave rudely. The earth itself has parts that are ugly like sewers, so do not form a low opinion of it.” (It is rather surprising that a Buddhist religious text would describe the historical Buddha as being “small and ugly.” In fact as a young man the historical Buddha was described by many eye witnesses as being athletic and comely. Even at an advanced age Buddha was described as having good posture and a face that reflected wisdom, a benevolent nature, and peacefulness. Of course from the point of view of an alien, it is hard to say what the surface appearance of a human would look like.)
At this point in chapter 23, Gadgadasvara enters a deep meditation and then appears psychically on earth before Sakyamuni and his students. One of the earthly students, Manjusri, asks about this mental appearance. Sakyamuni replies that the visitor is a student from another world. Manjusri asks if he can learn the same kind of meditation used to travel between worlds. Manjusri also asks if Gadgadasvara can come in person, because he wants to see what he looks like.
Gadgadasvara agrees, and comes to earth in physical form “accompanied by the noise of hundreds of thousands of musical instruments.” He arrived by moving through the sky on a “large tower.” Once he arrived, his appearance on earth was described as follows: “His face showed eyes resembling blue lotuses, his body was gold colored…and sparkled with a luster.”
Upon arrival Gadgadasvara has a curious but polite conversation with Sakyamuni. He inquires about this world and about terrestrial students. Gadgadasvara expresses hope that earthly students are not too troublesome or too difficult to instruct. This is an interesting conversation because it deals casually with the topic that every inhabited world will have students and teachers and that the students on some worlds may be easier to teach than students on other worlds.
Sakyamuni asks Gadgadasvara to show the earthly students his true shape and body which he does. But Sakyamuni also points out that Gadgadasvara has the ability to assume many different forms and to take on many other appearances if he wishes to do so. Gadgadasvara listens to Sakyamuni’s sermon, and then gives a polite “goodbye” to the terrestrial Buddha and returns to his own world: “he again mounted the tower and with the noise of hundreds of thousands of musical instruments he returned to his own world.””
All this is very consistent with the cases I published in UFOs Exopolitics and the New World Disorder where the search for enlightenment is not only being impacted by extraterrestrial teachings on this world but is ongoing on other worlds as well. The same can be said for OBE and NDE cases as powerful drivers toward enlightenment. Like UFO cases, OBE and NDE cases are much more widespread than most people realize and have been impacting humanity throughout our existence from the shaman of both past and present, to the consciousness scientist of today. Don Miguel Ruiz a modern day shaman wrote on the cover jacket of his book The Mastery of Love:
“Don Miguel Ruiz was born into a family of healers, and raised in rural Mexico by a curandera (healer) mother and a nagual (shaman) grandfather. The family anticipated that Miguel would embrace their centuries-old legacy of healing and teaching, and carry forward the esoteric Toltec knowledge. Instead, distracted by modern life, Miguel chose to attend medical school and become a surgeon.
A near-death experience changed his life. Late one night in the early 1970s, he awoke suddenly, having fallen asleep at the wheel of his car. At that instant the car careened into a wall of concrete. Don Miguel remembers that he was not in his physical body as he watched himself pull his two friends to safety.
Stunned by this experience, he began an intensive practice of self-inquiry. He devoted himself to the mastery of the ancient ancestral wisdom, studying earnestly with his mother, and completing an apprenticeship with a powerful shaman in the Mexican desert. His grandfather, who had since passed on, continued to teach him in his dreams.
Don Miguel Ruiz, a nagual from the Eagle Knight linage, is dedicated to sharing his knowledge of the teachings of the ancient Toltec. He lives in San Diego, California.”
The important thing to realize is that the overall reality impacting upon our consciousness is the same today as it was hundreds of thousands of years ago. What is changing is that as we and our civilization evolve, we become more refined and sophisticated in how we perceive and shape ourselves and our world. This is true for our search for enlightenment as well. The shaman, healer of mind, body and spirit is still alive and well in today’s world adapting and changing with the times even as our religious and scientific search for enlightenment becomes more refined and sophisticated.
Lichens and mosses once broke down the rocks to form the soil for more evolved plants hundreds of millions of years ago. They are still here flourishing in our modern world finding new niches on the trunks of trees and on the concrete of buildings. It’s the same for the so called more “primitive” religions, they are still here and thriving and useful just as single celled organisms now continue to thrive not only in our oceans, but even in our guts digesting our food for us.
Humanity’s search for enlightenment began long ago and continues into the present and into the future. In order to best understand enlightenment, we can work our way forward through history following natural pathways, the same way that new creatures are formed recapitulating the past history of life on earth in the womb of their mothers. After all it would appear that past, present and future exist simultaneously, or it's just that we experience them in our illusionary consciousness state as separate.
THE LONG HARD ROAD
(FROM SHAMANISM
TO QUANTUM PHYSICS)
Written and compiled by Ed Komarek
SHOESTRING PUBLISHING
Copyright by Ed Komarek
3301 Hwy 93 South, Cairo Georgia, 39828
ISBN: - 13:9781506014487
In this book, a significant amount of the content is compiled by the author, but is not the property of the author. So the author and Shoestring Publishing can only claim copyright on the writings of Ed Komarek. Anyone wishing to use material from these other authors need to contact these authors and seek permission, especially material that is under copyright protection. Shoestring Publishing and Ed Komarek have made a good faith attempt to find and seek permission to reprint material, especially information that does not fall under the fair use laws and is copyrighted by the authors.
The Long Hard Road to Enlightenment is the third in a series of books written by Ed Komarek to summarize the knowledge and wisdom gained during his lifetime so that others may build on his work as he as built on the good works of others. The first book written is UFOs Exopolitics and the New World Disorder that is available to be read for free or as a PDF download on its website. [1] Fire in Nature, A Fire Activist’s Guide is also available to be read on its website. [2] The hard copy and the Kindle edition of all three books can be purchased from Amazon with wholesale copies available from Createspace Publishing. To reach Ed, please contact him by email [email protected] or by Facebook message.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ash Staunton has created the excellent book design and cover for this book which is very much appreciated. I would also like to thank my friends Thomas Reeves and Jeffrey Bivins for helping me edit this book.
NOTE TO READERS
The source material for this book is referenced using footnote links for those reading this book free on the Internet at its website URL. Ed Komarek can be contacted on Facebook message, or email at: [email protected]
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to all those who have come before and upon whose good works I have built my life. I am also fortunate to have so many good supportive friends in this life that have helped me so much along the way. I especially want to thank Spomenka Vasic (Siddhani) for her loving support toward this book in particular even while away living on the other side of the world. Truly love knows no limits, be we together in person or have to communicate through the Internet.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One - The Fool’s Journey
(Culture & Lifestyle)
Chapter Two - Life is a School
(Life a Loving-Brutal Taskmaster)
Chapter Three - The Big Picture
(Reincarnation, Drugs, OBE, NDE & ET Contact)
Chapter Four - Evolution of Religion
(From Shamanism to Quantum Science)
Chapter Five - Consciousness Science
(Energy, Matter and Consciousness)
Chapter Six – Personalization of Religion
(One Size Does Not Fit All
PREFACE
“Those shamans had another cognitive unit called the wheel of time. The way they explained the wheel of time was to say that time was like a tunnel of infinite length and width, a tunnel with reflective furrows. Every furrow was infinite, and there were infinite numbers of them. Living creatures were compulsorily made, by the force of life, to gaze into one furrow. To gaze into one furrow alone, meant to be trapped by it, to live that furrow.
