Pre-graduation Essay

[Pete]

I owe a lot to Mystress (even though she may be loathe to admit it) and am very thankful that she allows Goddess to work through her as she does...especially in the vehicle of FST.  Thank you Mystress!  Thank you guys for your responses to my questions/seeming issues at various times.  It is a huge support to have fellow seekers to remind you to surrender or to tell you that they've been there and gotten the t-shirt.  And, I know that there is still a ways to go until I rest in complete union with Goddess.  _/!\_ Namaste
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Goddess Does As Pleases Her

            This course has begun to help me strip away the things that I thought were me.  It has been blissful at times and terrifyingly dark at others.  While, I cannot say that any one lesson has been more profound than any other, I will say that the most powerful lesson for me has been The Power of Love.  This lesson absolutely floors me every time I study it.  I thought that I was ready to submit this essay on several occasions over the past few months.  Goddess has had other ideas.  After asking my heart voice, I discovered that there is still more to work on.  The main thing is that my heart was not open enough.  I double checked with the I-Ching and it said if I continued there would be a relapse of some problems that have happened before.  Writing this, I see that I need to put more faith in the heart voice.  For some reason, I have seen it as less than it is.
When I showed up to FST, I had a lot of ideas of who I was and what I was looking to find.  There is a lot of stuff that has fallen away, lending space for awareness and a clearer view of what is there to be surrendered.  Still, there is much to be surrendered.  The lessons never cease to amaze me.  Even though during the week(s) of a particular lesson the synchronicities that arose in my day to day life graphically illustrated the teaching, I found that often the real meaning behind what was there did not become apparent until weeks or months down the road.  Even now, new layers of meaning unfold.
            Initially, the intention was to complete 45 days of grounding as directed while doing the other lessons.  Somewhere around day 12 or so, circumstances made it too easy to quit.  I would forget to do the grounding or be too tired or get too tired…lots of excuses.  So I put it off.
            Matriarchy and the Goddess marked a turning point in this life, the first one in the course.  I was raised as a Southern Baptist.  My parents were still feeling out their beliefs which meant that I got to witness of a wide variety of Christian denominational structures, which culminated in a high school conversion to Catholicism. 
            In fact, most of my early understanding of God came from my relationship with my father.  He was like a guru to me in many ways.  When he had a mental break down and my parents’ relationship began to fall apart, so did my cherished beliefs about God.  This resulted in the beginning of a driven search for absolute Truth and the shunning of my childhood indoctrination.  The concepts of Matriarchy and the Goddess created a mental construct that has made Truth once again approachable.  This framework has even begun to dissolve as growth progresses further.
            At the Grounding Lesson, I began to undertake the 45 days of 8x/day grounding again.  At day 36, I was unable to ground more than once in a day without falling asleep for a few hours each time.  So, I backed off of the grounding exercise.  At some point, I also became attached to the initial feeling of the exercise.  It has been useful to let this go, and subsequently the grounding exercise has changed several times and significantly for me.
            Around the Holy Trinity Lesson, during a chat party I met Snakey.  I let him swallow me several times.  It was really an interesting feeling…very pleasant, warm, rhythmic contractions around my body and then I was excreted out.  This released a flood of karma, left a lot of empty space, and in a couple of days a very desperate feeling Pete.  Here, I learned that Goddess light fills the emptiness.
            The Heart Chakra lesson opened my heart partially, but it closed again.  In retrospect, this lesson helped me to understand that someone else could help me grow only to a certain point.
            One of the entities that left the heart during the entity clearing was Jesus.  He went into the light.  He is one of those who can go in and out of the light at will though.  That was an interesting experience.  I was happy at the time to be rid of him.  Now, I see that he was only being compassionate in honoring my request to leave.
            The Waking the Serpents lesson is probably one of the most memorable lessons for me.  Going into the lesson, I was expecting fireworks…what actually happened was a tiny spark going up the spine and a light sense of peace.  Later on that day I saw the only sunbow that I’ve ever seen and knew that something good had happened.  This was really the beginning of an insight into the nature of reality and the imperative of surrender.
            The Witness State Lesson was another turning point lesson, but its experience actually did not come until I was driving several months later.  OBE while driving is not a good idea.  Thankfully, Goddess provided a way back into the body before anything really serious happened.  I almost witnessed the body’s demise.
            Learning to Pace myself has been a challenge…not with the lessons, but with everything else.  The ego driven search for Truth has caused more problems than surrender ever has.  In this search for truth, I’ve collected and used many methods for growth with some small success.  Often though, the outcome has just been to bite off more than I could chew by triggering more karma and then falling into resistance.
