Calling Our Spirits Home: Gateways to Full Consciousness
Chapter Nine
The Unnamable Sacred
The contemplative waits in silence and when he is ‘answered,’
it is not so much by word that bursts into his silence.
It is by this silence itself suddenly,
inexplicably, revealing itself
to him as a word of great power.
⏤Thomas Merton
Outside, our group straggled through narrow back streets of Delhi. The walls of the buildings lining the lanes had involved themselves in a continuing struggle to keep from crumbling completely, the rubble of their unwon battles arranged haphazardly on the ground in front of them. Large-eyed children and malnourished dogs milled around us begging or just asking for acknowledgment, sometimes impeding the way. A man with a filthy bandage around his arm trailed most of us, but kept in close step with one particular member. The man repeatedly pointed to his wrapped arm and in a gravely, heavily accented voice parroted, “What’s your problem? What’s your problem? What’s your problem?” This line had made its way into his vocabulary probably mimicked from words originally directed toward him by some English-speaking person.
We drew attention from the open-air barbershop, the barber twisting his head while still holding the straight-edged razor at his customer’s throat. I could almost hear the quick intake of his customer’s breath, hoping the barber was not too distracted. The other customers, who were standing idly in a circle awaiting their turn, broke their conversation to look over at us intently. Continuing on, my eyes were drawn to the unexpected orange brilliance of some giant zinnia-like flowers against the backdrop of all the greyness. So distracted, I tripped over some trash in the street. But that was the external world.
We finally came to our destination. The few steps led us up to the doorway in the courtyard wall, the one through which we would pass to the internal world. These walls were clearly set apart from their neighbors by their well-tended appearance. Even the casual passerby might wonder about the nature of the space within. There was no sign to announce it. Moving through the doorway and into the courtyard I was struck by its pristine simplicity. Only occasional potted plants and a couple of flowerbeds graced the open space. But to the left there was another set of stairs leading upward to something beyond yet another enclosure. It was to this interior place that our group made its way. Passing through the entryway, there proved to be an inner sanctum, a small, stark-white domed building pierced every few feet by seven-foot onion-topped windows. The windows were covered by stone latticework that sought to hold inmost secrets and caused me to want to get close enough to peer inside. But there was no need. A latticework door swung outward to invite Pilgrims, Seekers, Priestesses and Priests to come inside and pay homage⏤for this was the Dargah of Hazrat Inayat Khan.[1]
We removed our shoes before entering, piling them outside the door. Slowly and silently we filed inside. The white marble floor felt cool to my feet and the white marble walls brought fresh relief to my eyes. In the middle of the room, a golden silk-covered platform was strewn with fuschia, orange and white flowers. The blossoms made their path up and over the headstone covered in Arabic writing. Hazrat Inayat Khan’s resting place was further enshrined by a wooden canopy held up by sturdy columns. Just inside the canopy, appropriately centered over the headstone, a wooden heart was flying.[2]
We each approached the foot of his shrine, knelt in tribute, prayed or made a sacred sign before finding a place to sit on the floor. As my turn came and I knelt on both knees, something found its way inside me⏤something hallowed. I carried it within me as I stood and made my way to sit near a far wall to quietly meditate. Then, glancing up, I read the Sufi invocation engraved on the wall behind Pir-o-Murshid’s[3] headstone, the words that have come to express my inward and outward intent.
Toward the One,
The Perfection of Love, Harmony and Beauty,
The Only Being,
United with All the Illuminated Souls
Who form the Embodiment of the Master,
The Spirit of Guidance.
Our Sufi leader indicated it was time for us to form a circle around the canopied shrine. As we stood holding hands, I looked at every face in that circle and saw Divinity shining. Back home we had the roles of merchant, musician, physician, artist, student, realtor and several others. But there at that moment, we shed our worldly occupations as devotees in step Toward the One. It touched my very core. We began the repetitive rhythmic movement and chanting that informs the Zikr° and connects Sufis to each other and their Beloved. La ilaha illa ‘Llah hu. La ilaha ill ‘Llah hu. La ilaha ill ‘Llah hu. There is no God but God. There is no God but God. There is no God but God.
As I felt consciousness fully awaken and move inside me, for just a brief moment, I opened my eyes. They fell on the young man directly opposite me in our circle, across Pir-o-Murshid’s resting place. He was gazing at me, too. Something of an incredible unnamably shared depth passed between us and bubbled up in me as a joy that I could not contain. As tears slipped down my cheeks, I knew that our Guide moved through me.