A warrior’s final aim is to focus, though an act of profound discipline, his unwavering attention on the wheel of time in order to make it turn. Warriors who have succeeded in turning the wheel of time can gaze into any furrow and draw from it whatever they desire. To be free from the spellbinding force of gazing into only one of those furrows means that warriors can look in either direction: as time retreats or as it advances on them. Viewed in this manner, the wheel of time is an overpowering influence which reaches through the life of the warrior and beyond.” Carlos Castaneda
I was raised in a family of early ecologists who mentored me in ecology and fire ecology hoping that I would follow in their footsteps. I went to college at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks majoring in wildlife management. I was disappointed after a year in a local junior college and two years at the University of Alaska that I was still struggling under a load of classes with little do with wildlife management. In three years I had taken not a single course on wildlife management. I had, however, been working for Alaska Department of Fish and Game in the summers and even co-authored the first scientific paper on the Fish of the North Slope of Alaska in the early 1970s. I was mainly responsible for the field work for this paper.
Little did I realize when I first began college that my life’s direction would soon change and that I would give enlightenment top priority in my life and develop a lifelong interest in the paranormal. A chance encounter with a small metaphysical bookstore in downtown Fairbanks amongst the bars and shops led to an existential crisis in my life that resulted in me quitting college to try to understand myself and figure out what was life really about.
Looking back on my life in old age, I now realize that context gives meaning to content and the greatest and most accurate context makes sense out of life complexities. Context (perspective) provides a model or roadmap showing us where we are, where we want to go and how to get there. Just as we are lost in the forest without a map showing us where we are and where we want to go, so we are lost in life without a comprehensive and accurate map or model. Most people live their lives with very limited context to guide their thoughts and actions. I see so many people madly painting content on life’s canvas without much perspective and so it’s no wonder that their lives are such a mess.
Most people just play the cards to which they are dealt, deal with situations as they arise, acting and reacting to stimuli moment to moment day to day. Folks rarely think about who is dealing the cards, or what the cards really mean, or heaven forbid, question the nature of the game itself or even see and choose alternative games and lessons. Yet, sooner or later this life or the next, this evolutionary system driven by rewards and punishments will put everyone on the path to enlightenment following in the footsteps of those who have traveled this path before.
Our lives are chock full of illusions and delusions created by limited perspective. On a simple scale we can see that the sun rises in the east, travels across the sky and sets in the west. For hundreds of thousands of years people experienced this illusion that earth was central to the cosmos where the earth was still and the heavens moved.
Folks were able to go about their lives experiencing seemly no ill effects from this perceptual illusion until modern times, except perhaps religious and spiritual people. Even then it was those that saw through the illusion that were threatened and burned at the stake for speaking the heresy that the earth was not the center of God’s universe. Most people now realize the truth of the earth spinning contrary to common sense direct perception and much of our modern technology like space travel is dependent on having broken this illusion and knowing this truth.
Some of us believe that we are on the verge of a second Copernican revolution and are even now in the process of destroying the illusion that we humans are alone and central to the universe. We are finding that all intelligence in the universe does not revolve around us nor that consciousness arises out of matter but rather matter arises out of consciousness. Just as the Copernican Revolution had very profound and revolutionary effects on all aspects of our society, the Consciousness Revolution will have profound effects on future generations and most profoundly on our spiritual development being retarded by materialistic illusions.
By the same token, a long time ago, people thought the world was flat because that was what they observed every day, yet with a greater context or perspective, they were shown that in fact the world was round. Simple ship navigation worked fine under this illusion, but more complex navigation from the 1400s onward required the true understanding that the world was round and spinning on its axis.
Wise men for thousands of years have been debating if consciousness arises out of matter or matter out of consciousness. As it turns out, empirical understanding from NDEs (Near Death Experiences), reincarnation and meditative techniques is now being quantified by modern science which is close to proving that materialistic perspective itself is just another illusion. It is also true that the materialistic perspective illusion-delusion has led to great advancements in the material aspects of our collective lives but failed miserably in supporting true love and happiness. So many of us chase after the pot of promised gold at the end of the materialistic rainbow all our lives, only to be disappointed when the rainbow always stays far ahead of them no matter how fast they run.
While the shaman illustrates this greater perspective as the wheel of time and the need to break out of the limited illusionary perspective of only one groove on the wheel, world teachers through history have picked up the ball and continued to stress the importance to be in the world, but not of it! There is a general tendency to concentrate our attention and our lives in our own limited set, or on our limited part of the stage and ignore or downplay what lies beyond this limited illusionary perspective. This is one of the greatest mistakes we make and it brings great suffering down on us.
We may become so focused and captured by the drama and unfolding events of our lives so as to admire those who work hard onstage even as they rush about in circles creating more suffering for themselves and others. It is a great mistake to ignore the fact that hard work is not enough and has little value without perspective. Brush strokes on canvas mean little unless one is able to stand back for the perspective to guide the brushstrokes accurately. It’s not easy to convince an active person that activity can be a trap and that adequate perspective gives meaning to action. Often, active people think meditative, contemplative people are just lazy when in fact just the opposite may be the case. Anyone who has tried meditation knows just how difficult it is to calm the mental dialogue to enter higher states of consciousness.
It is my intention that this book be evidence based as are my two previous books. Just because somebody says something is true does not make it true, even if it comes from a respected religious, political or even scientific authority figure. One of the problems I have noticed in this life is that people have a difficult time discerning what is true from what is false and this causes much confusion and suffering in their lives. Simply repeating a lie over and over can manipulate and control the minds and bodies of others, but this does not make the lie true or liberating. In this case too, discrimination requires not only accurate information gathering and analysis, but accurate greater perspective as well
Fortunately I was brought up by scientists with a good understanding of the scientific method. The scientific method is a form of inquiry in which one observes, collects and studies evidence and from there one develops concepts and theories to be tested toward a functioning model of the reality that is useful and effective. I firmly believe this form of inquiry has merit and is superior to other forms of inquiry such as those that simply accept a concept or belief through repetition of lies and indoctrination in general. Those that are unable to question authority, observe and collect evidence and think for themselves are doomed to be slaves to authority having their thinking done by rulers at their expense.
I see so many people struggling and suffering in denial throughout life trying to force the evidence to validate the concept or belief to which they have been indoctrinated by authority figures in their lives be it parents, church, political or scientific leaders. I suppose one can even make the case that indoctrination is not a form of inquiry at all, but brainwashing in which the victims perpetrate the indoctrination of false concepts through generations, enslaving and brutalizing not only themselves but their children.
