One of the thoughts that gets most sent to me (either verbally or via thoughtform) is that because I work with the dark that I must not work with the light (or something to that effect).

Others will go as far as to admonish me, or put negativity my way because I do work with the “dark”, and more than that I have compassion for “dark” things.

This is not only directed at me, but is the experience of most actual spiritual workers, shamans, witches, folk practitioners, etc. Most of these practices have been given a shiny coating of peace and love to the extent that anyone doing any actual spiritual work is perceived as “bad” while those who are play-acting and putting their puritanical ideals of what “light” means are “good”– at least in their own minds.

This is sad because historically spiritual methods and paths that have been a full spectrum of practices (in some cases for thousands of years) have now been diluted to appease the minds of new-agers. This has caused most knowledge, books, and message boards (everything from Shamanism to Witchcraft to Voodoo/Vodou and Hoodoo) to be filled with new agers who know nothing about the practices telling traditionalists or people that have studied this work for decades that anything not their own particular brand of “love and light” is bad. Due to this movement traditional practices are being represented to the outer commercial market as being this extremely surface version that has essentially been stripped of its power, knowledge, and spirituality in deference to the love and light movement.

The truth is that we cannot have the light without the dark… or the dark without the light… and anyone doing any sort of actual spiritual work will realize quickly that those labels are created out of fear by people who are not interfacing with anything of importance spiritually.

It is easy to put labels on things like a James Bond movie: James Bond= good, Russian spy (or whatever)= bad. In fact, most of the “lightworkers” who claim to work with anything dark (spirits, beings, elementals, demons) are doing so out of this dichotomy. Life isn’t this simple. The spiritual world isn’t this simple.

I have been doing spiritual work professionally for a while now, and interfacing with different spiritual realities for a very long time now. I know that once you get out of your own self-created world that the highest, shiniest angelic energy may be fierce enough to give you a headache for three days and blow out your microwave. This same energy may not care about you– it simply knows that you have the appropriate calibration/energy/ability to interact with it.

Similarly, something that is considered “demonic” can be easy and straightforward to work with– pulling no punches and telling you exactly how it is and what they need in order to leave a person, or family alone.

I am under no illusions, by the way (another new-ager favorite) that there is no such thing as evil. There is. This, like many things (curses, spirits, energy, etc), can only be denied by people who have not experienced evil and wish to remain ignorant of it. There are all sorts of energies out there that can be categorized as “dark” and “evil” because they are dark and evil.

But we are largely in a sea of thoughtforms, and most of what people encounter is either a simple spirit (former human) that they have decided is a “demon” or has told them they are a demon (kind of like someone you meet bragging at a club about how much money they make or something). Plenty of people are self-creating all sorts of demons out of fractured parts of their psyche. Even so, what I am simply stating is that something considered the darkest of the dark can be easy to get along with and understand, and something that is the lightest of the light can cause issues and may not care about you at all.

So this idea of only working in the light is false. What the person is most likely doing is creating a sort of cocoon for themselves, a sort of illusory spiritual reality of their own creation based on their own person belief systems, ethics, and emotional needs from the spiritual world.

This is why so many white people have “Native American” spirit guides (seriously, nobody has a Mexican spirit guide?) and why their guides (some from thousands of years ago supposedly) talk exactly like them, tell them what they want to hear, and are singularly and positively “light”.

The light is like anything else. There are different shades of it, different energies… and when you truly begin to work in the light, or with light beings or energies you are likely going to have unpleasant physical symptoms (at least for a while) while you work with them. They might not care about you personally, you are simply a vessel for them or someone that has the ability to work with them.

The idea that everything in the spirit world is in love with you, cares about your path, your personal belief systems (and piled on traumas, restrictions, and issues you have carried forward into this lifetime) is really odd if you think about it logically. Why would Archangel Michael have a personal interest in you? Especially if you have not developed a relationship with him, which most people simply don’t know how to do properly.

When we go beyond the constructs of the light we have created for ourselves based on our needs for the spirit world we discover real light. Spirits, beings, energies, angels, deities, elementals (you get the picture) that can bring us a lot of light, that can bring the light of pure divinity into this world. But most of us need to get over ourselves a bit and stop creating the spiritual realms out of our own needs to interface with them. And most people will not. We would rather believe that something is singularly white, pure, light, and singularly and almost obsessively involved with us than think that even the lightest beings have complex interests and understandings way beyond our own constructed illusions, and the needs of our fractured and traumatized Self.