            The introduction of to the Divine Beloved was a good thing.  She has taught me to make her primary above all relationships.  She even brought me a beautiful, external relationship when I thought that I did not need one.  This is documented in the tearoom.  As long as the Divine Beloved is primary, there is no problem with projection or a false love.
            Diet and Kundalini was a good lesson for me.  At the time I first did the lesson, my diet did not seem to make as much of a difference as it does now.  Kundalini is very purifying and it helps to eat healthy and nutritious meals.  The best part is that my body will tell me what to eat if I listen!  Though it is far from perfect, I am actively working to fix my diet these days.
            The lessons on sexual stuff helped me to understand that Goddess is enough for me.  If I ejaculate with fear of loss, then I will lose and my kidneys will tell me about it.  If I set aside the fear and make oblation to the Goddess with an open heart, increasing openness and energy will follow…the offering of the ego a drop at a time.  Other things that have come up have dealt with various sexual addictions to include pornography and masturbation.  These have come up in layers that seem to never end.  At one point, I thought I had surrendered the issue in the form of loneliness to see the pattern re-emerge in the form of lust.  I thought that I had dealt with it again, but it re-emerged a few weeks later in a different form of energy scarcity…me not seeing the female within myself.  This energy scarcity pattern has taken several forms as well, including fear of doing the grounding exercise.
            The Mirror of All that Is contains powerful concepts that have really been transformative.  It is only myself reflected.  This is the Tibetan teaching of the mirror-like wisdom and it is powerful.  It has been a very useful tool for keeping a level head and finding out what I need to surrender during trying times.  The application of this teaching has offered a very powerful tool to experience external reality by examining the play of shakti through my inner blockages and karmic patterns and subsequently surrendering these things.
            The period from the beginning of the Shadow Lesson to The Power of Love has definitely been the most painful period of study for me.  Initially, there was a powerful experience that reintegrated pieces of light that had been fragmented in hatred towards homosexuality.  This is documented in the tearoom.  After this though, I forgot about the shadow.  Within weeks, my body and external reality crashed and burned as the k-fire blasted through my body and pushed on the aspects of myself that had been denied.  I asked Goddess to have mercy on me and the flood of energy died down a little, but the physical pain remained.  I took myself into the emergency room because I thought that I had a bad kidney infection.  Their diagnosis was antibiotics and a lot of we don’t know what’s wrong, but it’s not a kidney infection.  My organs hurt, my meridians hurt, I had no temperature control, and I was tired all of the time.  I could do very little.  I stopped all of my energy practices, including FST.  Things finally died down when I took the advice of 3 separate people and began to meditate.  The pain unraveled rapidly over the course of the next few months.  Knots in my sex chakra and base chakra opened.  The pain in my solar plexus began to clear with an audible pop and a whiny child’s voice saying, “I don’t have control.”  My heart chakra opened as well, allowing the body to give to the homeless again and treat family with compassion instead of ignoring them.  As I was getting physically better, I did not pace myself again and pushed myself back into problems twice.  At the very end of this time, I stopped to investigate a small cosmetics shop called Divine Alkhemi.  A man skilled with plants greeted me and before I left he told me that I needed to embrace my shadow.  He was right.  Embracing the shadow by non-judgment and giving room for these things to open in meditation is an incredible help.  The shadow cannot be ignored.  I learned that if the shadow is ignored, Goddess will take you to death’s door as necessary.  I am a first hand witness that resistance to Goddess has the potential to kill the body.  Surrender as a gradual death of the ego is imperative for continued evolution in this life.  A lot of baggage dropped away rapidly during this time.  Included in this ‘baggage’ was the martial art into which was invested 6 years of time and a lot of ego.  It became apparent that I was practicing to please my dad and the higher self had no desire to continue.  More recently, the shadow has manifested as violent thoughts.  These have come and gone, leaving behind insights into the power chakra and old patterns of passive-aggressive behavior.  The witness state has provided the best means for surrender here.  In fact the witness seems a state of inherent surrender.  Even though I know that the shadow is a part of me, there is nearly always a sense of surprise that arises when the shadow stuff comes up for surrender.  Recently the sense of surprise has waned, becoming almost non-existent.  Again, the witness state helped immensely.
            It was here I stopped again to ground 8x a day for 45 days before using the Grounding Exercise to Clear Karma.  This was the first time that no part of me has stood in the way of completing the assignment.  The exercise was actually continued well beyond the recommended time and it has been for the better.
