Calling Our Spirits Home: Gateways to Full Consciousness
Chapter Eight
Staying in the Field
I was drawn to go to India. I was inexplicably drawn from the depths of my soul. I had no words of explanation for my friends and family. I had no expectations toward the outcome. Yet, I knew that India had something to teach me and that I would learn. I found myself in a state of not knowing, but trusting.
We landed in Delhi in the early morning hours. As our taxi conveyed us to our hotel, I was immediately transported back to 1978. Magically, my time travel took me to the six months I spent in Iran. There was a palpable aura of dejá vu as I noted the walls at streets’ edges barring glimpses into homes beyond and battered shutters rolled down over crumbling shop fronts. The same coating of dust blanketed everything. I saw the faces of the Iranian people I knew back then in the dark skin and beautiful brown eyes of our taxi driver. I said to myself, “This is nothing new.”
In the days that followed, I made entries into my mental databank: beautiful architecture, beggars on the street, tent dwellings, exquisite handicrafts, waves of people, gracious smiles, noxious fumes and traffic without rules. Each time effectively disassociated I said, “I’ve seen this before.” Then, we left Delhi and went to Jaipur.
While still in Delhi, I journaled my feelings that, as I looked back on them later, seemed prophetic to me. I wrote, “I feel as though I am waiting to leave Delhi and go to Jaipur where something awaits me. I have the sense of going into myself and knowing that Self in all its manifestations⏤past, present and future. I will make a conscious choice and emerge reborn. The energies are moving inside my body as I write this, as though in agreement. This will be Initiation.”
I spent the first couple of days in Jaipur in meditative practices sequestered in the compound of Diggi Palace where we were staying. Diggi Palace was so named from its history as the hunting lodge of a long gone maharaja. Its modest rooms and grounds provided an oasis in the heart of Jaipur. On the third day, my companion and I left the grounds and encountered Choutu Singh, the young Indian man who would become our constant guide. He offered us the services of his rickshaw, and there I began my Initiation.
It seemed that Choutu drove us through every aspect of Jaipur that existed, and suddenly I experienced all as new⏤and connected directly to me. From my enduring meditations, or perhaps from just being in Mother India for some days then, I was in a heightened state of awareness. As we drove through byways and alleyways, the material destitution of the people I saw entered me. The filth that I saw entered me. The barrage of noise and toxic air entered me. The open sides of the rickshaw found no barrier, physical or psychic, that divided any experience from me. There were no boundaries. All was seamless and I said out loud, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
We had stopped in a gem shop when I noticed the sore throat⏤immediate, sudden. Although feeling quite well prior to our venture out that afternoon, by the time we returned to Diggi Palace less than an hour later, I was starting to feel very ill. Fever, chills, insomnia and acute body aches were my companion through the night. Inexplicably, waves of intense sadness would arise from unaccountable depths within me. It was mine and it was not mine. Tears streamed down my face off and on through the night and during meditation the next morning. Then, I put hands on myself with the intent of healing and began to feel better throughout the day. That night I had a normal night’s sleep and awoke feeling energetic and light as though I had been through a deep cleanse.
Embracing Duality
It seems India chose to be a symbol of duality. In the midst of the spirituality of her land and people, the Indian government conducts nuclear testing. It is the holiest of places and the unholiest. It is the richest and the poorest. It is the purest and it is the most unclean. All elements are blatantly present to be acknowledged as a part of the whole. India is a message to the world. If we allow it, it will open our hearts, invite ‘clear seeing’ and fluid nature in the world.
Just as there is black, there is white. As heat exists, so does its polar opposite cold. There are these extremes and the places in-between. To deny existence of any of it cuts out experience and refutes reality. Many people spend an enormous amount of energy creating blind spots, whether their natural disposition is toward what they consider ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in life. But what we try to block is presented to us again and again in a variety of ways. As early as my teenage years, I remember thinking I would really like to retreat to the days of my childhood. Then everything for me seemed to be on an even keel⏤one day easily flowing into another. I longed for those childhood days when life was like gliding on the airwaves, not the roller coaster ride I experienced as a teenager and young adult. Yet it is in experience and awareness of all that exists that we mature and grow in deepening ways.