If we are able to rise above (metaphorically) even the lightest archangel we may find ourselves directly in flow. With source. If we are going to talk about light energy, this is what it is all about. Pure flow washing through you. It is beautiful, sacred… a state of pure grace. Words are indescribable for this state which is why I (and others) simply call it “flow”. Because that is what it feels like.

The world, the cosmos, everything inside and outside of ourselves is made up of currents. When we are able to let go of our traumas, our illusions, we are able to find this place of flow.

A lot of people describe this state as being one of perfection, in which our lives will be filled with bliss and light and love. And it is. But what most people don’t understand (especially those who are still in the stage of categorizing dark=evil, light=good) is that you can have bliss and pain at the same time, despair and joy.

Dark and light is simply a continuum. 

As spiritual workers, or those interested in a spiritual path, we have one of two choices, seemingly:

1. Put ourselves in a cocoon or new-age sort of bubble where we self-create most of our spirituality. This allows for us to feel in control, to create things out of our own puritanical constructs, and to never really interface with anything outside of ourselves. In this way we can believe that the cosmos itself is centered around us, our thoughts, and our needs. We can remain comfortable and secure in our beliefs and anything (any thought, opinion, direct experience) that we come across that does not fit it we can simply cast aside as false.

In this manner we do not progress, but we are comfortable and secure with what we believe to be true about our spiritual reality. Many of the people in this category talk a good game about their “shadow” and doing personal work, but you will often find them judging others, not spiritually progressing, and not really understanding anything of a spiritual nature. This is because they don’t want to. The self-created is comforting, illusion is comforting. We feel in control, we feel like we are the center of the Universe, we can tell ourselves that we understand everything, we do not have to go into the beautiful, wild free-fall of category #2

2. We can work with a full spectrum of consciousness and continually unfold. We can realize that we are not the center of the cosmos, that the spirit world does not revolve around us and our needs or puritanical constructs. We can be wild, we can experience freedom. We will continually progress with the knowledge that whatever we know, however much we know, that we do not know very much.

The more light that we become the more darkness comes to us. Either our own or from outside sources. We begin to realize that the lighter you are the more you actually interface with darkness as well as the full spectrum of reality. Rather than hide from it, ignore it, or insert ourselves into a bubble we go beyond simple duality and constructs such as dark/light and realize that things are exceedingly simple, and not-so-simple at the same time.

We can directly experience the light, the dark both within and outside of ourselves. We can comfort the darkest parts of ourselves and feel compassion for the darkest elements of the Universe. We can realize that the dark and light are just constructs and that the darkest thing can also be light. We can work directly with the light and feel a flow state that goes way beyond anything that we could even imagine or self-create for ourselves.

The light is wonderful. But it is beyond our constructs, our own needs for the Universe, our own needs for individual guides or Gods. It just is.

In our pursuit to become intellectualized, “higher” animals, we have lost our inherent primal nature. While we all appreciate the modern appliances and way of life that allows for computers, air conditioning, and educational pursuits, we have in our pursuit of such things demonized, ignored, and cast away a vital aspect of ourselves.

Our primal selves. The animalistic force that is within all of us. The energy that does not wish to think, to reason intellectually. The energy that wishes to act, to claw, scream, whimper, stomp its feet on the ground, have sex, make love, be in nature… the aspect of ourselves that may be murderous, basic, evil, hate, and is our primal, natural, animal instinct.

So why return to this? Why acknowledge this? Most of our spiritual pursuits are about finding and acknowledging our “higher” selves. We find angels and discover ourselves as divine. We may find joy. We go after that which is “light and love”. We begin defining anything that is not “light and love” as not spiritual.

But that is not all there is. That is not all spirituality is. When we ignore any aspect of ourselves, when any part of ourselves is subconscious it will act out its most subconscious desires in patterns that may confuse us. We may chastise ourselves for “awakening” while thinking poorly about someone who cut us off in traffic. We may pretend to be “love and light” and still gossip, judge, and hate those different than us. We may be spiritual and create animals and earthly “spiritual helpers” that are fuzzy, warm, and deprived of any animal instincts. We may begin to believe that “awakening” is about “ascension” and is completely separate from our physical lives, our sexual instinct, our primal needs and emotions.