As We Are Born to our Journey
We are born into this existence with a purpose and sacred connection, often unknown to our Personalities, but fully known to our Inner Being. We have the ample lap of the Divine swelling around us from which to gain our sustenance. But we forget. Just as sparrows swooping and diving upon a crow, we are driven away from our remembrance. So do the labor pains of life do this, but they can give us our grounding from which to operate. Or they may take our grounding away from us depending upon our circumstances and the levels of our own real awarenesses of the happenstance. Whichever is the case, it is our special calling to bring our Selves back into alignment with Grace even as we walk upon the density of this earth. Any fright that we may feel is because we have forgotten this is our journey.
Sometimes a piece of our personality foundation is missing. We may have an experience or early years that cause so much pain⏤a pain that we have no capability to understand. Consequently, unable to bear it, the part that connects us to the unfearing Heart detaches. That part wanders lost while the Heart strains at its absence and the Personality seeks somehow to close the open space. In her book Soul Retrieval describing the shamanic process she uses, Sandra Ingerman focuses on this very phenomena.
As we enter the pitch blackness of the cave, my heart is beating fast. I know that we are in the Cave of the Lost Children, one of the most heart-wrenching places in all of the inner worlds.
As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see the outlines of hundreds of children of all races huddling together in the cave. Hundreds of huge, sad eyes⏤black, brown and blue⏤stare at me. My heart contracts with pain as I see them in their timeless beauty⏤lost, unwanted, and frightened. Always waiting.[i]
Tanya often got lost on the roadways of life. The signs to turn would be present, but she would find herself in a tranced-out state. Unaware and confused, she would continue straight until she reached a dead end. Then surprised, she would wonder how she had come to be there. She would find herself continually backtracking to begin her journey over again. But she was an intelligent person and finally began to notice that something was clearly amiss. To avert these misguided travels she carefully drew her route. She set out earlier than others going the same way. She doggedly followed her own map. She had some successes and arrived at her destination either on time or early, rather than late or not at all. Wanting desperately to believe that something now was going her way, she began to identify with the map until she became her map. Then came the proclamations issued from her own lips that She was the map and drew the way. Sadly, she became diverted from the journey.
Proclamations of this nature are a clear signal of loud desperation. The soul part had become disengaged at some point, even though a thin filament still attaches it to the whole Being. It wanders lost looking for its wholeness. In frustration, the Personality striving to ease the tension of the missing piece grabs onto what it can. The ego takes over to cover the existence of the frightened child, trying to own something for itself. But there is nothing to be owned, merely a flow to be engendered⏤a flow that carries us to remembrance and unity.
There is a wonderful story that is indeed a tribute to Murshid Samuel Lewis who founded the Dances of Universal Peace. One time at a gathering, Murshid Sam had begun to speak when a man came in late. Obviously inebriated, making noise and intentionally seeking to disrupt the aim of those assembled, he declared, “God sent me to be your teacher!” Murshid Sam smiled at him and said, “Who has God not sent to be my teacher?”
The Entrance to Unity
When we know the foundation of our identity it provides internal sanctity. We can hold it in our hearts and it informs the faith we carry and our actions in the world. We then have no need to name. Knowing that life’s labors seek to distract us and carry away our remembrance of this holy law, Initiates seek to keep it close within.
Wazifa practice is such an act of conscious remembering.[4] It is the distinct attuning to the wisdom, love and expansiveness that resides within us⏤those qualities that have been passed to all of us from beyond what our eyes can see. It is, therefore, an act of love and devotion that Sufis make to themselves as well as to their Guide. It is their faith that holds such qualities are present, causing the wazifa to awaken those parts within that may have forgotten. By chanting the specific wazifa, it generates a clear resonance of that quality in the body and the mind. It is the faith that such a thing exists that allows the floating ecstasy that gives further proof. Then resonance finds its way into the everyday actions of those who have activated them.
It is faith and not belief that spurs this practice. Beliefs can change based upon new information. There are many beliefs that we held in childhood that are no longer with us. In the Bible, Hebrews 1:11 tells us, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith may be tested, but true faith is a constant. It is the power of faith that Jesus used to heal the sick and create abundance when there seemed to be little.
It is the process of our living that tells of who we are. Hazrat Inayat Khan’s words on meditation speak as a metaphor to this truth.
