Ning
Create Your Own Social Network
The Soul Union Community : By Senior Hamsa Acharya Johanna Parry Cougar
The Soul Union Community 
By Hamsa Acharya Johanna Parry Cougar 3,243 words
Her dark, piercing eyes locked into mine. "Slowly, she said. " Slowly". Her electric gaze caught me deep in my spine. I could feel "slowly" vibrating through my pores. I am a 40 something middle class American white woman. I was born into a very small town in the redwoods of California. Redwood City is where Sequoia hospital is. My parents took me home to La Honda. We lived on Laguna Drive, across from the lake. My life has been typical compared to my social group. My parents had a nasty divorce when I was around seven, my sister had severe emotional problems. I married a bit too young, had three boys, worked for non profit organizations and outlasted my parents 10 year marriage by two years. I am now on my second marriage, my father on his third, and my mother died in a car wreck when I was 21. Like most of my 1970's high school contemporary's, I leaned toward open minded thinking, liberal politics, activism around the important matters, and wholesome food. After experimenting in spiritual and social values around vegetarianism, meditation and popular new age trends, I settled down into what I knew to be core knowledge for myself. You know, the basics. Integrity, honesty, surrender to the higher power, cultivating peace within by seeking to release any negative "stuff" that might keep me from my happiness.
I did my best to be a good mom, not yell, keep the house clean and make food on time. A lot of my friends spent much of their time investigating cohousing, network marketing and chain letters. Everyone had more than one money earning attempt going on, trying to find time for "their art" or "their meditation" or "their life work". Really though, we were all driving our kids to baseball practice, getting tired of the drag of the day and wondering how the world would turn out with all the chemical spills, environmental devastation and urban sprawl. What in the world will our kids lives be like, anyway? We sighed, collectively. When I was about 31, something unusual began to happen to me. Like most folks I know, I had had "unusual" experiences before. Everyone has a ghost story, or sensed a visitation or has in some way interacted with the paranormal forms of the spiritual dimensions. Many people in my age group began to have "spiritual emergence" experiences.
These experiences are often accompanied by unusual body movements, altered states of consciousness, and radical shifts in perspective. Some call it the beginning of an "awakening" process. I remember my alarm, somewhere around 1995, when because of the extreme nature and length of my electrical emergence experiences, I began to do emergency phone counseling for others that were going through similar events. The commonality and frequency of the experiences and the sheer number of people I met who were reporting them, made me feel something very unusual was beginning to happen. I discovered the spiritual emergence network, and became an extended member of a community of people who were all going through these experiences on some level. Ph.D. psychologists, mental health professionals, and professors from a leading psychological institute from the Bay area created a community and network, the need had become so great. The program later became Star Gate: a school for spiritual unfoldment using generations old and time tested means of human spiritual practices. It is now a growing spiritual community called Kayumari located in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Eastern California. I was connected to the work of the leading experts on electrical energetic emergence, or as some call it "kundalini awakening". Others call it "being visited by the holy ghost", or "being grabbed by God". Regardless, the phenomena was increasing at an alarming rate, with no real "official" body of observers tracking it in a clear way. My years as an administrator within non profit organizations taught me the value of statistics, and yet, though we all seemed to be going through it ourselves, we were too busy to organize the statistics of what we were still living.
Because one of the symptoms is a radical change in perspective, many of these folks found themselves trying desperately to change lifestyles, relationships and careers, which created an incredible chaotic drama where whole communities of people began feeling like there just isn't enough time for life. Our approach to relationships and work had to change. Our kids are killing each other and themselves. We have the highest teenage suicide and death rate in our known history. Teenage suicide bombers, teenage schoolyard snipers. This is serious. We nonprofit administrators call these social indicators. Then it happened. I went to a public talk with my friend, Michael. We arrived at the Dojo of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park to hear an East Indian yoga teacher talk about Hamsa Yoga. We have all heard of the yogi's from the Himalayas.