When we separate from our primal selves that aspect of ourselves begs to be noticed. We gravitate towards the activities and patterns that will satiate it, but without understanding these patterns will simply repeat. In mundane terms, there is a reason why the states in the U.S. that wish to teach only abstinence education to children and teenagers, that are anti-gay marriage, and anti-abortion are also the states that have the highest rates of pornography usage. In mundane terms, there is a reason why as a country and as a world (for the most part, some countries excluded) we are so sexually deprived and fixated on young girls as beacons of sexuality because the idea of adult sexuality creates fear. In mundane terms, there is a reason why we are always at war, creating violence, and spewing hatred towards one another.

When we do not recognize and work with our primal selves this energy goes out into our lives as individuals… but it also goes out into the world as a whole.

Until we recognize our primal selves and learn how to work with even our most base instincts in this world we will not fully be conscious. Until we recognize that our spiritual natures are not all “love and light” but can include even the most murderous, scratching, clawing, sexual, primal instincts we are not awakened. As a culture, as a world, when we do not work with, understand, and love the aspects of ourselves that are animalistic, sexual, primal in nature we as a culture and a world unconsciously create scenarios to satiate our primal selves.

When we as individuals are able to recognize our primal selves we can begin to feel compassion for this thrown away, scolded, and judged piece of ourselves. When we are willing to come away from this idea that spirituality is all things– higher self, lower self, divine, animalistic, fierce, smooth, flowing, kind, compassionate, violent, angry, sexual, peaceful, loving, hating, energetic, emotional, mental, spiritual, physical– we can transcend the illusions that are so commonly perpetuated in the awakening community and truly awaken. And more than that, we can recognize, reconcile, and love a piece of ourselves that we have cast away… and in doing so we can become more embodied, more awakened, and more compassionate towards ourselves. We can fully become who we truly are.

Making peace with our most violent instinct, our most primal may seem like the least “spiritual” idea to many of you. If this is true, question why. Question why spirituality needs to be about a certain brand of illusory light… the same light, the same rules, the same illusions that are commonly taught to make people believe that spirituality is anything but physical, anything but right here and now, anything but emotional… anything but your every-day lives. There is an agenda to this illusion. There is a reason why this illusion has been perpetuated for centuries. It is because it keeps us from ever becoming whole, it keeps us from going from seeker to sought, and it keeps us from truly awakening. We are never truly satiated by these illusions because they are not what we need to truly awaken, to truly become whole. So we continue looking and buying the same illusion again and again, the same books and thoughts from different gurus/teachers again and again… but we never find what we are looking for… which is wholeness, reconciliation of all parts of ourselves, and our true divine nature… which is rooted in love for all aspects of ourselves.

Our primal selves are playful, joyful, devious, fun… they can teach us a lot. When we engage with them, when we make them conscious we no longer have the repression, the rules and restrictions that have been handed to us by ourselves, our families, by society, by others who consider themselves “spiritual”. When we can make peace with the inner violence, with the sexual currents within us, with the hatred, with the desire to scream and slash and run, when we are conscious of every bit of ourselves we no longer subconsciously (or consciously) lash out at the world… and we have taken responsibility for that small parcel of energy that has gone out into the world making our world such a violent, unconscious, unfeeling, and quite frankly, brutal, place to be.

My first book, the Spiritual Awakening Guide, is available on Amazon now. It goes over types of spiritual awakenings, the spiritual journey as a whole, and symptoms of spiritual awakening in a pragmatic, non-dogmatic way. You can get it here or here (kindle version). You can contact me for inquiries about sessions and the work that I do.

Many of my blogs, I realize, are utilized to deconstruct popular myths or illusions about spiritual, psychic and shamanic practices as well as the true, complex, and multifaceted process that is spiritual awakening. I do find this necessary work, and am passionate about it, and hope that it helps many of you to critically think in your own way about the world you live in and your own awakening process.

But in dispelling illusion and being critical I do recognize that there is seemingly a focus in my blogs on the difficult, or perhaps even negative aspects of awakening. In dispelling the illusions that are so pervasive in this world, especially in many spiritual organizations, communities, and teachers/gurus… the exact place you would think we may be looking for truth… the positive, profound, and even blissful aspects of awakening tend to get lost.

Awakening is blissful. It is beautiful. Its purpose is for you to know exactly who you are, why you are here, and what you as an individual can bring to this world uniquely and individually. It is also about merging with source, God, light. As we realize our own divinity we are able to feel, see, and sense divine flow as a whole.

