I was instructed to dismantle my belief system, and then to intelligently rebuild it from scratch. I was told to be disciplined in my approach and to use personal experience, logic and common sense to build a new foundation belief system, upon which to continue my quest for true enlightenment. The concepts in this article directly apply to Kundalini, and to spiritual development in general. This is because, if you have any contradictions in your core belief system, this will misalign you with your higher self, and cause problems when you step into the greater reality by awakening and raising Kundalini.
A New Approach to Life and Greater Spiritual Reality
In the mid-nineteen-eighties, I experienced a serious belief system challenge. Glaring contradictions arose at every turn, between my ongoing hard-life experiences and popularly accepted New Age concepts of spiritual reality. I struggled to comprehend and integrate my experience with this paradigm, being forced time and time again to accept illogical compromises. But the adaptation of my life experience soon became impossible and I began suffocating under its awkward burden. The popular model rapidly became unworkable in a practical sense. Either I was going crazy and experiencing consistent, repeatable delusions, as were all the people I was helping, or something was decidedly rotten in downtown Denmark.
Like many people down through the ages, I had spent my life searching for spiritual truth and meaning to life. For many years, I had sat in development groups, prayed, meditated, visualized and read until my eyes burned and my mind reeled under the massive contradictory onslaught. I developed psychic abilities, had spectacular OBE’s, visions and mystical experiences. I made good progress, but still, I needed more. . .
I was eventually reborn and transformed when I raised my Kundalini to its highest level around 1987 (this was when the enigma of my life became apparent to me). But raising Kundalini, in itself, does not bring instant enlightenment. Kundalini has to be raised regularly and mastered, just like any other ability. The first time Kundalini is raised it causes ‘abstract’ enlightenment, not actual enlightenment. You know everything while Kundalini is raised, but cannot realize this when you return to a normal level of consciousness (the base level of consciousness in the normal waking state). There are no shortcuts, and there is no way of avoiding all the hard work and hard-life experience necessary for the abstracts to filter down into your conscious mind and physical reality.
All of this gleaned me glimpses of the greater spiritual reality above, with a few tantalizingly abstract snippets of abstract higher truth thrown in for good measure. But my increasingly strong contact with the greater spiritual reality provided me with a flood of contradictions to the popularly accepted model. This intellectual burden grew and grew as my belief system was stretched way beyond its design limits. It rapidly approached critical mass.
I was offered a solution around 1990. I had a major experience where an angel, master, or my higher-self (hard to tell which, and somewhat of a moot point) manifested to me as a powerful objective voice. I could have recorded this had I a tape recorder handy; it was that audible. I was wide-awake and standing up. I had just stepped out of the shower and was about to start my evening meditation, around 9 pm. It was the most beautiful voice I have ever heard: deep, rich, masculine, eloquent, loving, and wise. The atmosphere was intensely peaceful and very powerful.
(This may have been the same objective voice that had spoken to me a couple of years earlier when it then instructed me to begin teaching myself how to write. Since I barely finished grade eight in school, this was no mean feat in itself. I had worked hard, and by the time of the second visitation, had already mastered the basics of English and grammar. Even so, I still felt I had not done enough. But direct contact with spiritual beings from the greater reality always has this effect, especially when they come to you.)
The voice asked me to sit down, and then proceed to explain a great many things to me, the most important of which was advice on how to proceed on my quest for higher spiritual truth and knowledge. I was instructed to dismantle my belief system, and then to intelligently rebuild it from scratch. I was told to be disciplined in my approach and to use personal experience, logic and common sense to build a new foundation belief system, upon which to continue my quest for true enlightenment.
The foundation belief system lies deep within the subconscious mind. This comprises a set of conceptual mental filters and shields, which are fundamental to one’s physical and spiritual existence. These shape and affect your thoughts and perceptions by filtering ideas and inspirations, making these conform to a central theme, as set by your foundation beliefs. All knowledge lies within your heart. But accessing this is extraordinarily difficult. Everything has to pass through your conceptual filters before it can be perceived or realized.
If one’s fundamental beliefs are even slightly flawed, information trying to pass through becomes distorted or blocked. Imagine new truths as being delicate spheres, and flawed conceptual filters (contradictory beliefs) as being coarse triangular. New truths are effectively blocked. If one forces them through, the results are damaged goods, i.e., fractured, distorted or incomplete truths result.