No one can claim to be meditative. For a meditative person need not say it with the lips. His atmosphere says so, and it is the atmosphere alone which can say whether it is true or false. Once I asked my spiritual teacher what was the sign of knowing God. He said, “Not those who call out the name of God, but those whose silence says it.” In other words, it is no longer the singer who sings the song, but the song sings the singer.[ii]
The more we operate in the higher planes, the stiller will be our waters within and the deeper our resonance with a higher dimension of living. Once after Zikr and a time of sharing, one member stood and spoke poetically, The radiance of her breath showered perfume. This beautiful scrap of original prose describes the sensual nature of being in the presence of a Priestess or Priest. It is palpable. We can feel grand presences when they walk into a room. Their voices caress us. Their words speak beyond our hearing. When they turn their eyes upon us, we know they are looking into our very souls. Their interior rivers run silently yet crash upon our shores seeking to round our jagged edges and ferret out those smooth polished stones of ours laying buried, unexposed to the air. They teach us without telling because they dwell in the comfort of their Homes.
A Certain Humility
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was such a man. He taught by his example. Let my life be my meditation. He wore the dhoti or loincloth, the garment of the “Untouchables” of his native India. He mixed with the poor and rich alike in his work for basic human rights. Gandhi often went to prison and when released would say, “I am coming back.” Such respect was given him that Lord Irwin, Viceroy of India at the time who represented the very people who perhaps should have been Gandhi’s political enemy, stood as Gandhi remained seated during their first introduction to each other.[5] Even though just released from prison after having been put there by the viceroy, Gandhi smiled at him, offered him goat’s milk and dates and said, “How are you, my friend?” His followers called him by the title Mahatma, meaning Great Soul. But he never referred to himself as such.[iii]
One evening at the Dances of Universal Peace, I was honored to come into contact with a woman whose very presence hinted at a similar humble and blessed personage. We were performing a quite beautiful three-tiered dance referred to as “The Healing Circle.” In the innermost circle, a few people sat on the floor with the small group of musicians and chanted Zikr. At the same time in the outermost ring, dancers performed a simple movement that took them around the circle while intoning the mantra Ya Shafee! Ya Kafee!⏤O Healer! O Remedy! Between the innermost and the outermost spaces, those of us in the middle circle stood facing a partner. Lifting our arms to the heavens we sang, Let me do thy will, Al-lah, Al-lah. Bringing our arms down and crossing them first over our own hearts and then connecting with our partners by placing one hand on their hearts we continued, Let me do thy will, Allah, Al-lah! We then would pass to our next partners and repeat our surrender. The spirit of the dance lifted my heart and seemed to speak of my very existence as I sang and moved from one partner to the next. And then a teacher came to me. With a slight figure and short brown hair, she was a person that most people would pass on the street without noticing⏤except for one thing. Through her wire-rimmed glasses her eyes looked deeply into mine as though she was clearly gazing into the eyes of her Beloved, beseeching me with her song, her whole body mirroring her devotion. Her rapture was so genuine that she unselfishly extended its transmission to me. There was such an aura of reverent humility about her that I felt truly humbled in the face of her greatness. And each subsequent time we partnered during the Healing Circle, my rapture increased by her touching me with hers. I was truly sorry when the dance ended and another began. I never learned her name, but her name did not matter. It was almost as if by seeking to put a form around her, it would demean her. It is her Divine Mother energy that I will take with me through my life.
It is through the great souls that have walked the thickness of this earth plane like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa or the extraordinary examples of everyday humans inviting in the Divine that we can learn to be in the world, but not of the world. Nearly every day, such saints were faced with trials. They were surrounded by many forms of abject sadness and injustices of the world. By comparison, what most of us face is puny. Yet, we often wrestle with what life gives us, knead it like bread dough and allow it to rise until it suffocates us. When we do so, we are distracting our Selves and voluntarily dying to our purpose here. We can learn well from the stories of saints and use the strategies they offer us on our own journeys. Gandhi certainly did not ignore the sadness he saw around him, nor did he wallow in it. While he was firm in his convictions, he did not display righteous anger toward the English or his fellow countrymen who perpetuated the caste system, nor did he suppress it. He stayed in the field of his center while, in fact, welcoming the witnessing of the state of things. Then, he transmuted these energies in such a way that they lost their toxicity as they blended with his own energy. This transmutation just served to propel him higher in active consciousness toward his purpose. Gandhi clearly invited the demon in to tea and then dissolved the demon with his own amber liquid.