So in this book as with my other books I intend to back up the concepts of enlightenment with evidence. There is a huge body of evidence based on witness testimony that has accumulated over generations even thousands of years through all cultures. This evidence supports the doctrine of reincarnation including life after the death of the body and that we are in fact eternal beings that evolve toward enlightenment through innumerable lifetimes of toil, tribulation and suffering until we get it right.
Life is like learning to play the violin with terrible brutal screeches and squawks, until we can play life with true joy, love and happiness. Today many scientists and consciousness researchers are validating this huge body of witness testimony from reincarnation, NDEs, psychoactive drugs and meditation just as have our ancestors before us. They are in the process of proving that all matter, energy and life itself, evolve out of consciousness rather than the other way around. In other words, materialistic doctrine is just another case of viewing the world from a limited perspective with the result being the experience of an illusion as real rather than a true reality.
Thanks to consciousness researchers and religious leaders, we have many rough roadmaps or models inherent in scientific and religious doctrines that we can use to guide us through life allowing us to see where we and others are on the road to enlightenment and how best to proceed further. For instance, David Hawkins provides a useful scale or map of consciousness that stands out. I believe I encountered his map or scale of consciousness as a young man from a reincarnational specialist that came to Fairbanks Alaska to lecture on reincarnation. When I got a reading from her there was this enlightenment rating system from one to a thousand in which I was placed around 380. I had no idea at the time where this rating system had come from, but recently now at the end of my life, I was introduced to David Hawkins’ work by a friend and I believe it may be the same system.
Hawkins places humanity on average at a little over 200 on his scale, the point where he believes individuals begin to do more good than harm to themselves and others. Hawkins points out that this level 200 presents a major challenge where in order to move onward one has to stop blaming external forces, situations and people and take full responsibility for the situations one gets oneself in. It takes a lot of courage to break this barrier and he rightly calls this level “courage”.
I believe it is the suffering that occurs below the 200 level that essentially drives the process of individual evolution forward in an unconscious manner until the individual consciously takes the imitative toward a brighter future for themselves and humanity. Life is painful and really makes little sense to a person below the 200 level and no amount of deception and self-deception will alter this reality.
Above the 200 level the individual begins to understand that life is a journey and a school and that evolution is driven by a simple carrot-stick manipulative mechanism. Of course this concept in not new and has been around for thousands of years, especially in the East. If you refuse to learn the lessons being presented to you on a daily basis you suffer. If you learn, then you gain in love, joy and happiness. Hawkins also points out that the 500 level presents the second major hurdle where one must realize that all are learning at their own rate and in their own time. At this point we develop tolerance and quit judging others by our standards developing love and compassion for others no matter how screwed up they are.
When we realize this fact we no longer judge the experience and mistakes of others. We realize that all is unfolding as it should with different people learning at different levels. Still, this does not mean that one does not avoid or defend against the predator tactics of those suffering and living in lower states of consciousness. It’s just that we accept the right of others to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes just as we do also.
We protect ourselves while existing in a state of unconditional love and compassion, rather than as in the lower consciousness states by exhibiting destructive anger and hatred in the face of predation. We learn to deal with both human predators and prey just as we do with natural predators and prey in a loving compassionate manner. It’s important to understand at the 500 level that we see that it’s the very nature of those that suffer to harm themselves and others. It’s part of their lessons to be learned. This is an inherent natural process in nature and in man. As the suffering diminishes above the 200 level, individuals harm themselves and others less and help themselves and others more. It becomes the responsibility of the more evolved to reach out and assist where possible, but at the same time avoid being drawn back down the scale of consciousness into harm’s way.
I intend to get into the Hawkins scale in more detail later in this book and will just present the scale here and later we will come back to it from time to time as we proceed further into the book to explain how Hawkins arrived at this scale and how he uses reflexology to test and validate it. For now let’s just use it as a guide and just by looking at it we can pretty much determine where we are on the scale and where we want to go. The Hawkins scale or map of consciousness in brief:
“•20:Shame •30:Guilt •50:Apathy •75:Grief •100:Fear •125:Desire •150:Anger •175:Pride •200: Courage •250: Neutrality •310: Willingness •350: Acceptance •400: Reason •500: Love •540: Joy •600: Peace •700-1000: Enlightenment”
I think for many people psychological suffering and the corresponding destructive emotions will just seem as normal day to day experiences. However, as we will show throughout this book, the reality is that this is not normal or healthy. Instead these states and emotions are abnormal and unhealthy to the individual and society when viewed from higher states of consciousness. As I have shown in my Exopolitics book, there is a large amount of evidence that other stellar and planetary civilizations average much higher on this scale than earthly humanity and that we are evolving to their level.
The more advanced beings tell the contact people that we are quite primitive in our evolutionary development and that we still have a lot to learn from the school of hard knocks before we are ready to move our civilization into higher states of consciousness. As to the reality of extraterrestrial contact, polls have shown that about one in ten people claim to have seen a UFO about the same as those that claim to have had a Near Death Experience (NDE) or Out of Body Experience (OBE).
Looking back on my life I see now what happened to me with my existential crisis in my early twenties was exactly as described in the above quote by Carlos Castaneda at the beginning of the preface. The ecologist groove in the wheel of time into which I was born was not enough. I had to experience more and more accurate and greater context. There had to be more! In order to make this move, unconscious forces (karma) reacted to my struggling intent drawing me in my early twenties to the psychoactive drugs that temporarily stopped the internal dialogue that kept me stuck in that one groove on the wheel of time. The drugs broke me free to begin an exploration of those other grooves in the wheel of time through yoga discipline and meditation.
Interestingly, just before inserting this quote and these comments into this text, in typical synchronistic fashion, I found myself watching a mama turkey and her two chicks feeding in the field next to my camp-house in North Carolina. This support from the greater reality in response to my intent has become so common in my life that often I hardly notice these effects, but they are very much a part of my life and the writing of my books.
Suddenly through love and empathy of that turkey, I became her for a moment, alert and very perceptive of my surroundings looking out for danger that could appear at any moment for me and my chicks. I had been practicing slowing my internal dialogue to better work on this book, but it apparently prepared me for this unconscious shift of awareness into that of the turkey to illustrate this commentary.
As the turkey, I had no internal dialogue just an acute alertness and a constant preparedness to flee, protect my chicks and to feed. This turkey has become tame over the years knowing that I will do no harm and exists in one of those infinite groves in the wheel of time. I now understand how and why shamans move out of their normal awareness to perceptually experience other animals, beings or realities in this wheel of time.
I came out of this existential crisis a much different and wiser person several years later with whole new existential realities opening up before me that I could explore now without the use of psychoactive drugs. Looking back, I realize that this very difficult existential crisis that immersed me far below 200 on the Hawkins scale for two or three years was just the rough beginning of my personal journey to enlightenment that has slowly smoothed out over the years. Still, I have no illusions as to the fact that in lives to come I could easily fall back down the scale of consciousness until I can properly orient myself in these future lives.