Therefore, if a higher intelligence tries to pass contradictory new truths through a flawed belief system, these truths are conceptually blocked or distorted. The greater the fundamental errors in one’s belief system, the greater will be the distortion. All things being equal, this is why some people can receive inspiration (be it artistic, musical, scientific or spiritual) and others cannot or receive only poorly.
The core concept here is scientific method. This is called ‘open-minded scepticism’. The concept that you create your own spiritual reality is nothing new. Versions of this idea can be found in a great many books of spiritual philosophy. But actually realizing how this works and applying it to one’s own foundation belief system in pursuit of higher truth and knowledge and experience is an entirely different matter.
I was given detailed instructions on how to accomplish this. The next day I sat down and made a list of all the things I believed in concerning my spiritual reality. I then analyzed and erased all the things I had not actually experienced or proven for myself. After many hours of pondering and revising, I ended up with a very small list indeed. It went something like this:
OBE is real: I’ve had Astral projections all my life.
Clairvoyance is real: I’ve seen auras and visions all my life.
Healing is real: I’ve both given and received it, seen and felt its power.
Kundalini is real: I raised mine to its highest level in 1987, and many times since.
People and animals survive death: I’ve seen many people and animals after their deaths and regularly visit the spirit worlds.
A higher force is concerned with human existence and its spiritual evolution: I’ve experienced this many times — the voice I heard above is just one example.
Angels, masters, deities and good spirits are real: I’ve interacted with these types of beings many times.
Bad spirits are real: I’ve experienced poltergeists and psychic attacks, been demonically possessed and self-exorcised, and helped many people and children with similar problems.
Gone were personal spirit guides (while I had learned to believe I had one, I had never actually met or openly communicated with it). Gone was the involvement of spirits in just about everything spiritual and psychic (I had no hard experience to support this, only vague assumptions). Gone were concepts like Karma and Reincarnation. And gone was the entire organized spirit structure above us that I had been taught to believe in (I had no real proof this was accurate, but I did have experiences to the contrary).
I took the advice I had been given to heart. I would learn to live this new way of truth and to apply it to my life.
My final list was real and true, as I had personally experienced everything on it. As instructed, I would build on what was real and discard everything else. I was told to shelve items of ‘possible’ truth aside until proven or disproven. However, this is easier said than done and I went into what I can only describe as a spiritual shock. But if I was to do this at all, as instructed, I had to go all the way.
In time I worked out a slightly better system for myself. In my heart, I had my core beliefs. In my left hand (held wide to the side) I had my ‘probable’ list, of things that were probably true but I needed personal experience and or logical evidence based on experience before I could move them into my core beliefs section. I also added a ‘possibilities’ list which I held out wide in my right hand. These were things that I considered possible, being an open-minded sceptic. I awaited new experience or evidence to shift these into my probable list, and so on. This layout (which is an analogy, of course) stuck and I still use this system today.
Reincarnation, in case you were wondering, sits firmly in my ‘probable’ list. This, because I do have some personal experiences that appear to relate to past and future lives. But I need more in order to take this into my core belief system. Reincarnation is real in the sense that all living things reincarnate. But there are more complexities to this than meet the eye.
Reincarnation has both biological DNA aspects, and also spiritual aspects.
In time, this new foundation belief system settled more comfortably within me. I got over my emptiness and began filling my aching void with practical truth and knowledge. From this point onwards, slowly and surely, everything started to come together in my life, and make sense. As instructed, I began writing a journal of my thoughts and ideas. I used the writing process to nurture my inner genius, to free up the flow of inspiration between my physical self and my higher-self. This flow, the muse, I had been told, was blocked not only by my previously flawed conceptual filters, but also by the vast differences in consciousness: between the level of consciousness of my normal awake mind (my base level of consciousness) and the more rarefied and abstract level where my higher-self resides within me. This gap is bridged somewhat during altered state meditation.
I turned my unanswered questions into journal and blog articles. These contained everything I experientially knew to be true about each subject. I found myself putting in many logical subtitles and question marks to represent gaps in my knowledge. I used the writing process (revision, sleep, revision, sleep, and so on) to coax the truth from my dreams, and from the deep recesses of my higher spiritual-self. As instructed, I began shutting myself away in a dark, silent room for several hours at a time, discovering a profound new level of deep trance thinking. I thought, dreamed, meditated and wrote on seemingly unfathomable arcane matters.