Teachers in Obscurity
With the publication of his book Autobiography of a Yogi in 1946, Paramahansa Yogananda revealed to the world the existence of the Mahavatar Babaji.[6] He gave only a hint that Babaji deemed appropriate for our knowledge during these times. While Paramahansaji noted that such great prophets as Jesus and Krishna were here for a spectacular purpose and then left this plane, Babaji has been here for centuries living somewhere in the snow-filled Himalayas⏤his purpose evolutionary rather than revolutionary. There is no recording of his birth or his parentage. He appears in the form of a young man perhaps twenty-five years of age, but people may notice that he casts no shadow. He continues to exist in bodily form to assist teachers and prophets in their purpose. Kabir, the medieval poet, and Lahiri Mahasaya, a guru of the nineteenth century, were initiated by Babaji. Babaji appeared regularly to Paramahansaji in the twentieth century. By communing with the Christ Consciousness, the two fully illuminated Masters enjoin their energies to guide us toward the Light and away from the baser ways of materialism, racism and religious sectarianism. Paramahansaji wrote that he was not surprised that there was no historical reference to Babaji.
The great guru has never openly appeared in any century; the misinterpreting glare of publicity has no place in his millennial plans. Like the Creator, the sole but silent Power, Babaji works in a humble obscurity. Such masters always veil themselves from the gross public gaze and have the power to become invisible at will. For these reasons, and because they generally instruct their disciples to maintain silence about them, a number of towering spiritual figures remain world-unknown.[iv]
But anyone has access to avatars such as Babaji. Lahiri Mayahasa said, “Whenever anyone utters with reverence the name of Babaji, that devotee attracts an instant spiritual blessing.”[v]
This is the role of a Master, bodied or disembodied. We in Western culture have difficulty understanding this concept so readily understood in many parts of the world where the focus is of a more spiritual nature. During a small group discussion near my home, one member made a comment about being aligned with a Master and another member sputtered, “I won’t fall into that one!” Perhaps it is because few of us in this society have had an opportunity to be in the presence of a Master that many are cynical. When we have had that fortune, there is no mistaking the value of it. In Murshid Sam’s words, “It’s like connecting the wire to the generator. That’s what allows the electrical current to run through it.” Being in touch with a Master does not ensure that it will necessarily be a pleasant experience, but it will always be a learning experience. Just as an electrical current can provide us with inspirational light that brings an ecstatic calm, it can also give us the painful jolt of an electrical shock to point out to us those places where we need healing. The Master justly delivers to us both of these polarities and allows no excuses.
Sometimes the teacher comes with no form. Jacques Lusseyran was a leader in the French Resistance for youth during World War II, himself only fifteen years old at the time. There was something very special about Jacques. Beyond the fact that he had become totally blind at the age of eight, he had inner sight. When he ceased to try and regain what was external to him and explored inward, he came to realize that he had an internal radiance that acted as a beacon of sight for him. Even though blind, he saw continuous intense light and color and he was able to “see” others in a way that they could not hide. Potential new recruits for the Resistance were brought to the “blind man” for evaluation, some six hundred spending a brief time under his review within a year’s time.
At the age of eight he discerned that he was not making the light, that it came from outside of him. He was merely a passageway because it did not originate from him. But he found that there were times when it left him.
It happened every time I was afraid. If, instead of letting myself be carried along by confidence and throwing myself into things, I hesitated, calculated, thought about the wall, the half-open door, the key in the lock; if I said to myself that all these things were hostile and about to strike or scratch, then without exception I bumped or wounded myself. I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly, because, as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes, and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside. But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light.[vi]
Jacques was betrayed to the Gestapo by the only recruit on whom he had hesitated, but signed on anyway. He was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp and survived. He said he owed it to the light that continued to burn inside him. In turn, he radiated that light to fellow prisoners and hundreds came to confide in him and seek solace.
There are teachers and guides of many sorts. People near the transition of death often report seeing a loved one who has passed or perhaps a spiritual teacher who exists in another plane. These presences are comforting to those who are taking that journey, knowing that someone familiar awaits. Something similar is true for those at the start of life here. As we are born we are still divinely connected, open and aware of what people who have been living long in this density have largely lost. It makes sense that we are ushered in to life here just as we may be escorted out, and that our ushers take a form that we would understand.