Staying in the Field
In his book Peace Is Every Step, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh discusses the Buddhist idea of suchness meaning “the essence or particular characteristics of a thing or person, its true nature.” All manifestations of life have their own suchness, whether an event, a person, an animal or an environment. He gives the example of natural gas, which we bring into our homes for heat and cooking. We are well aware of the suchness of gas. We take precautions or it can explode. We embrace it and are also mindful of its properties.[i] What in the suchness of any manifestation can we find as a thread woven into ourselves? To look at all of life in this manner, allows the presence of its seamlessness and our own wholeness. This is the understanding that we are all the same. In that knowledge, there is no separation. This is the understanding that allows us to be in the world, but not of the world. In this state of Being, the world flows through us while we stay in the field of our center.
Sri Karunmayee is a master teacher of Hindustani vocal music. The warmth of her energy emanates from the small bundle of her body, speaking her devotion without words. She has a gift of transferring music into her students through the use of metaphor. Sitting cross-legged on the floor with a group of North American students she said, “Some sounds you may have difficulty in saying because they are not in your alphabet. Sounds in Indian music are related to the chakras. They are mostly from the heart. And to be in music, to enter a country like India, is to enter the Mother like a child in the womb⏤much protected.”[ii]
Many of the sounds Karunaji spoke of are not in the alphabet of Western culture, for the higher chakras have not yet completely blossomed. So many of us have shut down to dualities. Yet in acknowledgment, there is freedom. No parts of us are denied. She further explained the form of musical devotion to the group.
In Indian music, everything is in relationship to the keynote SA[1], which means God, and accountable to it. When you hear a melody find the keynote and hold it dear in your heart. Then, you can never get lost. In relation to SA others know their power. Feel as though you are holding a light in your hand and find your own path. To know what you are doing is enlightenment. You have to make friends with SA.[iii]
Faquir Pran Nath, who was Karunaji’s teacher, had said, “SA is totality. All notes are in SA. SA can be any note, but RE could not exist without SA.” The same is true about being “in the note” as we are living. Being truly in the note we become nothing but the note. In becoming the note we become everything. RE, DHA and MA are all around and within SA.[2] SA is RE, DHA, MA and all other notes because this is the center from which we emerge. This is staying in the field.
By holding the keynote and staying in the field, we invite an attunement that allows for the merging of parallel existences, of non-ordinary and ordinary realities. Here the doorway to a mythic life opens. Here we activate the ancient parts of ourselves to ways of knowing we had previously forgotten.
Interwoven Realities
When Initiates step through this doorway, happenings in ordinary reality that may have gone unnoticed, or considered odd but dismissed, take on deeper significance. These happenings often provide confirmation of a choice or, if Initiates answer the Call, lead to more profound ways of “following their bliss” as Joseph Campbell said. When Initiates begin to validate and utilize events in non-ordinary reality, it signals an end to the Initiation and entry into a new life. The new life is still interwoven with the old one, but it is also set apart. The mythic realm is introduced.
In his book Heaven and Hell where he explored the unmapped areas of higher human consciousness, Aldous Huxley noted a significant parallel in ancient cultural traditions. Each of them contain lore of Other Worlds. In the Greco-Roman tradition there was the Garden of Hesperides, the Elysian Plain and the Island of Leuke. There was Circe in Italy and farther west the Islands of Blest. The existence of the Islands of Blest was so firmly believed that, in the first century B.C.E, Sertorius planned to send an exploring party from Spain to search for them. The Celts had the Isle of Avalon and the Japanese had Horaisan. The Hindus had Uttarakuru. The Judeo-Christian tradition had the Garden of Eden. In these Other Worlds resided the gods, spirits and nature beings that humans, in their more open primal state, communed with in various ways.[iv]
The Irish poet AE, also known as George Russell, wrote of his visionary experiences, “When I meditate, I feel in the thoughts and images that throng about me the reflections of personality; but there are also windows in the soul, through which can be seen images created not by human but by the divine imagination.” Commenting on these ruminations, Huxley wrote:
Our linguistic habits lead us into error. For example, we are apt to say, ‘I imagine,’ when what we should have said is, ‘The curtain was lifted that I might see.’[v]
The more that we are able to stay in the field, embracing dualities and then transcending them, the more we may witness and participate in the play of All That Is. The curtain descending to separate acts will be less and less frequent. Reader, take heart in knowing that as you have experienced these openings you have not gone off the deep end⏤only the deeper end. You have aligned with long revered traditions where unusual happenings are very real. While having visions are one way, there are any number of ways the curtain may begin to lift. What follows are snippets of experiences that illustrate a kaleidoscope of variations.