Right after what I believe was an encounter with three advanced intelligences, knowing that there was much more to reality and using techniques of good mental and emotional health, I propelled myself through the 200 barrier never to hopefully return, at least in this life. In old age I now realize that my personal journey was and is a recapitulation of a collective societal journey, that all of us in our own time must make, if not in this life then in lives to come. It was necessary for me to drop back down in consciousness, shedding old indoctrinated outmoded beliefs and concepts for new more advanced well thought out ones. It also allowed me to appreciate the depth of despair and suffering that by Hawkins’ reckoning 85 percent of today’s population feels below the 200 level.
As part of this personal and collective process, I began writing later in life to inform others so that others can build on my knowledge and understanding just as I have built my life on the good works of others. I started out writing blog articles and articles for the Internet media and have progressed toward writing a series of books summing up what I have learned in a long, productive life. My first book UFOs Exopolitics and the New World Disorder was the first in a series of books on diverse subjects that I have been writing and publishing.
Fire in Nature, A Fire Activist’s Guide was the second book in what I am now calling the Enlighten Your World Series. I have made these first two books free on their websites in order to benefit as many people as possible all over world and to build up my reputation as a writer. There may be some fire managers, scientists, and others who may think I wear a tinfoil hat for investigating and writing about UFOs. However, I believe these books in the series should each stand on their respective merits, where each individual subject can or may act as a portal into a much broader understanding of life and the life sciences.
These books, even while covering very different subject material, are written in a style based on exhaustive, credible footnoted link source material as is this third book in the series Enlightenment, The Long Hard Road. It would be a mistake to reject out of hand any one of these books simply because of a topic covered in another book. I am reminded of those respectable French “scientists” hundreds of years ago who refused to even look through a newly built telescope because, it obviously had to be some kind of a trick.
With the Fire and Exopolitics book now out of the way and in circulation, I am free to write this third book about what I have discovered on my personal path to enlightenment. Prior to stumbling upon and entering that tiny metaphysical bookstore in the dead of an Alaskan winter my know-it-all attitude on life had already begun to take some hits. I suppose just leaving a loving family and the land upon which I had been raised at 17 years of age and moving to Alaska completely on my own began the transformation to who I am today.
I was no longer under the influence of my parents, their security or their expectations and now found myself in a very demanding and rugged environment where a little mistake could cost me my life or my health. I felt like I had been thrown as molten metal into ice cold water to temper and discipline myself to begin my individual journey into life.
Soon enough I made new friends who helped me to adapt to the cold climate and to prepare me for a long cold winter with clothes that would keep me warm and free from frostbite. One of these friends was Matt Kelly who later became a smoke jumper. His parents had worked in Africa for the UN. One of the first shocks to my know-it-all attitude came when I brought up my southern prejudice against blacks that I had learned growing up in the south. Matt slammed his fist down on the table in an argument and would not talk to me for three weeks.
I had learned to argue intensely from my father and his associates who would “blow off steam” in arguments about land management but in ten minutes would be best of friends again. Matt forced me to really think hard about my prejudice against blacks and realize I had been wrong. Later my sister married a black man and basically got excommunicated from the family with me attending the wedding and being as she said her “bridge over troubled water”. Years later she and my parents reconciled.
The second and most serious blow to my know-it-all attitude came when I left one of the bars in downtown Fairbanks Alaska in the cold of winter where I had been playing pool with my college friends. I went out to get a little fresh air and stumbled upon the little new age bookstore on a back street. I entered to the sound of chimes and incense and inside there were bookcases full of books on the paranormal. Here were books on UFOs, Near Death and Out of Body experiences, reincarnation, world religions, paganism, and tarot decks of cards. I felt strangely right at home and began to buy and read these books that were so much more interesting than the repetitive boring stuff I was being taught in college.
It was not too long before all this began to push me into an existential crisis in a couple of years. I had to quit college and try to figure out what life was really about, not what I had been told or been impressed upon by others. This was the late 60s and early 70s with a whole generation trying to break free and beginning to revisit the collective spiritual journey of the ages beginning with the shaman’s path toward enlightenment.
We moved beyond psychoactive drugs and the shamanistic traditions and experience inherent in Carlos Castaneda’s books to transcendental meditation, yoga and world religions. During this process many of us lost our way finding ourselves having been caught up, even ensnared in a materialistic culture that values everyday survival, raising families, pursuing wealth, power and privilege over others. A very few of us have managed to maintain our focus and concentration to approach and achieve spiritual enlightenment, at least to some degree.
In our early years psychoactive drugs, the powerful allies of shamans, were plentiful in the late 1960s and 1970s. Several doses over two or three years managed to blow up my preconceived notions of reality. I fell into a deep depression and existential crisis from this loss, but later I emerged a more complete and better person firmly on the path to enlightenment.
Since that time I have never become distracted or wavered and my intent grows ever stronger. I have pursued the mental and emotional housecleaning necessary to move into an existential state of being that is difficult to describe to others who do not experience it. Teachers all throughout history have had this same difficulty and have had to develop disciplines to inform others. It is only now as I near the end of this life that I feel capable of properly articulating in this book what I have learned.
INTRODUCTION
“We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, and we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop the internal talk.”
“To change our idea of the world is the crux of shamanism. And stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it.”
"When a warrior learns to stop the internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become attainable.” Don Juan Matus
Unless we make enlightenment a priority in our lives we are bound to suffer immensely. There is just no way around this fact and the sooner we get on with it the better for us and for humanity as a whole. Too many people live haphazard, depleted, stressed out lives of intermittent illusionary happiness and often great mental and emotional suffering. Simply lying to ourselves that we are happy and that we do not suffer just throws us into denial which makes our situation even more precarious and debilitating. We find our supply lines to our source quantum reality are pinched and overextended, keeping us fearful and afraid that we may suffocate or starve, losing everything.
One way to think about enlightenment is that of a diver in an ocean connected by an air hose and lifeline or a baby in a womb connected by an umbilical cord to its mother. What is in common in both cases is that both the baby and the diver exist and are protected and sustained within an environment in which they cannot normally survive separate from a greater reality. Oxygen, nutrients and the removal of waste are exchanged through the umbilical cord and the baby is carried within the mother’s body until such time as it can exist outside of her body on its own.
There is something very fundamental here that involves a projection of influence from one sphere of existence into another sphere of existence. It’s the same way for an expedition, or a military campaign into enemy territory that requires supply lines that if cut or broken, spell disaster and defeat. The shaman, the religious scholar and the consciousness researcher of today, are finding themselves in agreement in that our material existence is somehow being encompassed and being supported by a greater immaterial or quantum domain.
If too much of our attention becomes overly focused in either realm, the exchange or flow between the realms become constricted and damaging, even deadly to the individual or a society of individuals. What seems to be happening in Western societies is that the balance of the attention is focused on the material world resulting in a materialistic perspective and a restriction of information flow back and forth between the greater immaterial universe and the known physical universe. The result is a culture that supports mental, emotional and physical distress and suffering in the isolation from the greater whole. In Eastern societies, there can be too much attention to the universal realm which also is destructive in that the ability to survive in the physical world degrades from neglect.