We realize that we are a drop in the ocean and the ocean in a drop.

This means that we realize that we are divine, we are light, we are much more than what our physical bodies are, what even our family is, or society, or even the world is. We realize the entirety of the flow that permeates every reality (divine flow), we can hear, taste, and sense this flow. We merge with this flow, with oneness.

I have written critically about oneness before, and how it is different than what is perpetuated in modern spiritual thought. And it is. The total dissolution of individual identity is momentary. It is important. But we are not intended to walk around as undifferentiated blobs of oneness, thinking that we are the same as every person around us in abilities, characteristics, and other attributes.

This dissolution into oneness allows for us to get over ourselves, basically. To lose the fear of physical death. To let go of identification with a temporary, physical body. We do not realize how much fear we have wrapped up around the fear of dying and death until we transcend it. It is enormously freeing, and allows for us to act and be in this world in a much different way than we once did.

Oneness also allows for us to feel connected to others around us, but more importantly, to God/source. It is wonderful if we feel connected to people, it really is. But the entire spiritual awakening process is about realizing how we are a part of source, and we have actually never left source.

We have a huge wound in ourselves because we believe the illusion that we are separate from source. We look for ways to fill this void. On the surface physical levels this may be drugs, sex, shopping, tv, technology, etc. When we awaken it is through taking workshops, reading books, and entering seeker mode– perpetually looking for something that we often cannot define and can never find.

We do will not understand how much energy we have put into seeking until we find, and directly experience, what we are looking for. The realization that we are with source… that despite our outer wrappings that we have never left… allows for us to transcend seeker mode and become sought. Seeking is exhausting, when we become sought we have a lot more energy. We may not need to sleep as much, and the fatigue that is so pervasive in the spiritual awakening process begins to lift.

Being awakened really is bliss. It is being held. It is being loved. One of the biggest spiritually based issues in this world is that we are looking for bliss and love and safety in the wrong places. We continually cast our nets out looking for anything to help us become less isolated, less afraid, more loved, and more safe. We create illusions upon illusions to try to convince ourselves that we are safe, we are in control, we are not alone. Awakening allows for us to see that human love, human safety, the very human act of coming together and being in our external, physical, daily lives will never provide us the type of love that we truly crave. Humans are all flawed (even those who are awakened or pretending to be) and are not capable, in their human physical wrappings, to provide the depth of love, bliss, and sensation of being held that we really require to feel whole.

Awakening allows for us to be held by source, by the spiritual mother. When we reach this point we realize that humans are flawed (again, all of us, otherwise we wouldn’t be here), and that our hunger, our yearning, our perpetual seeking for someone/anything to hold us and tell us we are okay is a call out to source.

The interesting thing about reaching this place is that we are scared of this type of love. We may reject it. We may not feel worthy of it. But even if we are able to radiate a single drop of love towards a spiritual mother or source it radiates back exponentially to us, letting go of our fear, our anger, and allowing us to finally fill up with what we have been seeking for so long.

One of the more useful but “mundane” (well, at least compared to feeling infinite love of source energy) aspects of awakening is to be able to see illusion and falsehood. This can be a bit isolating, but I have found it is quite helpful. When this happens you can see what books are worth your time, what workshops, what pursuits, and generally what in your life has meaning. This also oddly has the aspect of making you really compassionate and even loving towards the people around you. Most people are really struggling. They have so much chaos and confusion and trauma and illusion around them that they are like someone at the edge of a cliff hanging on with their fingernails.

This means that you can have compassion for them. They know not what they do, as the saying goes. This also means, generally, that you can see or sense other awakened souls, especially if they are around. This at the later stages is simply a recognition, but in early stages in severe awakenings (such as Kundalini awakenings) you may not be able to be in the same room as someone else if you both are in an active K cycle.

The opening of spiritual doors occurs. This again, can be difficult in some ways. Most of the world sees, thinks, and operates the same as one another. Thinking deeply, questioning, realizing beyond the norm is not generally thought of as a positive attribute in this world. But it is. Most people walk around sleepwalking, simply reciting what they have been taught by others as their truth. They don’t question it, they aren’t able to see beyond it. They see the world as it has been given to them, and they do so without questioning. Even if they are, or claim to be “awakening” they are simply reciting the words of others and are repeating ad naseum the same recycled new-age memes and the same information in books, lectures, and ideas. Being able to move beyond this type of illusion, this type of belief that what you have been given by others is your own without questioning allows for you to become fully individualized, fully unique in a world where most people simply copy one another and live fairly unremarkable lives. It gives you the opportunity to fully realize who you are and what you independently think, free from the constraints that have been given to you. This allows for you to create in this world in a unique way, in a way that no one else but you can do.