On the way to a spiritual retreat in Southern California, we passed a large bird lying on the side of the road, its wing raised like the flag on a mailbox. We swung around and went back to investigate. The bird turned out to be a great horned owl recently deceased. Not three feet from the owl laid approximately thirty perfectly preserved yellow butterflies in the grass. Unusual? Yes, but maybe not. What is the symbology of the owl, but mystery, wisdom, clear intent with action and, for many Native American tribes, sacred medicine? The great horned owl is endangered. What is the symbology of the butterfly, but metamorphosis, emerging from the cocoon of protective containment? Both the owl and the butterfly are related to flight. We gave the owl a ceremonial burial. The butterflies came to the retreat where a live owl couple made themselves evident frequently. The retreat was deeply transformational.
Under the full moon in India, we stood on the top of the main building of Diggi palace looking out over the grounds and over the walls of the compound to the city dwellings beyond. There was a silver light from the heavens that delivered a surreal quality to the closest buildings and vegetation below, permitting the black silhouettes of swooping bats with three-foot wingspans. Suddenly there was separation somehow, like we were in a bubble with the beauty of the bats, the trees and the old buildings. Yet, we were still part of the world. We heard the sound of traffic that was only a block away and yet somehow greatly removed. Minutes before, the air was thick with wood smoke. Then it was sweet and clear. We saw beyond India.
At a Native American sweat lodge in the Midwestern United States, the group was giving great attention to the exacting rituals of the leader as the participants prepared to enter the sweat. Standing in the middle of the woods, we heard the traffic of a nearby highway. Suddenly, there was an experience of timelessness that granted the woods, but removed the noise of traffic to a great distance as though two planes were existing side by side, not of each other. The practice was ancient.
Above Cusco, we were preparing to enter the Temple of the Moon. To the indiscriminate eye there was merely an insignificant bump in the landscape. Circumnavigating the rise, Don Américo brought us to the mouth protected on either side by the barely discernible carved snake and jaguar. It was dark. We felt our way through a passageway and came to a roughly circular, open chamber. Barely visible was a rounded heaviness hanging down from above. Don Américo said to us, “You are in the womb of Pachamama. You are yet to be born. Feel this sanctity and know the humanity of your parents.” Unaccountably, tears of joy and something unexplained streamed down my face. I stayed in the womb for a very long time. I did not want to leave. Finally, I felt something pushing me, saying it was time to go. Reluctantly, I made my way through the dark passageway…leaving to emerge. The sky was clear and the moon was full. I stood for a long time just gazing at her Mystery. The Magic all around me was palpable.
I had returned from Peru a couple of weeks before. I stood in Mountain Pose feeling the energy of my center. I took a small step forward with my right foot, leaving my left foot behind as though in mid-step. My arms hung at my sides, my wrists rotated so that my hands were turned upward in receiving. My neck arched as my eyes turned upward in Stargazer pose and…in that split second I was no longer practicing yoga. I was in a separate space-time back in Peru and the Temple of the Moon experiencing the Mystery of rebirth once again.
Lying comfortably on the massage table, there was soft drumming on the CD player in the background. My massage therapist had been to a workshop and was trying out some new moves. She asked me to turn over onto my stomach. After I did so, she brought my arms straight above my head and proceeded to fold them at the elbow and place my hands behind my head and on opposite shoulders. Instantaneously, I was somewhere else. I couldn’t tell where, but I was feeling intense confusion, not fear. I felt bound. I couldn’t see anything. I heard drumming and chanting in a circle around me. Why was I lying there in that manner? I normally took part in the circle. What was happening? Just as suddenly as I left, I was once again lying on the massage table as my massage therapist guided me into another position.