The key to an understanding of the enlightenment process is to understand this balance of information flow between the lesser and greater reality in which one exists. In Western societies too much activity and focus on materialism result in an ever increasing internal dialogue and increasing levels of fear. The fear and internal dialogue are symptoms of separation isolating the individual or society from not only the greater reality, but the more limited one in which we are embedded. The internal dialogue is the incessant mental activity that keeps us awake at night thinking about one thing or another but continues both day and night.
In observing ourselves or others, we can see that where there is too much focus and activity in holographic reality, connectivity breaks down between the individual and environment. The result is that there is only a limited exchange of perceptual information between the person and his or her surroundings. Who has not seen mentally ill people on the street talking incessantly to themselves in situations where the internal dialogue has become so strong that these people have become mentally ill, isolated from both quantum and holographic reality?
The Culture Trap
We should note that this incessant, debilitating internal dialogue does not exist in isolation from the rest of our society and culture. It is connected to the internal dialogue of others in society. It tends to be a self-reinforcing destructive feedback loop throughout our culture driven by the inability of citizens to detach from culture. Detachment allows an individual to become selective as to involvement in those things that benefit him or her and separate from the destructive aspects of the society or culture. Those who have taken the path to enlightenment like the Buddha have had to detach from the society in which they were drowning only to reenter it more selectively.
So the opposite of an enlightened, perceptive state of mind is a state or degree of mental illness caused by separation from our existential roots and an over emersion in materialistic culture. The major symptom of the situation is too much mental dialogue, both in the individual and amongst all individuals. An enlightened individual, or one firmly on the path to enlightenment, is a person who has learned to slow down the mental dialogue through meditation, reflection and a relaxed rested lifestyle that allows for a strong perceptual and intuitive connection with reality. As the mental dialogue slows, fear, anxiety, depression, anger and frustration begin to dissipate.
We can think of the mental dialogue as a kind of waste product that accumulates over time from too much mental, emotional and physical activity in the material world. This waste product restricts the flow of information between the individual’s lesser and greater surroundings causing the person to mentally and emotionally wither away into mental illness if it is not removed. In fact, most people live with varying degrees of mental and emotional illness and consider this normal as long as they are still functional enough to raise a family or hold a job.
What happens to us as we become more and more isolated from our existential roots and trapped in our tyrannical mental dialogue? We usually end up in the criminal justice system, a mental ward, commit suicide or end up on the street being supported by a welfare agency if we are not of the privileged class. If we are in the privileged class we may even move up unchecked to the very apex of power in society acting as a danger to both ourselves and others. As psychopaths and sociopaths in such a capacity, we control essential resources, military and religious power and we may justify in a number of ways the murdering of millions of people for reasons of political expediency, religious intolerance and even prejudicial ethnic cleansing.
Tens of thousands of years ago shamans understood the need to slow or stop the mental dialogue for healing purposes and they discovered psychoactive drugs in plants that would do this. These drugs lead to a temporary trance state of greater connectedness between the greater and lesser embedded reality. Today’s scientists are proving scientifically this very same thing; that these drugs break down the separation between the conscious and subconscious mind and have mental healing properties.
The shamans learned that there were dangerous side effect limitations to these psychoactive drugs just as with other types of drugs that healed the body, so care in using them was important. Shamans also learned other techniques to slow or stop the mental dialogue like music, repetitive drumming, meditation etc. that have been developed and refined in ancient and modern religions and consciousness science.
However, I must stress the importance of living a lifestyle that supports the pursuit of enlightenment, one that has balance between rest and activity. The internal dialogue and excessive focus in the holographic realm seem to feed on each other in a kind of negative feedback loop. It’s the old, which came first the chicken or the egg concept, where excessive focus and stress on the holographic reality projection causes an increase in the internal dialogue which then causes more focus and stress in holographic reality.
So the key is to reverse this process and make it a healthy process of less focus and stress leading to a decrease in the internal dialogue etc. Even when one goes on a retreat, it’s good to just lie around and sleep the first couple of days before beginning intensive meditation practice. The reduction in stress and focus the first couple of days begins the reversal of the negative feedback to a positive one. This allows for the meditation to be more effective within the context of a more relaxed body and mind slowing the internal dialogue faster and easier as the body is more rested and relaxed.
I think a lot of our problems arise because of this increased focus on holographic reality not allowing enough hours in the day to process the information we gather. I suspect that this unprocessed information is a good part of the internal dialogue problem of separation from the greater quantum existential reality that surrounds and nourishes us every moment of our lives. It’s like we are living energy depleted lives always running on empty and in a state of crisis and this is also why spiritual teachers, especially shamans, place emphasis on building personal power and not being sapped by trivial things moment to moment, day to day. The emphasis it on a powerful intent of purpose to build power and use is wisely rather than wasting it like most people do on things that don’t really matter or that we cannot change.
Developing a balance between our material or holographic universe and the greater immaterial or quantum reality is no easy task. This is especially true because earth humanity is still so primitive and out of balance existentially, even as technology develops exponentially. Technology and power, today’s impotent materialistic gods, cannot bring us enlightenment and free us from mental and emotional suffering. Only self-knowledge and understanding can do that, along with a good dose of discipline and strong intent to become enlightened and free from suffering.
The road to enlightenment is long and hard and takes many lifetimes of hard work, but the suffering that comes from not being enlightened drives us forward into a more enlightened state of existence. We can fall into denial, scream and yell, become overcome by depression, anger and hate, lifetime after lifetime, even commit suicide, but there is no way to escape the forces that drive our individual and collective evolution forward using this simple system of reward and punishment. If we get things right we become happier and more content and if we don’t we suffer until we do. More often than not more suffering is necessary until we get it!
The Religion Trap
We all need a religion, a set of valid values, concepts and beliefs to be used as guidelines to living a good life, an enlightened life. However, these religious values and morality should not be imposed upon us as indoctrination by authority figures to be accepted without question. Unfortunately much human suffering is based on incorrect or errors in religious doctrine that actually hinder or suppress the process of enlightenment as a form of enslavement. These religious errors get passed down through unquestioned indoctrination for generations to be used as mind control by so called political and religious leaders whose unconscious or conscious intent is predatory rather than supportive of an individual’s search for enlightenment.
For this reason many people have become disillusioned by religion altogether and are apt to dump the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. I believe this is a serious mistake of judgment because we do need moral and ethical guidelines and an ability to learn from more advanced civilizations and beings than ourselves.
I also believe I have had advanced beings intercede in my life when asked for and when they were most needed. I feel very strongly that I was and am being guided out of the morass of despair and suffering, something that would be impossible or very difficult to do on my own. Sure if we are lost and if we work at it long enough on our own, we may get lucky if we don’t die for lack of water or starvation in the process, but how much simpler it is to meet and be guided by someone who is familiar with the terrain we are lost in and furnish us with maps.