In time I began receiving inspirational ideas. My dreams and visions swam with sparkling clues; tiny pieces of the jigsaws I was trying to build. My logical and inspirational processes began working overtime, far more powerful than ever before. I found myself waking many times during sleep, compelled to reach for pen and paper to record new ideas. Mundane conversations and events triggered intellectual storms through the mental associations they caused, necessitating much frantic note-taking as inspirational ideas surfaced like glistening dolphins leaping from the murky waters of my subconscious mind.
This belief system method fitted well into my personal experience. I had become quite shamanistic at this point and knew the power of signs and omens and synchronicities and coincidences. And this had been part of my problem. I was walking with one foot in the physical world and one foot in the greater reality. And these are not compatible no matter how far you try to stretch and bend them into shape.
I accepted this process and began working with it. I felt like I had been reborn. This is how I developed my Catch Basket concept. During the day, I set my catch baskets by pondering unanswered questions. These are baited with rich crumbs of personal experience, tantalizing ideas and juicy pieces of logic. In the morning, I check these for fruits that have been cast into them from above. I record everything and add each small harvest to my questioning articles. Pretty soon, these began fleshing themselves out and filling in the mysterious gaps.
And it is through doing this that I learned a Great Truth. “Staying In The Question.” Instead of trying to answer a question or problem with my own store of facts and knowledge, I learned to STAY IN THE QUESTION. This is powerful as it opens the way for the truth to slip down into your mind and give you the true answer.
In truth, my work teaches me just as much as it teaches those I share it with. Over the years since I began this process, my catch basket repository began groaning with ripe esoteric fruits. As instructed, I began pouring these into the articles, tutorials and books I eventually began writing.
Over the years since my arcane riddle began, my inspirational process grew into a finely-tuned subtle mechanism. Now, if I have a serious question the answer always comes to me. Sometimes it surfaces immediately, sometimes days, months or even years later, but the clues that lead me to the answers always come. This has given me drive and purpose, plus an ever-increasing fascination for this many-splendored thing we call mortal life. Whatever the future holds in store, I look forward to living it with great interest.
When I started teaching live workshops and interacting with people more, I discovered a new level of learning. I discovered that while lecturing and answering questions, I would slip into a muse state where grace would flow through me. By this, I mean that ideas and answers and words would come to me that I had never thought of before, triggered by the situation or topic or questions. So, by teaching, I am also learning. Even while writing and editing this for the new Raising Kundalini program, which is available on www.astraldynamics.com I find new ideas slipping into my mind. This is a priceless gift and I hope you get to experience it yourself one day soon.
I hope the above explanation of where I am coming from is of some help to people who might be struggling with their own beliefs. It is neither my intention nor my joy to cast doubts upon anyone’s heartfelt theories and beliefs. But if my work causes you belief system discomfort, then how solid were your beliefs to begin with? While faith is powerful and truly a priceless jewel, if one accepts anything blindly, one risks polluting one’s essential core belief system with the curse of mindless dogmatism, inaccuracies and falsities.
Please keep an open mind to the possibilities I have introduced here. The popular New Age spiritual paradigm contains a great deal of beautiful, comforting philosophy and truth. But it can fall down quite badly in a practical sense, especially when applied to dark force and supernatural problems. If one clings to this model, the development of new concepts and the gathering of higher spiritual truths become virtually impossible. The parameters of current popular spiritual models simply do not allow for this. Because of this, many people today bend the rules and invent elaborate explanations to get around these problems, while dogmatically holding true to popular beliefs. But this increased complexity prohibits a more direct approach. It leads to belief system obfuscation and ineffective methods being developed and propagated.
A Little Sage Advice To Close On
Question everything, especially the sacred cows of dogma, and everything that is taken for granted. Always think for yourself. Experiment and learn from all that life has to offer you. Listen to and consider the wisdom of others, and try on their ideas as you might try on their coat for size. And above all, build your own core belief system from the steps of your own personal life experience, as you walk the path of the masters. For personal experience plus logic and reason is the path of the masters.