I went to the little burg of Snowmass Village in Colorado to do some writing. I spent much time in meditation and walking among the wildflowers. Words poured out of me into composition from a source that seemed to come from beyond me. For those days, I experienced a continuing altered state of existence as though I was myself, yet walked beside myself. Particularly during meditation, at odd moments during the days and in night dreams, I was the recipient of profound insights. In the following days, I read the very insights I had already received almost verbatim in books I researched
Science and Myth
Are there explanations for these occurrences? Possibly. We could spend much time debating the presence of signs and omens, dimensions of space-time and body memory against scientific evidence. However, if we choose to hang our hats on logical scientific data, the Mythic Realm will flee.
In writing of St. Thomas Aquinas, Huxley noted that nearing the end of Aquinas’ life he experienced what he called Infused Contemplation. After that, Aquinas refused to go back to work on his unfinished book.
Compared with this, everything he had read and argued about and written⏤Aristotle and the Sentences, the Questions, the Propositions, the majestic Summas⏤was not better than chaff or straw. For most intellectuals such a sit-down strike would be inadvisable, even morally wrong. But the Angelic Doctor had done more systematic reasoning than any twelve ordinary Angels, and was already ripe for death. He had earned the right, in those last months of his mortality, to turn away from merely symbolic straw and chaff to the bread of actual and substantial Fact.[vi]
In logic, we often find noise and the interminable voices that state “why not.” In listening, we dilute mythic experiences or eradicate the opening in order for them to appear at all. In the Andean tradition, they make note of ‘domestic’ and ‘undomesticated’ energy, the difference between social and natural energy. The wild, natural energy is called Salk’a. Don Américo explains the divergence in these two energies.
Domestic energy is really loud and it perturbs everything. In the presence of this energy, the condor flies away, the pumas hide, the Spirit goes and the Power leaves. The wolf will not sleep where the dog has slept and neither will the eagle sleep in the nest of the chicken. The more Salk’a energy that you have, the easier it is to work with silence and Magic. Then the animals come to you, the wind caresses your face and the river sings to you…because you speak their language.
Information sometimes comes to me from a region that is located in my upper right visual field. However, the information is most often not visual. But it can be. Sometimes it is not even conscious. I first noticed this activity when I would be seated in meditation and find my head had rotated to right of center point. As I would notice my head position, I would try to bring my head back to center. Invariably, like it was being drawn by a magnet, my head would slowly swing back to that ‘right’ position. For it to be otherwise, produced a struggle that took me out of the meditative state. As I accepted this phenomenon, I had an intuitive knowledge that something was being poured into my unconscious during these times. I also came to feel very safe with it.
Shortly after my acceptance of that phenomenon, I was the recipient of a true gift, nothing I consciously developed. It most often happened while I was in service to others. During the information gathering phase of my work with clients, they would tell their stories, and with prompting would go in widening circles with it. Invariably, I would suddenly know the central issue that wove its thread through the myriad challenges the person was having. These were the areas to be focused on in facilitating resolution.
I realized after a number of times having received these insights that I essentially went into a meditative state of deep listening. Also while the person talked, I frequently gazed into the upper right quadrant of my visual field. I also began to hear a somewhat hazy voice, almost indistinct, coming from that quadrant. I had to strain my ears to consciously hear it. There was an auditory channel of some sort, and it produced a solid knowing within me. Sometimes, the auditory input was shortly followed by an indistinct image that usually represented a gestalt of my clients overall patterns. Over time, I came to trust and accept this second phenomenon.
The gods decided to give me more. I began to get clear messages in the form of a very distinct, matter-of-fact, genderless voice. Again, it emanated from the upper right-hand quadrant and normally made itself known when I was in a deep listening state with a friend or client. The unusual aspect of these messages was that they came out as though they had been lifted from a book of famous quotations, and when received, always in precise form. Sometimes pictures followed that enhanced the meaning of the pronouncement. Invariably when I would repeat what I had received to the person, it would have deep meaning for them.