There is plenty of evidence and witness testimony as to the existence of more advanced intelligences willing to help a fellow traveller on the path when it is necessary, but not to incur dependency. Its best to teach a man to fish than feed him for a lifetime and more advanced beings abide by this concept. On the other hand it is a mistake again to deny this reality of advanced intelligences just because some folks may be fooling themselves by following imaginary advanced intelligences as part of their unquestioned religious upbringing and indoctrination. Yet even here more advanced intelligences don’t seem to mind impersonating these imaginary intelligences as a means to work with those in lower consciousness states.
It becomes even more problematic and dangerous for the unwary and uneducated religious seekers when religious con artists work their way into leadership positions in all religions and use their positions to prey upon people rather than guide them to enlightenment. In my opinion world religions have become havens for corrupt and self-centered individuals over many generations so as to make them almost useless.
My thinking is that each individual needs to build his or her own individualized religion based on factual evidence and useful information gathered from world religious culture disregarding the dross. I think we need to get away from this one size fits all in regards to religion realizing that each individual is unique. What is needed is an individualized customized religion for each individual suitable to individual needs and consciousness. This is part of the process of taking responsibility for one’s life away from collective consciousness as indicated by moving above 200 on the Hawkins consciousness scale. One must take personal responsibility for one’s religion, politics, finances etc. and not blindly follow predators only to blame them for the suffering eventually incurred.
I believe it is a mistake to think of oneself as a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or faction thereof but rather one should say, I find value in one or more of these religions, but I am a free and independent individual where no religion or politics owns me. I believe it’s the same for other fields such as politics. When we identify too much with any doctrine we become enslaved by it and when doctrines collide we find ourselves killing each other in the name of a particular religion or political doctrine. This is all lower consciousness thinking and acting and we must rise above this foolishness if we are to enlighten ourselves and end our suffering from wrong thought and wrong action.
Religious traps and snares aside, let us move to build our own religious doctrine and model of reality starting with the very basic concept that life is a process, a journey and a school. As we move forward in the enlightenment process, let’s study the evidence, the very factual information and concepts that support these higher consciousness enabling concepts and ideas.
We should also in the process remind ourselves of our own conscious and unconscious bias in our search for enlightenment. I thought Sylvia Cranston in her book Reincarnation, The Phoenix Fire Mystery, articulated this bias problem very well.
“Tough-minded thinkers are apt to maintain that all theories of immortality should be dismissed as comforting illusions projected by wishful thinking. Obviously, where reincarnation is concerned, if someone believes in it simply because he or she wants to come back, that does not make it true. However, if another, weary and bitterly disillusioned with life, says, “What, one more round? Never!” that does not make it false. Furthermore, the latter person may understandably resent the thought that the vicissitudes presently experienced result from his own actions in a prior existence, and that the misdeeds of this life must be paid for in lives to come. The Christian fundamentalist has his bias too: He prefers an everlasting stay in heaven to the painstaking work of going on with the evolutionary process.”
We can’t just ignore other knowledge and perspective trapped through our internal dialogue to our individual perspectives of science, religion or shamanism. We have to step out into the unknown every moment of every day and try to free ourselves of our bias by engaging and experiencing others in their shoes rather than our own. As I have stated previously there are many ways to break loose and expand our consciousness beyond our current limits with the study of reincarnational and NDE doctrine, science, meditation, extraterrestrial contact and even psychoactive drugs.
One of the most powerful and dangerous tools in a shamans toolbox are the use of psychoactive drugs on their students. I am just beginning to appreciate why shamans past and present have had to resort to the use of these mind altering drugs on students trapped and held hostage by overly strong cultural beliefs or other insurmountable issues. From personal observation I see where people get to a certain point in their spiritual and psychological evolution and then get stuck in some strong belief, fear, materialism or other issue for the rest of their lives.
Shamans are repositories of tribal wisdom and knowledge and as hunter-gathers the tribe learns through trial and error which foods are good to eat and which ones are poisonous. In this process of feeding off the land, people also ate some foods like mushrooms that had this psychoactive mind altering effect and this did not go unnoticed by shaman healers who used plants and fungi to heal the body and the mind. They also knew that these psychoactive drugs were dangerous in that they could cause dangerous irrational actions as well as loss of identity and as such were not to be used indiscriminately. The article How Psychedelics Saved My Life potently expresses the value of psychoactive substances in the hands of capable practitioners. [3]
“Ayahuasca is a medicinal tea that contains the psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The brew is rapidly spreading around the world after numerous anecdotes have shown the brew has the power to cure anxiety, PTSD, depression, unexplained pain, and numerous physical and mental health ailments. Studies of long-term ayahuasca drinkers show they are less likely to face addictions and have elevated levels of serotonin the neurotransmitter responsible for happiness.
If I had any reservations, doubts, or disbeliefs, they were quickly expelled shortly after my first ayahuasca experience. The foul-tasting tea vibrated through my veins and into my brain as the medicine scanned my body. My field of vision became engulfed with fierce colors and geometric patterns. Almost instantly, I saw a vision of a brick wall. The word ‘anxiety’ was spray painted in large letters on the wall. “You must heal your anxiety,” the medicine whispered. I entered a dream-like state where traumatic memories were finally dislodged from my subconscious.
It was as if I was viewing a film of my entire life, not as the emotional me, but as an objective observer. The vividly introspective movie played in my mind as I relived my most painful scenes - my parents’ divorce when I was just 4 years-old, past relationships, being shot at by police while photographing a protest in Anaheim and crushed underneath a crowd while photographing a protest in Chicago. The ayahuasca enabled me to reprocess these events, detaching the fear and emotion from the memories. The experience was akin to ten years of therapy in one eight-hour ayahuasca session.”
Sometime people just need something to grease the skids of their mental machinery but no more. From there on mental, emotional and physical discipline should carry the day as it was known that psychoactive drugs could only open up the doors to perception and spiritual understanding. Any more use could and would be self-defeating as to incur dependency and or mental and emotional disintegration even insanity. The objective is to skate that consciousness boundary between materialistic over identification and insanity opening up the subconscious quantum reality using more disciplined controllable tools like meditation, yoga, dreams etc.
Once we become open to the greater universe in which our materialistic universe is imbedded, we begin to see our life as like a book, with a beginning, middle and end. Each life is as one pearl on a string of pearls that make up a necklace with that necklace a link in an even greater chain to infinity. We begin our life like the first card of the Tarot Deck represented by the fool, the ignorant one, who is so ignorant that he or she does not even know that he or she does not know. Then we proceed through the middle of our life gaining experience as represented by more cards in the Tarot Deck. At the end of our lives comes the time to pass on what we have learned for the benefit of generations to come. For me this is to write down in my legacy series of books what I have learned in this life.
Finally we come to the end of our life and end up with the world card; the cumulative effect of not only this life but previous lives as well. Many there are that begin this long hard road to enlightenment, but few will reach the world card in this life. Sooner or later in more lives to come they will, but it’s just a matter of time till the need to alleviate suffering and find true love and happiness drives a person to enlightenment.
Each life is a step in the direction of enlightenment with each person having their own unique pace and lessons to learn that only they can come to know and understand. With wisdom comes the realization that we should not judge people too harshly, because they are exactly where they should be learning their own self specific lessons.