            The Grounding Exercise to Clear Karma is a good thing.  However, I would feel remiss in the application of surrender if it was only engaged in at specific times during the day as suggested in the lesson.  Goddess brings the patterns of pain into awareness throughout the day to be surrendered at a pace that can be handled.  Making this a habit has been good to keep in the forefront the idea that I am not in control.  Relinquishing the ego clinging at all times that it is brought into awareness prevents me from mentally compartmentalizing Goddess and the ego identifications as separate entities, which would only perpetuate the patterns of the past.
            Here are couple of experiences that have happened at differing times over the past months.  I’m grouping them together because they are all varying manifestations of the same experience…though it took a while to see and recognize them as the same experience.
             1)  Sitting in the living room and chanting a Kali mantra, the entire room was filled with blackness and stars.  Everywhere I looked and into each material object I looked at, including my body, I saw this same field of starry darkness.
             2)  Sitting in meditation with the awareness in the heart chakra, the underlying emptiness that is the nature of things began to reveal itself.  This awareness is present at all times, but my experience of it is not a constant yet.  It is the place from where everything is created and the place where it returns.
             3)  During the grounding exercise, a vast starry darkness began to permeate my body.  Everywhere it touched, the karma would just dissolve.  It was a very powerful experience that is hard to explain.  It stopped a few days later just as suddenly as it started.
            4)  Walking down the street between offices at work, something felt very different.  The bliss came and everything I looked at from dirt and cigarette butts on the ground to the people and birds were only a reflection of myself beholding myself.  This lasted for about 15 minutes or so.
            5)  In Target, I was walking to find a storage bin and gawking at the ladies.  Suddenly my   heart voice asked me what I was looking at and what they had that I thought that I did not.  Then, it answered for me that I was looking for female energy.  Within seconds a fountain of the most feminine energy I have ever felt welled up inside of me and I understood.  All of the women around me were beautiful, young and old and they were all looking at me as if I was one of them and smiling.
             In an off the cuff chat w/ Mystress and a few others, I pined that I knew surrender was necessary, but was having a difficult time doing it.  She suggested that I just give it to my Divine Beloved.  After doing this, my Divine Beloved merged into the body.  There was a strong emotional release and a spontaneous kriya of the yogic breath of fire.  An awareness came in which the need to do dissolved.  The 11 year ego driven search for Truth was halted in its tracks.  I’ve allowed my ego to recklessly drive me for a long time.  The ego does not know where to go and crashes frequently and spectacularly as I‘ve mentioned above.  Goddess takes care of everything.  No techniques are necessary.  As the Shiva Sutras say twice, “knowledge is bondage.”  However, surrender is a technique just like the use of mantras and yoga or qigong.  So, at the advice of a friend, I went back to the Chakra Lesson again.  This was really helpful to shed light on the doer/deed/witness relationship.  I was stuck at the interface between the power and the heart chakras.  Moving awareness out of those places revealed that the deed, doer, and witness all arise spontaneously and dissolve spontaneously.  In this way, it does not matter what is done as I am not doing it.  Mantra, no mantra, washing dishes, grounding, surrender, cutting grass, or cooking…  These are all the same thing.  Who can say anything else?  As long as we are in duality, duality is how we know and experience Goddess.  Techniques are valid for every person until the actual point is reached where they are no longer necessary.
            Getting stuck between the heart and the power chakra has been a pattern for me for some time.  I’m beginning to recognize the feeling of being pulled between the two.  When I feel it, karma vamping often helps to shift the awareness higher and the ‘situation’ resolves pretty quickly.  Now, I can feel the karmic patterns and give them to Goddess as they come into awareness.  Recently, a breakthrough in this area came up.  After being psychically attacked three times in two otherwise unrelated incidents, awareness was brought to a karmic pattern that was subsequently surrendered.  Another layer on my previous martial arts involvements came with the remembrance that I was bullied as a child.  Seeing myself as weak and helpless were the seeds for attack.  The actual pattern manifested energetically as a large, fibered web between the heart and the power chakras.  It continued down the stomach area as body armoring and through the heart and into the throat.  From the throat it went to my left ear and left nostril.  Goddess made it into light.  Other things that were tied to this pattern have been a desire for spiritual power, a desire to teach, and a desire over this physical reality.  These things really have no place in a state of surrender.