The ability to feel peace. Many of us, again, go about our lives in a state of quiet desperation. We are worried about the present, the past, the future. Some of this may be entirely appropriate worry, by the way. But awakening brings the ability to finally settle into our bodies, to be okay with being quiet and being still, to know that who we are and what we are doing is exactly what we should be doing. Gone (well, for the most part) are the lectures internally about how we should be doing something else when all we want to do is eat a piece of chocolate cake. We eat the chocolate cake when it is time for chocolate cake and fully enjoy it.

Full embodiment. This cannot be stressed enough. One of the most pervasive myths in the awakening community is that anything spiritual is somehow separate from our daily lives and our physical bodies. There are in fact whole cultures that would do horrible things to their bodies to prove that the physical form was a temporary vehicle– starvation, creation of pain, sitting on funeral pyres. And while I do not question that some of these were necessary for the people who believed they needed them, the physical form is important, and past a certain point in the awakening process we begin to realize that we can be fully embodied, fully sensate people who enjoy our physical presence on this earth. Most of us are disassociated, disembodied, and truly hate our bodies and our lives (this may be subconscious). Awakening allows for us to process that self-hatred, and we come more into our physical bodies. We are able to taste, sense, feel and utilize all of our senses in a way that we never had before. We no longer want or need to “go anywhere” because our lives are what they are, and we realize that death is simply a release of the physical form,. and that in life our physical forms should be cherished because they bring us opportunities and understandings.

Spiritual realization. Do you know what a chakra feels like? Do you know what it is like to travel in other dimensions, to realize that time is not linear, or to simply understand that the world is not just made up of supposedly concrete, physical matter? That we inwardly have a constellation? Through the awakening process we come out of intellectualization and into direct experience. We no longer need to study the chakras and their colors (or whatever) because we can feel our chakras… and we may feel twenty-five of them and be able to interact with them through direct experience. We realize that much of the material out there is for beginners. There is nothing wrong with this, all of us were beginners (and still are in many respects no matter how far we have come). But through direct spiritual revelation we can discover our individual path.

We can enter a state of grace. This is typically a later stage, but building up to the oneness experience we believe (and want to believe) that we are powerful, we are strong, we are Gods. While this may all be true (and it is) if we are able to recognize how small we are, we become humble. This allows for us to enter a state of grace, where we know with certainty that we are being held by something much greater than ourselves, but also answers that question of existential despair: “am I going to be okay” once and for all. With humility we can realize that we are a single drop in the entirety of divine flow.

We can be fully who we are without excuses. I used to hide my “darkness”. It was not considered “appropriate” and frequently got me chastised or even chased out of spiritual circles in my early days. My questioning of things, my ability to see differently (and generally more deeply than others), my thinking differently, and the direct spiritual experiences I have had caused me to be ostracized. As I have mentioned, people really love their illusions, and anything that goes against or questions their personal cosmology creates enough fear that they will lash out to protect themselves. This still happens. I just don’t care anymore. I am doing what I am here to do, and saying what I need to say because it is different than what others think. I share this not to shift focus onto myself, but to say that whatever you are struggling with that you think that people won’t accept, that deep dark, primal place that you are hiding in fear of, scared that others will not find out… this is likely your strength… your power. People do not want you to have power because they do not have their own. They fear anything different. Once you are able to reconcile those parts of you that are afraid, that care what people think, that care about people discovering those deep dark aspects of yourself, once you realize those deep dark aspects of yourself are fine, and even beautiful… you can be fully who you are.

You love all aspects of yourself. This is a difficult one to understand, because in most spiritual communities the focus is on the “light” and anything else is “bad”, but we are intended to have emotions, physical experiences, and be in touch with even the most primal aspects of ourselves. Once we get out of the heap of trauma and chaos we are all under we realize that emotions are just currents of energy, and the emotion of grief can be as beautiful as the emotion of joy. We can fully realize our physical, sexual selves. We can come to love our primal, animalistic selves. We can fully integrate all of these selves and just be one whole person, with no parts of ourselves villified. 