When I was very young I had what was later described to me as an imaginary playmate. He was a bear just about my size. I saw him clearly and was quite adamant about it. My tolerant parents had to set a place at the table for him and forever watch where they were sitting. When I was old enough to go to kindergarten and out into the world, my bear gradually disappeared from sight. We could say that I was just an imaginative child who found the story of Goldilocks attractive and invented a playmate, having no brothers or sisters. But I have come to sense otherwise. I had to be convinced to come into this world. My time for appearance was juxtaposed with great loss in my family. My paternal grandfather passed suddenly immediately before I was born and my maternal grandmother was preparing for her journey even during my conception and left soon after I arrived. My mother’s labor was very long and intense, but after many hours I finally allowed myself to be birthed. Strangely, even to this day I think and refer to myself as a “late bloomer.” But I’ve always felt blessed and protected in my life and often feel a presence with me. It doesn’t matter that she no longer wears a bear’s body. She has always given me comfort.
Some people would be prone to argue against the existence of spiritual guides, angels, or Masters. There had been controversy for years about whether Carlos Castaneda’s writings about Don Juan Mateus, his Yaqui teacher, were true or a perpetuated hoax. It could be that Don Juan did not exist in this space-time, but in another. Only Carlos Castaneda knows the answer to the questions asked. This I know: Don Juan was surely a Master. His teachings tell the tale.
I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. Does this path have a heart? The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path.
For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length.
And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly.[vii]
In the words of a friend who had studied and used Castaneda’s work extensively as his own practice: ask yourself these questions. Does it work? Where does it take you? To the ego or to the Divine? There we have the answer for any questions toward the validity of a guide.
Issuing An Invitation
To hear the messages, we need only invite them in. Sometimes our teachers get impatient waiting for us. On many occasions when I am wrapped up in the material plane, I begin to get a sense that someone is energetically rapping their knuckles on my skull trying to get my attention. It does. That is when I know I have forgotten my practice for too long and many riches are waiting for me. I cannot remember a time when I did not bow to this reminder.
Yet when we bring our meditative states back with us into ordinary reality, that in and of itself issues the invitation because the veil then remains thin between the two worlds. The inspirations and insights we receive are the gifts from the Creator. Just as Jacques Lusseyran said, we are the passageways. Whenever I feel my ego beginning to believe that it is the originator, something profound happens and I fully realize that the more I know, the less I know.
In India, most temple art is unsigned. Generations who created the art recognize the inspiration comes from higher wisdom moving through them. I am the writer of this book, but am I the author? There are someone else’s words that flow through me onto these pages. There is some signal that has gone out for events to align themselves so that I may write about them. Nearly every day, someone says something to me at just the appropriate time that finds its ways into the sequencing of the pages here. As I write this book, it writes me. I am merely the recorder.
I can say that I am a healer only in the sense that we are all healers and heal ourselves nearly every day. Words may come from my mouth as a metaphor or a question asked in a certain way that generates a response in someone else toward their own healing. But quite often the words I speak come from somewhere beyond my training, as though someone else had spoken them. If it does come from me, it is only from that source within my deeper identity of connection to something so sacred that I cannot name it. The answers to everything are vibrating in the ether. We need only to attune our intent to receive what we need for it to find its way to us.
The Power of Silence
There is no word in the Quechua language for “thank you.” To say “thank you” separates the person from his state. It then creates an ‘otherness’ rather than a ‘oneness.’ Paramahansaji said the same thing when he was telling a story to his students. “The moment you utter your love, some of that pure feeling has flown from your heart and become mixed with the foulness of the mouth; the germs and taint of the lips have soiled it.”[viii] The state of loving appreciation is most powerful when silently felt and shown.
So it is true in the outer spaces we may travel where Mystery is experienced. From these spaces, I cannot tell you who I am because who I am does not matter. I am everyone and everything and nothing at the same time. In these spaces there is a language of no language where only silence prevails. The Upanishads talk of the elusive quality of these spaces that our minds cannot grasp. “Not inside knowledge, not outside knowledge, not knowledge itself, not ignorance.” The description is written in the negative because we can only fully identify what it is not.[ix]
Should we try to capture this Magic, put a form around it and tell its secrets, it will bite us and quickly leave. Having known the Mystery, we would ache in excruciating longing, experiencing the gaping hole it had left.