Many of my friends had read Paramahansa Yogananda's book, "Autobiography of a Yogi". It had in fact, been pivotal in many of my later teen choices about religious and spiritual perspective. Those that didn't get to Autobiography, definitely made it through Carlos Casteneda's Don Juan, or Richard Bach's Illusions, or Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Everyone I know still craves the kind of magic these novels pronounced as fact, including my lawyer friend, Michael. This teacher was claiming to be the spiritual successor to Shri Yuketeshwar, having trained in the Himalaya's during his youth with the same nath yogi's known to interact with the immortal Babji. According to this yogi, the being he interacted with was Shiv Babaji Gorakshanath, a being who descends directly out of the sun, primarily in the Himalaya's, and occasionally takes a mortal form at will. This was the lure that got us through the door. I sat in a semicircle of a group of about 30 people. I was seated on cushions, about four feet from a floor length thick insulated glass window. The yogi, who everyone called Gurunath, meaning "Teacher or light bringer nath", was seated on a dias at the head of the room. He was short and stalky, with vividly dark eyes. Light glistened from the glassy intensity of his gaze. His hair combed straight back, was almost to his shoulders with silver curls. The energy in the room was palpably thick. He began by talking about science and the electromagnetic nature of the universe. He was describing the location in the body of the human soul. He talked about sacred geometry and the gradual stages of evolving consciousness as one begins the process of reabsorption by the universal divine.
Then, he told us he would show us what it was like to be breathed by the divine indweller. He told us if we could relax, and become like a child of five, that he would enter our breath, and make it longer, richer and deeper. He told us every one would feel the experience of being breathed by God. To do this, he needed to "set the energy" of the room. He adjusted himself and asked us to look only at his eyes. Then he clapped his hands together sharply. I immediately flew backwards and hit the glass window, slid down onto the floor, and lay there having electric spasms until he waved his hand my way. My body suddenly relaxed. No one else had flown backward. I felt self-conscious about the interruption as I readjusted myself. The room was so still. Then I felt it. My breath became longer, beginning down at the base of my spine, and coming all the way up through my spine and continuing slowly into my third eye center, to go back down again. It felt very rich, like a nourishing deep draft of mountain air. The yogi was breathing through me. He asked the group to raise their hand if they had experienced all three qualities of longer, deeper and richer breath moving up and down the spine. Three quarters of the group raised their hands.
By the end of the evening everyone had experienced this, as well as observing his aura change colors, seeing him literally dissipate into white light, then re appear. But each individual witnessed this to a different degree. Part of the process is to unfocus the eyes to almost blurry. 30 hands are in the air. 30 witnesses. "Look around", Gurunath encourages everyone. "Would anyone here not be honest?" We witnessed his face change from one great prophet to another. Again the hands. Again a unified experience. We experienced our breath movement generating heat, vibration and light in our spinal column. "You are generating electromagnetic energy for use in spiritual evolution" he told us. "Eventually, this will allow you to be reabsorbed by God, and it can happen while you are still in your physical body. You can literally become the light." Then, he gave all of us the experience of one mind. Everyone in the room stopped thinking at the same time, and were suspended in a no thought state until he released us with a hand wave. Again, the raised hands.
He repeated this Siddhi, or demonstration of God unity until all 30 people in the room had raised their hand. "You have just experienced the no mind state of unified God consciousness" he stated simply. "All true yogi's keep their mind at zero point". "Now that you have experienced it, you know what you are striving for." His light playful manner created such an ease in the room, that no one seemed shocked or surprised at what had just taken place. Now I want to tell you the most amazing part of my story. I hesitate because it is so big I am not sure I can communicate it effectively. This information rocked the foundation of my world, and I am still reorganizing. To be really honest, I will never be the same. All of us, my generation, your generation, we as collective Americans, know of this prophecy for our time in history right now. If you are a Christian, the story holds a different form than if you are Jewish, or Muslim or Buddhist or Sufi or Bahai. It doesn't really matter. The Hopi have a prophecy that carries the same story that the Christian prophecy holds as the Jewish prophecy and every religion that chose to publicly announce the details of the "end times" or "purification" or what I prefer to refer to as, the time of "revelation".