This is certainly not a comprehensive list, but I wanted to introduce this topic because most of you who come to me are in a state of panic. In a state of fear. In a state of recognizing the illusions of the world, the illusions of the spiritual communities. In a state of recognizing that most of the books and gurus and teachers and workshops out there are just meant to perpetuate a state of illusion rather than break you from it. It is hard when you are going through the true struggles of awakening to not feel cursed, like the universe is out to get you, to blame yourself and God/source, to look out at the world of fake gurus and see them espousing spiritual awakening as a state of simple bliss without having any sort of direct experience of it. The more that we move through our awakening the more that the blissful, the wonderful, and the truth about spiritual awakening come through. It just may not be like the brochures said it would be.

If you would like to contact me, you are welcome to.

One of the most difficult things on my spiritual path (beyond surrendering and coming to terms with the illusion of control) has been the letting go of layers of emotions related to the realization of the world being an illusion.

Many of my clients have felt the same way. This realization first comes as a sudden, irrevocable moment. We may have intellectualized about it before, or heard others speak about it (or intellectualize about it) but there is a sudden, direct experience of understanding the outer, exterior world (our day to day reality) as being an illusion that is difficult, if not almost impossible, to integrate.

At first this direct experience may come looking outward at the world. We see that not only individual people but our town, our state, our society, and our world are repeating loops of patterns and behaviors again and again. We may be in a public place and realize that most people are like actors engaging in a play they do not know they were cast in. That the behavior of a group, or of people in a restaurant or a movie theater is to be expected because it is looping. We may have deja vu of experiences that we have never had before (that are not based in interior constructs like past lives or something we actually have experienced before but do not remember).

We may realize this on a societal or world level– that the same pop star but with a different face comes through every 5-10 years. We may begin to realize that political, social, and societal events repeat themselves ad nauseum in some sort of effort to break the cycle or change. But change is difficult, and requires many members of society to change, including ourselves.

We will then look inward and realize our own loops, the ways in which we are an actor cast in our own lives. Everything from crossing the street the same way every time to conditioned responses to how we emotionally react we will realize are ingrained patterns from conditioned reality, our belief systems, our traumas, and our thoughts.

Realizing that the world is an illusion first results in a sort of disbelief. A daydream state of feeling like you are watching something on television. This is much different than the sort of disassociation that occurs with trauma– it is the understanding that while out at a restaurant that you are the only person that realizes that everyone else is acting, that everyone else are like poppets repeating the same behaviors again and again.

Next comes anger. At first this is anger at the outer world– how can people not realize they are actors, that they are asleep, that they are part of this illusion?

After comes internal anger– how were we asleep so long? How were we sleepwalking through our own lives? How many ways and which ways are we still false? How many ways are we still sleeping, are we still acting through part of most of our lives?

Then comes grief… this is a difficult grief. To realize that the world is essentially false, that the world is created through our thoughts and through the conditions and thoughts of society/world. It is a difficult phase to go through to look at the world and realize from this vantage point of grief that most people are really struggling. Most people are really asleep. And many people lash out again and again in these loops without realizing it, most people are acting out their wounds and traumas and thoughts and the traumas, wounds, and thoughts of society again and again without realizing it.

Again we may be able to turn inward– what parts of ourselves is latching on to this grief? What parts of ourselves are still reactive to this grief? It is completely appropriate to feel sadness when looking at the world, but to let it consume us is another matter. We are intended to feel emotions, even the deepest layers of grief, but all emotions are like a wave form that can flow through us… or they can stagnate because we want to catch them, to hold onto them, to resonate with them.

The realization of the world being false, the numbness and emotional reactions that occur are all phases many of us who are truly awakening go through. The difficulty is that while we are all awakening, in small or large ways, in spiritual communities many of us do not come to this phase because we get stuck in the emotional aspects (totally understandable) which can be overwhelming… or we prefer the illusions of awakening to actually awakening.

When we work through some of our emotions the next level for many people who have gotten here is anger and grief at spiritual communities or people within them. Truly waking up allows for us to see that most spiritual materials are simply illusory– they are created by those who are repeating loops of behavior and thoughts like anyone else.

When you are truly awakening it is hard to look at the state of spiritual propaganda out there and not get upset. At first this is a natural reaction, but upon questioning… upon truly looking at this anger and grief two things come up.