One particularly useful time was related to the earlier story in this book about Jack. It happened during the time of the vocal music sessions in Jaipur. Over dinner, Jack had told me the story of his search for love and the woman he had met some fifteen years ago. I found his story intensely interesting. After dinner, I was very much focused on an energy session with someone who had requested relief from an illness. Suddenly, my internal ‘advisor’ boomed out, That that eludes us most in life is what we are here to discover and learn, and that that we fear the most! In that second, I knew that message was intended for Jack.
The next day he sat down beside me as I was reading outside on the grounds of Diggi Palace. We fell back into conversation related to his story the night before. As I recounted the message I had received for him, a light came to his face. He had a realization, and spoke of the way he had created his own barriers to fulfillment.
Some time after my unseen advisor became vocal, I came across the theories of psychologist Julian Jaynes regarding the workings of the human brain. Largely based on the work of Wilder Penfield, a neurosurgeon, Jaynes put forth the idea, with some evidence to back it up, that the right side of the brain actually has a language center. However, it has become nearly inactive over the evolution of humankind. This language center is distinctly different than the language center of the left side of the brain, which is associated with our conscious self. Ancient peoples experienced this voice activated in the right side of the brain as being very authoritative, heard from locations outside themselves.
The voices were so compelling that they were forced to follow the words of direction. The voices were interpreted as divine intervention, that of the gods. In turn, the presence of a god was attributed to the locale of the voice⏤a mountain, river or stone. Jaynes argued that these curious proceedings were present during a time in history when life was simplistic, that the sides of the human brain were functioning more separately from each other. The language center in the right side of the brain would be activated and speak to the left side of the brain when there was need of noticing patterns or other aspects commonly charged to the right brain. The left brain would direct the fulfillment of the instructions.[vii] In our evolution, as times became increasingly complex the human brain began to function more wholly than separately. The voices of the gods were silenced. The major exception, Jaynes said, is in the auditory hallucinations experienced by schizophrenics, which were then subdued with drugs.[viii]
There is an important difference between auditory hallucinations of most schizophrenics and the messages I relate from my own exposure. While schizophrenics often experience their hallucinatory voices as repetitive and damaging in some aspect, my encounters have always been positive, aimed at a specific event and voiced only once.
Over time, as much of the world became more populated and complicated, indeed most of our ancestors left the simpler lifestyle behind…along with connection to the Cosmos. The voices of internal dialogue and external noise have now become so loud they drown out our silences and openings to other realms. For most of us in the modern world, we have to cultivate practices to obtain any glimpses of glorious simplistic stillness. Whereas, ancient peoples unknowingly cultivated it through their connections with the elements. Some of these people still exist.
While many Indigenous tribes use a plant teacher such as peyote or ayahuasca as an entry point, the Q’ero Indians of the High Andes ingest starlight as their sacrament. They live in pure energy and see the filaments, or light body, of others as a natural occurrence. Just by seeing someone’s energy field they can tell their placement in the community. There is no hiding and when a person’s frequency vibrates to the next level, it is also witnessed. No pronouncements are needed. The person’s place in the community and the roles just change.[ix]
The Appearance of Hermes
It is within stillness and connectedness perhaps that something is activated in the right brain. Logic and science defied, we find ourselves standing on a precipice. Hermes appears. Being the god of thresholds and transitions, he leads us on the sometimes awe-inspiring, sometimes tickling hermetic journey. He presents us with synchronicities and signs to catapult us even more fully into our journey.[x]
Rene Laventure’s field is ecopsychology. One afternoon, she was walking in the woods. That day she was in great need of some comfort, a confirmation. In her head she was railing against God, “Why is it only when I’m in crisis you give me a sign?” More figurative shaking of her fist ensued as she continued her walk. Unexpectedly, a large tree with a hollow in its trunk caught her eye. On the ground, protruding from the hollow was a snakeskin. A few steps farther, she took notice of a delicate, papery wasp’s nest hanging directly at eye level, a den of activity. Yet later in her walk, she stopped to rest, sitting on a tree stump. There she beheld a large spider’s web, perfected in nature.