On the other hand we can’t allow others to prey upon us either in a parasitic way by slowing covertly draining our personal power, or overtly manipulating even to enslave us. Nature is full of predator-prey relationships and so is human society. But as a counterbalance there is also sharing and win-win relationships in nature and human society and these we learn to cultivate. By so doing we and others grow in love, wisdom and understanding, becoming better individuals and a better society.
It is my intention in the beginning of this book to travel back in time to find our collective spiritual-immaterial roots by inquiring into the shaman’s tribal world. It was here that the search for meaning and personal freedom began tens of thousands of years ago, maybe even hundreds of thousands of year ago. Because both our material and spiritual lives are a reflection of our culture, our collective experience passed down from generation to generation, it is important to understand our history.
Once we gain some understanding of our earliest shaman roots we can move forward in time to where the shamanic teachings evolve as society evolves into the early religious teachings still being impacted by our collective experiences involving reincarnation, OBE, NDE and extraterrestrial contact. Finally toward the end of the book we arrive in the present where science and the world religions Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and the Muslim religions predominate and compete with one another.
Once we gain in understanding of our history we can use that knowledge and understanding to gain insights into our personal and collective present. A present that while more complex and sophisticated than our past, is nevertheless still driven by the same simple fundamental forces or laws that affected us in simpler times. Once we understand these fundamental principles guiding and influencing even manipulating our lives, we can then use this knowledge and wisdom to gain more influence and control over our lives for the better.
It’s important to understand that tribal society is and was being influenced by the same environmental and spiritual forces as our complex global society of today. What has changed is that because of our individual and collective experience we can better define and clarify through scientific disciplines what our material and immaterial reality is and how it came into existence. These new scientific concepts have been well articulated in the article Proof That the Human Body is a Projection of Consciousness. [4]
“The thing is the quantum level of reality isn’t a local and insignificant aspect of creation. It is all around us, and it is the most fundamental level of creation aside from the unified field itself. The human energy field is interacting and influencing the quantum field all around us at all times and the energy of our beliefs and intentions are infused into our energy field because they are defined by the energy of our thoughts and emotions.
Thus the fusion of our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and intentions, which I will call the human energy field for simplicity’s sake, is perpetually informing the quantum reality within us and around us at each moment of our existence.
And because reality is flashing in and out of existence (hypothetically at Planck time – 1044 times per second – as explained by The Resonance Project biophysicist William Brown), every time our reality oscillates between form, and the pure energy state of the field, our awareness which is constant and doesn’t flash in and out of existence informs the field what to reappear as when it makes its transition back to form at the quantum level.”
While science has evolved far beyond the simple inquiry of tribal society we nevertheless have and act in a much more tribal way than we are prepared to admit to ourselves. The tribe has not disappeared as its remnants are strong still in the undeveloped world and pervade our global society as well. In writing the book Fire in Nature I realized that some of the most simple plants and animals going back hundreds of millions of years are still with us today flourishing in environmental niches among much more complex organisms.
For instance, we have about two and a half pounds of bacteria essential to our digestion surviving and flourishing in our gut. In our forests we have the same lichens going back over 500 million years that once broke down rock into soil now growing on the trunks of large trees. Because man is part of nature he and human society evolve as part of nature in the same way as other organisms. One of the most important insights about life is that all is interconnected so that what influences one aspect of society or nature has a cascading effect across the whole of society or nature.
Tribal society like today’s society is composed fundamentally and organized around a small privileged affluent class of people who exercise enormous political and spiritual power over the lower classes for the benefit of themselves. This fundamentally tribal autocratic structure works best in more “primitive” societies; but as society becomes more complex and sophisticated, serious organizational flaws become apparent causing an endless cycle of creation and disintegration of civilizations best symbolized by the proverbial Phoenix that sows the seeds of its own destruction and renewal in its life.
In tribal society past and present we have several fundamentally different types of people. The chief and his family council govern the political aspects of tribal society while the shaman resides over the spiritual aspects of the tribe. We also have the trader who accumulates wealth evolving into the banking institutions of today as the financier and banker. The hunter-farmer-producer of the past evolves into huge international production corporate monopolies of today. In addition the feudal worker or slave in tribal society evolves into the wage slave of large multinational corporations and world governments.
In another book (maybe called The New World Order – Disorder) on international and national politics, we will follow these other types of people and groups as they evolve. In this book, I will concentrate on the shaman or spiritual practitioner as he or she evolves into the religion and science of today.
In the case of the shaman, we can see that the shaman and tribal life are not only being impacted by the more material aspects of a holographic universe, but also by the more immaterial aspects of what has become known as quantum reality. Out of Body (OBE), Near Death Experiences (NDE), dreams and UFO experiences are not unique to our time but are an inherent part of our history. It’s easy for us to get caught in the provincial trap of a too narrow focus on the immediate aspects of our lives ignoring the more substantial, less obvious aspects of quantum reality that also have a great impact on our lives.
As we move from shamanism to more complex religions and modern science we can see that these fundamental experiences shape and mold our more complex institutions of religion and science just as with shamans of yesterday. I have covered extraterrestrial contact well in my previous book UFOs Exopolitics and the New World Disorder but not these other areas impacting on individual human and collective consciousness.
Sufficient to say that cases of extraterrestrial contact go back to the beginnings of recorded history as other stellar civilizations come to earth and impact not only our politics but our religions. Hinduism gives a very early comprehensive account on extraterrestrial contact influencing earth politics and religion that continues into the Christian teachings and even the Muslim religion. While Buddhists believe in life on other worlds I was surprised to find a rare account show up on my Facebook feed the other day that I would like to share here. In the article Buddhist Master Describes UFO Sighting in 1884 is this account: [5]
“Chan is often described as Chinese Zen Buddhism, of which Hsu Yun was one of the most influential Buddhist masters. He is believed to have lived for 119 years. He was born in 1840, and died in 1959. Online you can find a pictorial biography of the life on Master Hsu Yun, and also his autobiography, titled Empty Cloud (the UFO sighting is on pages 47 and 48 of this pdf).”
“I climbed the Da-luo Peak, where I paid reverence to the ‘wisdom lamps’ said to appear there. I saw nothing the first night but on the second, I saw a great ball of light flying from the Northern to the Central Peak, where it came down, splitting a short while later into over ten balls of different sizes. The same night, I saw on the Central Peak three balls of light flying up and down in the air and on the Northern Peak, four balls of light which varied in size.”
“The Master bowed to the Wisdom Lamps on top of Ta Lo Mountain. People often came to this spot to witness what fortune they might. At first there was nothing unusual, but then they all appeared: “Large ones, small ones, and in between – each fireball was unique.””
But wait, it gets even better for all you Buddhists. J Here is a second article that showed up on my Facebook news feed about the same time called A Description of an Alien Visit in the Buddhist Lotus Sutra: [6]
“The Buddhist scripture called Saddharma Pundarika or the Lotus of the True Law was first written circa 300 A.D. (Note that the word “Sutra” means “scripture.”) The exact date of the original Sanskrit version from India is not known with certainty, but the first Chinese translation was made sometime between 265 and 315 A.D. Buddha himself was born in 563 BC, so the Lotus Sutra was obviously written by Buddhist monks around eight centuries after his death.”