The essence of the prophecy is this. In the days of the revelation someone will come to us who will bring the light of salvation to us all. We will come to "realize our true nature as the light and love of God" All those willing to believe this, will be saved from darkness or suffering. We humans can interpret this many ways, just as you will want different interpretations of the next part of this story. Eventually, we will hear them all, I am sure. Once this story becomes public knowledge, things will become very interesting. As you have learned, everything I have witnessed in the presence of this yogi, who also calls himself a master of Sufiism, Kriya Yoga, and master of what we know more commonly as the indigenous Shamanic, or as Gurunath says Shramanic traditions, has been witnessed by a large group. I definitely am not the first person to hear this. I am, however, the first one to write about it publicly. I also know that this man receives great respect in his mother country of India, in his resident city of Pune, and with everyone I know who interacts with him. He was born into the ancient (it predates Buddhism by thousands of years) Siddhanath tradition through a royal premier family from Gwalior. This is not a person with an ego problem. At his birth the great Nath yogis appeared at his door, much to the dismay of his mother, who feared they would take him away with them.
This is not an uncommon occurance when a yogi is born fully realized. These "wise men" came bearing gifts to the newly born householder yogi, who would later be given a world mission, not unlike other prophets born into our world. According to Gurunath, now the leader of the Nath Sampradaya, Padhma Sambhava received his spiritual initiations from the "white brotherhood of nath yogis" and then took these teachings to Tibet. Also, according to Gurunath, a few of the transformational techniques such as how to dissipate the physical body into pure light, were witheld because humanity was not yet ready for the information. This is one of the many stories he tells. " I was having a wonderful dream one night. I was walking with the Lord Jesus Christ, talking and enjoying. When we came to the end of our walk, he turned to say good bye. As I lay back down on my bed, still dreaming, he reached down and placed his hand on my forehead. Suddenly, I woke with a start. Looking up I saw that it was the man Jesus. Standing over me in my bed, with his hand still on my forehead. His eyes were blazingly dark. His long hair flowing around him." He sometimes follows this story by stating that Jesus of Nazareth was a Siddhanath yogi known in Southern India as Ishwar nath.
His master's name was Cheatan nath. Cheatan nath recorded in his memoirs, his student who came from afar, Jesus of Nazareth, who he gave the spiritual name of Ishwar nath to, once he became fully realized. What needs to be understood here, is that in the nath tradition, these titles reflect states of achieved expanded consciousness. Jesus, viewed through this tradition, was an Avadhoot yogi who transformed himself through use of his breath into the light and love of God, and was working to become an Avatar, the highest level of consciousness available to a human soul, when he was crucified. Upon resurrecting himself (not an uncommon ability for a nath yogi) he packed up his family and returned to India where certain villagers are fully aware of his place of burial. This is also the process used by Siddhartha, another nath yogi who became the Buddha by transforming himself into an Avatar being, a fully reabsorbed soul, still using a matter body. Gurunath clearly states that he is an Avadhoot yogi, working to transform himself into an Avatar.
My understanding is that if this takes place, and he chooses to remain in this realm, the consciousness of all of humanity will also be transformed. This is an incredible story, given that this is the same man who was for years exposed to the physically abusive catholic boarding school re-education attempts that so many native people in our history have endured at the hands of well meaning priests owned by governments attempting to own other nations. After hearing this story, I spent several years working to integrate it. Since then I have been paying much closer attention to this "spiritual emergence" that many of my contemporaries are going through. I have gained and deepened in spiritual understanding on levels I never comprehended were available to a human woman. This is not an exaggeration. What I have learned, is that our creator him/herself is constantly in the active process of enacting evolution. We can never be done discovering ourselves. I have been practicing the art of breathing for the purpose of spiritual evolution ever since. It indeed is time for us to notice that evol ution is love, moving forward. Our instructions on how to evolve, are embedded with this word. Love.