Some months later, a friend did a spread of animal cards for Rene. The dragonfly was central to the spread. Researching the symbology, Rene discovered that the essence of the dragonfly transmutes light and works with illusions. They have a two-year lifespan. Rene was just emerging from a major shifting in her life that had begun two years prior. A short time after the reading, she was out walking once again. She stopped to rest and sat down. A dragonfly landed on her knee. They sat together. As she went to stand up, it lit on her chest before going its own way.
It has been Bob’s practice to walk ceremonially on his medicine wheel at night. He has consistently heard the voices of the gods and written the pronouncements on cards to pass on to others. There was also the story of the composer Ravel. While in North Africa, a disembodied Sufi Master appeared to him and gave him a composition. He named that composition Bolero.
The Comfort in Silence
Perhaps in all the stories written in this chapter what Jung called the Collective Unconscious, the archetypes of the ages, was being tapped. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake put forth a theory that sits right beside Jung’s in possibility. He found a good illustration in the case of the tit birds.
In 1921, a peculiar habit in the tit birds in Southampton, England was documented. In those days, milk was delivered to the door in bottles. Shortly after the early morning deliveries, the birds would break open the caps of the bottles and help themselves to the milk, sometimes drinking as much as two inches’ worth. It was observed in eleven species of tit birds. It was the habit of these birds to stay close to home, not wandering more than 15 miles. Yet, this learning on the part of the tit birds showed up in various places all over the British Isles plus Sweden, Denmark and Holland. Particularly notable is what happened in Holland. During the war years, milk bottles all but disappeared and were only used commonly again in 1947. Since the lifespan of the tits was less than the length of the war, it is unlikely that any would have been around when milk bottles were again used. Yet, shortly after their appearance, milk bottles were again tapped for their contents by the tits.[xi]
To explain these natural events, Sheldrake proposed the morphic field, a non-material region of influence containing a pooled or collective memory of a species, with much data to back up his theory. When one is in a state of resonance, an information transfer happens spontaneously on the basis of a past pattern or structure that is similar at any time in history. In this field of information, distance and space-time do not exist. It is as though all is now. Sheldrake said, “Morphogenetic fields are ‘probability structures,’ in which the influence of the most common past types combines to increase the probability that such types will occur again.”[xii]
Many of us want explanations to appease the logical mind. To know that Science is exploring these metaphysical planes and finding plausible explanations, gives us comfort somehow. Take comfort, but heed the warning. It was in over-analysis of inexplicable happenings and dogged seeking of concrete explanations that led us to lose contact with the Mythic Life in the first place.
The Q’ero know nothing of morphic fields or language centers of the brain. If we are technical about our inspirations, then those inspirations begin to have a certain hollow sound, devoid of resonance in the heart. It is the energy the Q’ero tap into, the musical possibility or the symbology in nature that our ancestors read wisping through the ether that provides us the creative impulse that endures.
The Sacred Triad
It is by engaging the third eye to invite awareness, and the heart chakra to invite compassion that beauty expands. The ancient yogis and religions that used the Prayer Pose as a posture were indeed much aware of this virtue. When we put our hands together in a prayer position, we are activating the chakras in the palms and fingertips. By bringing the praying hands up to chest level, the palm chakras engage with the heart chakra. As we bow our heads over praying hands, the chakras in the fingertips engage with the third eye. Here I see the forming of a sacred triad. Knowledge coming into the third eye engaged with the heart’s compassion becomes wisdom. The transfer is completed when received by the hands to produce inspired and compassionate action in the world.
In contrast, the pigeons of Diggi Palace point up what often happens instead. The walls of the music chamber are painted bright yellow overlaid with brilliantly frescoed patterns, urns and windows. The door is open and the pigeons think it is an invitation. The pigeons are fooled by the frescoed windows. They try to land, only realizing at the very last second that indeed there is no ledge. They are thrown off balance⏤surprised. Their claws scuffle with the wall and they quickly try to fly backwards and find a solid footing.
We are much like those pigeons. Life throws us a curve ball. We see something we don’t like or is unfamiliar to us. Many of us spend so much time in denial of one sort or another, tying up our attention and our energy.