1. That many people, including many gurus, are just as asleep as anyone
2. That many of these people, including many gurus, are doing better in this world than you are

This all boils down to a simple, but interesting fact: Most people want to remain asleep. They prefer illusion.

If I were to tell you that spiritual awakening is difficult, that most of the people I have worked with who are truly awakening lead difficult lives and have to work through many physical, emotional, and spiritual crises how many people would sign up?

If I were to tell you that spiritual work means complete surrender and seeing through the world in a way that most people will never understand? That seeing and thinking differently than others results in being ostracized rather than accepted?

What if I were to tell you that you truly can know who you are, what you are here to do, claim your power, understand spiritual power, know that magic is real, that spirits are real, that shamans truly can traverse realms, that your thoughts do manifest into reality (with some interesting results), and that you can feel oneness with source, that you can be fully embodied, that you can feel blissful in nature and in your lives… but that it comes through continual struggle, continual surrender, and walking through certain spiritual doors and having certain spiritual initiations that cause you to feel oneness and at the same time feel isolated because of these initiations/understandings?

Now, if I were to tell you that you just have think positively and nothing bad is going to happen to you… if I were to tell you that if you just create a vision board with a Mercedes on it you will receive one… if I were to tell you that if you think positively enough you will not get cancer, or die, or have diseases… if I were to tell you that awakening just means bliss… if I were to tell you that you will be a millionaire or CEO if you awaken… if I were to tell you that awakening means no longer having any emotions or human experiences (in which you are likely struggling as we all do)… if I were to tell you that you are in control of all of the spiritual realms and you just have to imagine white light to make anything frightening go away… if I were to tell you that everything is an extension of you and if something makes you upset, it is your fault, and if you see a spirit it is just an extension of you and you can simply think it away… if I were to tell you that awakening is somewhere else that you “ascend” to… if I were to tell you (this one is one of my favorites) that we are on the verge of a big world paradigm shift and aren’t we special to be a part of it because we will all transform… If I were to tell you that there is no such thing as darkness, or evil…

That last paragraph sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? 

Much of the spiritual world and the current and popular gurus are illusory. They are feeding into the cycle of looped behavior. It does not take a genius to look at one particular new-age publishing house and see that they print the same book again and again just with different faces on the back covers. It is not surprising when one of the most “enlightened” channelers  who has made millions off of her followers suddenly goes on an anti-Semitic tirade and the conditions of her “camp” are finally brought to the light of day as being deplorable. Most people are simply pretending. Some realize it, many do not.

Many followers are looking for something to make themselves feel better. They want to be awakened because they want to be rich, healthy, beautiful, and in a constant state of bliss (and yet not feel anything oddly). Our lives are difficult, and so this message that is continually perpetuated that the whole world is under our control, and if we just think right nothing bad will ever happen to us is difficult to witness for anyone who has actually awakened beyond this.

It can be difficult to realize that most people want illusion, and that faced with anything of “truth” they will become emotional, upset, or reactive… allowing for themselves to close off from any understandings outside of their own constructed illusion. It can be difficult to see, and is one of the more difficult spiritual initiations to traverse in the awakening process.

But if we begin to see that the world is false, it is full of illusions and thoughtforms and people who are asleep, and we continually work on the sleeping parts of ourselves, we can move past the anger, past the comparisons, past the disgust at the newest trend in spiritual literature being the same illusions recycled again and again with different names and faces on the back covers.

We can begin to realize that it is okay that most people are asleep. We can have compassion for the fact that most people are really struggling and need to feel in control… because the idea that if they just think right that nothing bad will happen to them may be all that is getting them through their days.

Awakening is beautiful, it is blissful, it is fully recognizing and realizing who you are. It is claiming your own power and having realizations and understandings that few do. But it is also difficult. And continually surrendering patterns such as this one, and participating in external reality (our day to day lives) after letting go of the anger, of the grief of the world being false means that we can surrender and unfold in source like we are intended to… without getting wrapped up in the reaction to the illusion. We can realize that others need their illusions, that they at least think they do, and have compassion for that. We can have compassion and love any person who is willing to take one step forward or break any sort of looping they have… to clear any sort of chaos or sleep out of their lives… most people do not and someone taking personal responsibility to take one piece of that chaos and clear it, or become one step closer to becoming conscious is admirable. We can become a conscious actor in the play, we can make peace with the isolation and oneness occurring simultaneously… we can continue to examine ourselves and our own loops that arise and truly and continually awaken.