Malidoma Somé talked of what he calls a secret homing device that his tribe, the Dagara, instill during initiation rites to prevent anyone from inadvertently or purposefully revealing sacred rites or from showing power. At the first word, the person feels as though they are choking. “There are powers, that like a fish out of water, cannot function in the open air.” To reveal them, puts an end to the powers.[x]
Similarly, Mato-Kuwapi, a Santee-Yanktonai Sioux, spoke just before his death in 1915, “The Sun Dance is so sacred to us that we do not talk of it often.” In Judaism, Yahweh, the personal name of God, was prohibited from tongues around the third century B.C.E. Only the high priest was considered perfect enough to say the name and thereby acted as the intermediary for the people. He recited the name for the masses on Yom Kippur inside the Temple’s Holy of Holies. Even today, strict Jews pen “G-d” when writing.[xi]
The Great Initiation
By the time Seekers are facing the awarenesses or non-awarenesses discussed in these foregoing paragraphs, they have already begun their initiation rites. They know that this is so through the increasing flow in their lives and a certain detachment that lives within them. They pay attention to impulses drawing them to certain places, people or events and follow their lead. Not knowing what awaits them, they find meaning and purpose in what they find there. Hazrat Inayat Khan wrote of the life of the mystic.
The whole life of the mystic is mapped on this principle…a voice from within that tells him “go here,” “go there,” or “leave”…Therefore, while others are prepared to explain why they are doing something…the mystic cannot explain, because he himself does not know. The one who knows little, knows most; and those who seem to know more, know the least.[xii]
The life of the mystic is so well expressed in The Sun card, the nineteenth card of twenty-one in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, signaling there are yet two more wisdoms ahead. Two naked children, a boy and girl, are grasping hands and looking into each other’s eyes, cueing an integration of the male and female. They are placed before a garden wall showing that there is no going back. But the sun shines down to warm their nakedness and shine a light on the path. A true rebirth has begun. Tarot historians note that the Tarot Sun children represent emergence from the Womb of Darkness into the primal paradise and a state of bliss.[xiii]
Whether Seekers choose to go through a formal initiation ceremony such as Sufis and many other traditions do or not, they have gone through a surrendering process and have been initiated by the Divine. The Divine knows their secret names that they may not even know themselves, but sense in every way because they are now Priestesses and Priests dwelling within the temple of the soul. And their internal worlds shape their external existences.
Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the changing scenes of Autumn.
I have said enough about moonlight,
Ask me no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars, when no wind stirs.[xiv]
⏤Ryo-Nen
[1] A Dargah is a shrine and burial site. Hazrat Inayat Khan was the Sufi saint who brought the Sufi tradition to the West in the years 1910 through 1926. Hazrat is a title of respectful esteem meaning Presence.
[2] The winged heart is the symbol of the Sufis.
[3] Roughly translated from the Persian Pir-o-Murshid means Elder Guide.
° Zikr is a Sufi prayer practice done alone or in groups, using small repetitive head or body movements and a mantra to lift the devotees out of the worldly plane to connect with the Divine energy.
[4] In the Sufi tradition, wazifas are the Ninety-nine Attributes of Allah chanted in Arabic. Each one calls upon a particular quality of God. A student of Sufism chants a wazifa, such as Ya Aleem meaning O All Knower, normally 108 times aloud, keeping track using prayer beads. The chanting continues with the internal voice for another number of times and then, the student releases the wazifa and just sits with the breath and the inner vibratory energy of the wazifa. Particular wazifas are usually passed on for chanting by the teacher to the student.
[5] It was normal protocol at the time for maharajas to remain standing until the English viceroy had spoken to them and invited them to sit.
[6] Mahavatar means Great Avatar. From the Sanskrit, avatar refers to the descent of Divinity into the form of flesh.
[i] Sandra Ingerman. Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 53–54.
[ii] Hazrat Inayat Khan. Spiritual Dimensions of Psychology. New Lebanon, New York: Omega Publications, 1981. 109.
[iii] Paramahansa Yogananda. The Divine Romance. Los Angeles: The Self-Realization Fellowship, 1986. 118–119.
[iv] Paramahansa Yogananda. Autobiography of a Yogi. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1946. 345–347.
[v] Ibid. 348.
[vi] Jacques Lusseyran. And There Was Light. Parabola, 1998. 19–20.
[vii] Carlos Castaneda. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1968. 1–116.
[viii] Paramahansa Yogananda. The Divine Romance. 242.
[ix] Satchidananda, 74.
[x] Malidoma Patrice Somé. Ritual: Power, Healing and Community. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. 63.
[xi] Panati, 288–289.
[xii] Hazrat Inayat Khan. The Inner Life. Boston: Shambhala, 1997. 60.
[xiii] Walker, 125–127.
[xiv] Aldous Huxley. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row, 1945. 138.
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.