   The desire for spiritual power has surfaced on multiple occasions.  It has been particularly tricky for me because the kundalini has caused abilities to come and go as the process continues.  When these things happen, it can be difficult to maintain a witness perspective and let it pass.  My ego has been very invested in my intelligence for long time.  Comically Goddess does a memory dump from time to time that causes large or small parts of my memory to go away completely.  Part of this investment in intelligence is the thought that I can understand with my rational mind how things work beneath the hood.  When abilities have come up, I have tried to observe with a desire to replicate the experiences.  I have been gently reminded by Goddess that in doing this, I am clinging to patterns and experiences that happen in the clearing of karma.  Complete union with Goddess is the true goal and anything less is ego in some way or another.
            There is one other experience that has happened much more recently.  It does not exactly fit into the previous grouping of experiences though.  I went with the wife to a gospel music concert.  At the beginning, everyone was offering their burdens and wishes to god in prayer.  All of the sudden, their thoughts began to show up in my mind as they passed into the body and out through the crown chakra.  The crown chakra opened wider and became warm as though a sizeable crown was sitting on the head.  An incredible amount of energy began moving down through the body from the crown and out to these people, healing them and answering their prayers.  Then I tried to step in with an idea towards psychosis, but stuff started to clog up until I went back into the witness state and everything cleared up again with the immense amount of energy running through as Goddess took it.  The next day, I had to have a processing nap.  Goddess does as she pleases while god is somewhat immobile under her feet.
            Another experience happened during a separate meditation session.   While practicing, a blue flame shot upwards through my spine and ignited a blue ball of flame in my crown chakra.  The crown chakra began to spin.  As the spin picked up, more energy was drawn down into the body.  It was bluish.  Looking upwards through the crown, I could see a blue ball of flame and a tower of white light above my head.  Within a few days time of this last experience, my head began going through short periods of time where it feels like it has completely dissolved and is joined with the sky.
            These last few experiences really hit home on a point that I have missed over and over again.  This idea was mentioned above….about knowledge being bondage.  As time progresses, more happens that really has very little in the way of a rational explanation.  These experiences leave very little room for any sort of discursive thought.  In fact thinking about them frustrated me quite a bit until I understood that Goddess was trying to tell me to stop grasping at the experiences and just be.
   The crown sensations intensified for a bit and then the focus of the awareness shifted downwards into the heart chakra amidst much gasping for breath and strange heart palpitations.  For now, the seat of the awareness is in the heart chakra.  Though initially somewhat befuddling, this occurrence has caused me to begin to value the heart voice much more than I have in the past.  Shortly afterwards, the heart brought my attention to some Hindu teachings that the true self, Atman, resides in the cave of the heart.  They also discuss a subtle channel that connects the heart chakra and the crown chakra, called atma nadi.
   Recently, during a trip to several grocery stores, I was approached and followed by people whose energy was seriously imbalanced, either from drug use or other reasons.  The interactions were three in number which usually means for me to wake up and bring awareness to the root of the issue.  An examination revealed that everything I had been looking at was getting blasted with energy.  The feeling is as though I was reaching out to grasp things with my mind, enveloping them with energy.  That is why these weird people were confronting me with absurdities or following me around the store.  They were coming to the energy.  The heart offered a better way to look, to bring the awareness into the central channel and observe everything from there.  It seems like an embodied understanding of the witness state because the view from inside is much more calm, and people do not react to it either.  It feels like I’m here and more expansive, but not spread thin.  There is no reaction to emotion from here either.
            Today there is much, much less that I can grasp and call my own than there was over a year and a half ago when starting this course.  Nearly all of the aspirations for success in this life are gone.  The ability to be with people and to be happy for them without judgment has increased.  The clarity of the inner guidance of the heart and the Divine Beloved are present and actively sought.  There is no need to smoke, drink, or bite my nails.  The need to manipulate with speech has faded.  Many of the patterns of ego based sexuality are gone…though there seems more work to be done here.  There is still a lot to surrender as Goddess brings it into awareness.  The mind is quieter and closer to being a mirror.  Things like weather changes no longer affect me; instead, everything is being replaced with a blissful, equanimous state that comes and goes.  There are briefly experiential understandings that there is nothing that I can call my own or push away because it is all inseparable from me.  It seems that my conceptions of reality will continue to lose their solidity as surrender remains the imperative.  Goddess is in this vessel, is this vessel, and works through this vessel.  Everything is Goddess.  Goddess does as pleases her.