“As background before proceeding, Buddhist cosmology is surprisingly modern. Buddhism recognizes the existence of millions of other worlds and casually asserts that they are inhabited. Indeed, each inhabited world is stated to have a Buddha of its own. (The word “Buddha” means an enlightened being. In Buddhist teachings, anyone is theoretically capable of becoming a Buddha, although actually accomplishing this goal is rare.) One Buddhist scripture mentions in passing that on earth sermons are given with words, but on other worlds sermons may be given with light or with scents or by other non-verbal means.”
“Buddhist cosmology also overlaps modern quantum theory, in that the Buddhists think that the void or emptiness is the source of both material objects and energy. As in quantum theory, particles can flash into existence from the void. The fact that material objects are constructed from millions of small particles is also part of Buddhist teaching. A central teaching of Buddhist philosophy is that all objects composed of such particles are fated to decay. This entropy or decay applies to living creatures, material objects, and the universe itself. Since Buddhist cosmology dates back prior to 525 BC, it is interesting that there are so many similarities between Buddhist cosmology and modern cosmology.”
“Chapter 23 of the Lotus Sutra is entitled “Gadgadasvara” and begins on page 393 of the Dover edition. Because the original 1884 translation uses many Indian names and very long titles (such as a distant world called “Vairokanarasmipratimandita.”) I will paraphrase the section that deals with a visit by an alien from another world. In Chapter 23, when the terrestrial Buddha was about to give a sermon, he darted a flash of light from a circle between his brows. This flash of light was seen on other worlds, including the one with the very long name cited in the previous paragraph.”
“On this other world the resident Buddha (who also has a very long name) perceived the ray of light from earth. One of his students, named Gadgadasvara, also sees the ray of light and realized what it meant, i.e. that the Buddha on this world was about to give an important sermon. The student asks his master for permission to visit earth and listen to the sermon of Sakyamuni, the terrestrial Buddha. Permission is granted, but the master gives Gadgadasvara some interesting cautions about what to expect on earth:
“On coming to earth you must not conceive a low opinion of it. The earthly Buddha Lord Sakyamuni will seem small compared to you, as are his disciples. He looks different from us and he and his followers will seem to be ugly, so do not behave rudely. The earth itself has parts that are ugly like sewers, so do not form a low opinion of it.” (It is rather surprising that a Buddhist religious text would describe the historical Buddha as being “small and ugly.” In fact as a young man the historical Buddha was described by many eye witnesses as being athletic and comely. Even at an advanced age Buddha was described as having good posture and a face that reflected wisdom, a benevolent nature, and peacefulness. Of course from the point of view of an alien, it is hard to say what the surface appearance of a human would look like.)
At this point in chapter 23, Gadgadasvara enters a deep meditation and then appears psychically on earth before Sakyamuni and his students. One of the earthly students, Manjusri, asks about this mental appearance. Sakyamuni replies that the visitor is a student from another world. Manjusri asks if he can learn the same kind of meditation used to travel between worlds. Manjusri also asks if Gadgadasvara can come in person, because he wants to see what he looks like.
Gadgadasvara agrees, and comes to earth in physical form “accompanied by the noise of hundreds of thousands of musical instruments.” He arrived by moving through the sky on a “large tower.” Once he arrived, his appearance on earth was described as follows: “His face showed eyes resembling blue lotuses, his body was gold colored…and sparkled with a luster.”
Upon arrival Gadgadasvara has a curious but polite conversation with Sakyamuni. He inquires about this world and about terrestrial students. Gadgadasvara expresses hope that earthly students are not too troublesome or too difficult to instruct. This is an interesting conversation because it deals casually with the topic that every inhabited world will have students and teachers and that the students on some worlds may be easier to teach than students on other worlds.
Sakyamuni asks Gadgadasvara to show the earthly students his true shape and body which he does. But Sakyamuni also points out that Gadgadasvara has the ability to assume many different forms and to take on many other appearances if he wishes to do so. Gadgadasvara listens to Sakyamuni’s sermon, and then gives a polite “goodbye” to the terrestrial Buddha and returns to his own world: “he again mounted the tower and with the noise of hundreds of thousands of musical instruments he returned to his own world.””
All this is very consistent with the cases I published in UFOs Exopolitics and the New World Disorder where the search for enlightenment is not only being impacted by extraterrestrial teachings on this world but is ongoing on other worlds as well. The same can be said for OBE and NDE cases as powerful drivers toward enlightenment. Like UFO cases, OBE and NDE cases are much more widespread than most people realize and have been impacting humanity throughout our existence from the shaman of both past and present, to the consciousness scientist of today. Don Miguel Ruiz a modern day shaman wrote on the cover jacket of his book The Mastery of Love:
“Don Miguel Ruiz was born into a family of healers, and raised in rural Mexico by a curandera (healer) mother and a nagual (shaman) grandfather. The family anticipated that Miguel would embrace their centuries-old legacy of healing and teaching, and carry forward the esoteric Toltec knowledge. Instead, distracted by modern life, Miguel chose to attend medical school and become a surgeon.
A near-death experience changed his life. Late one night in the early 1970s, he awoke suddenly, having fallen asleep at the wheel of his car. At that instant the car careened into a wall of concrete. Don Miguel remembers that he was not in his physical body as he watched himself pull his two friends to safety.
Stunned by this experience, he began an intensive practice of self-inquiry. He devoted himself to the mastery of the ancient ancestral wisdom, studying earnestly with his mother, and completing an apprenticeship with a powerful shaman in the Mexican desert. His grandfather, who had since passed on, continued to teach him in his dreams.
Don Miguel Ruiz, a nagual from the Eagle Knight linage, is dedicated to sharing his knowledge of the teachings of the ancient Toltec. He lives in San Diego, California.”
The important thing to realize is that the overall reality impacting upon our consciousness is the same today as it was hundreds of thousands of years ago. What is changing is that as we and our civilization evolve, we become more refined and sophisticated in how we perceive and shape ourselves and our world. This is true for our search for enlightenment as well. The shaman, healer of mind, body and spirit is still alive and well in today’s world adapting and changing with the times even as our religious and scientific search for enlightenment becomes more refined and sophisticated.
Lichens and mosses once broke down the rocks to form the soil for more evolved plants hundreds of millions of years ago. They are still here flourishing in our modern world finding new niches on the trunks of trees and on the concrete of buildings. It’s the same for the so called more “primitive” religions, they are still here and thriving and useful just as single celled organisms now continue to thrive not only in our oceans, but even in our guts digesting our food for us.
Humanity’s search for enlightenment began long ago and continues into the present and into the future. In order to best understand enlightenment, we can work our way forward through history following natural pathways, the same way that new creatures are formed recapitulating the past history of life on earth in the womb of their mothers. After all it would appear that past, present and future exist simultaneously, or it's just that we experience them in our illusionary consciousness state as separate.