Grace Inherits
Some years ago I regularly attended hatha yoga sessions that, interestingly enough, were held in a racquetball court next to active courts and sometimes a karate class. Through the echoes and sharp retorts of the balls hitting the walls and verbal explosions from the karate students, we practiced yoga. What better metaphor to use for learning to go inside and holding a space of peace. To fight against the noise would hold none. Hatha yoga is about stretching into a pose, playing with the edges and breathing through the extension all the while holding true to an inner line of energy. This keeps the student solid yet open.
The more we are able to maintain this state of Being the more diluted the boundaries of those morphic fields that conduct the knowledge of the ages to us will be. In this state of grace the interweaving of ordinary and non-ordinary realities become the norm, not fleeting events.
A man of pronounced humor, Swami Satyananda Saraswati said to a group of devotees, “In Sanskrit, the word ‘grace’ is made up of the words ‘do’ and ‘get’. So, what you do is what you get! Now, that’s grace!”[xiii]
Be in the note. Stay in the field. Allow the Mystery to guide you.
[1] Hindustani music is the classical form that originated in Northern India. Quite different from Western music, a drone or continual pitch is provided by the instruments tamboura, harmonium and/or sarangi creating the stability in a performance. The tabla (drums) offer the rhythmic structure. Against this backdrop a Raga is sung. Rather than harmony or key change, exploration is within all nuances of the musical note being sung which lends to the devotional aspect. SA (Do or C in the Western scale) is the keynote and represents God. Each of the other notes in the scale embody one of the elements of the Cosmos.
[2] RE, DHA and MA are notes in the Hindustani music scale equivalent to RE, LA and FA respectively on the Western scale.
[i] Thich Nhat Hanh. Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1991. 68–69.
[ii] Sri Karunamayee. Indian Vocal Music Program, Delhi & Jaipur, India. February 1998.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Aldous Huxley. Heaven and Hell. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1954. 99–100.
[v] Ibid. 92–93.
[vi] Aldous Huxley. The Doors of Perception. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1954. 78–79.
[vii] Julian Jaynes. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990. 84–125.
[viii] Ibid. 404–432.
[ix] Tom Best. Talk on Andean Shamanism. Prescott, AZ: Blue Heron Productions, May 1998.
[x] Allan Combs & Mark Holland. Synchronicity: Science, Myth and the Trickster. New York: Paragon House, 1990. 82–83.
[xi] Rupert Sheldrake. Morphic Resonance & the Presence of the Past: The Habits of Nature. Vermont: Park Street Press, 1995. 177–178.
[xii] Ibid. 108–109.
[xiii] Swami Satayananda Saraswati, Audience with Shree Maa, Sedona, AZ, April 1998.
All events described in this book are true. Some of the names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
Bio
Carla Woody is a spiritual mentor, writer and visual artist. She is the founder of Kenosis, an organization based in Prescott, Arizona, supporting human potential since 1999 through life enhancement coaching, retreats and spiritual travel programs working with Indigenous leaders and healers in the US, Mexico, Central and South America. In 2007 she founded Kenosis Spirit Keepers, a volunteer-run 501(c)3 nonprofit organization to help preserve Indigenous traditions threatened with decimation.
Table of Contents
Part I. THE NATURE OF THE JOURNEY
Chapter Two: Awakening to Consciousness
Part II. INVOLUTION
Chapter Three: Cultivating Mindfulness
Chapter Four: The Masks We Wear
Chapter Five: Things Buried Deep and Tended Well
Chapter Six: Bootcamp for the Soul
Part III. EVOLUTION
Chapter Seven: The Seasons of Our Times
Chapter Eight: Staying in the Field
Chapter Nine: The Un-Namable Sacred
Chapter Ten: The Pilgrimage Home
Permissions: The author has given great effort to locate copyright holders of any material other than her own that have been quoted in this book, and regrets if any have been inadvertently overlooked.
Calling Our Spirits Home: Gateways to Full Consciousness
Copyright 1999 by Carla Woody. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be directed to: Kenosis Press, P.O. Box 10441, Prescott, AZ 86304, info@kenosis.net.
Also by Carla Woody:
Standing Stark: The Willingness to Engage. Read in Illumination Book Chapters.
Portals to the Vision Serpent. Coming soon to Illumination Book Chapters.