[Sigmund]

My heart expands as I read your essay, Pete, both in following along and in remembering my own trials/successes as I make my way.  Thank you for sharing.  It's been a treat knowing you.

[Mystress]

  Good to read your essay again, Pete. Your process through this course has been astonishing. So beautiful to watch your growing!

 I wanted to comment on one paragraph, as in another conversation you were asking why the heart chakra is central in the inner guidance.

Recently, during a trip to several grocery stores, I was approached and followed by people whose energy was seriously imbalanced, either from drug use or other reasons.  The interactions were three in number which usually means for me to wake up and bring awareness to the root of the issue.  An examination revealed that everything I had been looking at was getting blasted with energy.  The feeling is as though I was reaching out to grasp things with my mind, enveloping them with energy.  That is why these weird people were confronting me with absurdities or following me around the store.  They were coming to the energy.  The heart offered a better way to look, to bring the awareness into the central channel and observe everything from there.  It seems like an embodied understanding of the witness state because the view from inside is much more calm, and people do not react to it either.  It feels like I'm here and more expansive, but not spread thin.  There is no reaction to emotion from here either.

  "It is only with the heart, that one can see clearly. What is essential, is invisible to the eyes." Antione du Saint-Exupery, "The Little Prince."

  So you learned firsthand what I have been saying, about how it is important to keep your energy turned inward, to change the nature of your Shakti field and make it less pokey, which also means not triggering the karma in people around you. The heart will always show the truth of what Is. Externals, deceive.

  Many scholars say the Witness is a property of the heart chakra and you have learned there is an aspect of it there, more embodied... there is a connection between those two chakras just as there is between the power chakra and the third eye... but to teach people to attain the Witness state early in the process, the crown first method is better.  The kundalini first goes up then works its way back down, witnessing through the heart comes much later and the Witness is too useful for clearing karma and gaining insights to be left that late.  

 Hope you continue to visit. Blessings...

[Pete]

Thank you, friends.