From now, to now. I also learned this most important lesson. How, in God's name could I have ever, ever, ever thought that the creator of all the universes at any moment, didn't have everything in perfect balance? This includes what happens here on this pitifully tiny planet in a vastly remote corner of only one of the seven universes. Regardless of how I may interpret it, the Truth remains. Perfection is constant. It is only how we interpret it that changes. Peace is constant. It is only our rippling in the mind of forgetfulness that changes. After I began to integrate all of the information made available to me by this most powerful being, I became obsessed by an impatience. This impatience rotated around my desire for the world to be free of suffering. I began to feel feverish about getting people to come hear him talk. I figured, if he had done so much for me, and if I could comprehend this, then anyone could. Certainly he is saying and showing the same things to everyone. Why then, aren't people forming lines around the block to see him? This realization drove me crazy. There are not lines forming around the block for his experiential talks. People are not interested in seeing yet another guru from India. In fact, since then, I have witnessed over and over, people talking themselves OUT of what they had just witnessed. So many times we have been told "this is it" by whomever decides what "it" is, that we now are numb to whatever claim, accurate or not, that is being made by a spiritual, charismatic person. So strong is our belief in the absence of miracles, that I watch seeker after seeker allow their mind to completely forget the experience they had in the room. They literally do not remember the power of the moment, and non logic of what the collective group experienced and verified in front of each other. Even those I saw as "spiritually advanced" in some way forget.
Even monks and nuns of ancient traditions forgot. The veil of the negative mind swallowed them within several hours of leaving the room. None of them have even asked me about him since. At the time, within the first hour, they were all excited by this extremely powerful teacher I introduced them to. (It took you four years, I remind myself). After the 9/11 tragedy I decided to sort it out. In desperation I turned to my Mother- She, who I have always surrendered to. But this time, it was she in the form of Gurunath's wife, Shivangini. She occupies a still quiet as she listens in the background of every public satsang. Black long hair framing a cherub glowing face, she speaks up in Marathi whenever Gurunath gets a story a little incorrect. He graciously acknowledges her correction, and re-explains. I slide up beside her after a satsang one evening. Like a child I blurted out my desperate confusion. "How is this possible?" I complain, waving my hands in the air like an Italian mime. If he is who he says he is, where are all the people? I look at her, expectantly. I then remember that Jesus had only 12 disciples, and at the crucifixion there was no one there who supported him. The books of the bible were written by that very small group. The masses were not really interested in consciously living within the light and love of God. That was why he was killed. There was no organized media campaign to give him the protection of the people. When I read the bible, I see references to the breath of union process everywhere. "How on earth is this revelation supposed to take place, if no one recognizes who he is?" I mumbled. Her dark, piercing eyes locked into mine. "Slowly, she said. " Slowly".
Her electric gaze caught me deep in my spine. I could feel "slowly" vibrating through my pores. "The revelation of all humanity will be that we are all one soul. Full realization of this is available to everyone. It begins with our breath" I heard within my mind. There is now a growing community. It is called Hamsa Yoga Sangh. Loosely translated, it means Soul Union Community. This community of people are dedicated to establishing earth peace through the reunion of the soul with the one conscious mind within all creation. We listen to our master when he comes from India to speak and give initiations and spiritual energetic empowerment. We spend a small amount of time each day doing the breathing practices that are the key to expanded still mind awareness. The key to changing the energetic vibration of our atoms and molecules. The key to burning away all of our past karmas, or stores of negative energy locked in the pranic chakra centers located along the spinal channel. The very same negatively charged, heavy energy that prevents humans from "rising above" the harmful thinking patterns of the human mind. Once the electric kundalini energy is in motion, burning off the negative charges of energy ("purification") and we are vibrating at the same rate as the fabric of our known and unknown universe, we will certainly be reabsorbed by the eternal divine light. In the words of Yogi Raj Sat Gurunath, (which translates to: Highest union light bearer, truth teacher of nath...teacher of lords, or, the lord of teachers) "If we are to herald the dawn of a new age, we must all realize that humanity is one's unifying religion, breath one's unifying prayer, and consciousness one's living God."
http://www.hamsa-yoga.org/
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September 2009 
johanna
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