Gordon Phinn's Blog

By polarity I mean those battling opposites and paradoxes devoting themselves to our education: the longing for calm vs. the desire for adventure and excitement, the need for nurture vs. the ache to be free, the search for structure vs. the safe place of cosy confinement, the need for gender identification vs. the fluidity of its loss, the desire for civilised society vs. the unpredictable shocks of remaining in nature, walking vs running, driving vs flying, and all the rest of chaotic choices advertising themselves from moment to moment.

We all seek a serenity when we have time to do so in the busyness of duties and committments in the realm of families, careers and ambitions. Often serenity arrives unannounced in the midst of some drama of conflicting desires and we can enjoy the rest before the game sucks us back in. It can also arise when we let go of our attachment to thrill of constant change. We can step back long enought to see our desire body as the creator of all that troubles us. Watch those desires sail away, their attractive flags flapping in the breeze. Allow yourself to inhabit the serenity that suddenly or gradually appears.

There it is, the land beyond desire, waiting patiently for our arrival. The place where being at peace is the natural state of things. You are still alive to need and temptation, but you renounce it for the nothing that knows you.

We all have moments fo clarity as we pursue, with stumbling determination, the vision that has been set beofre us by previous teachers, prophets and sensitives, of desirable goals. While various tasks, duties and unexpected challenges pile up around us we poks out heads above their waters to see that embracing the many faces and cultures to be gathered as we move towards the brotherhood of all mankind is yet beckoning from the horizon. WE swim through the choppy waters, often tempted to retire, or at least float on some passing raft.

As we absorb the various tendrils of information coming at us from books, interviews and podcasts, not to mention lucid dreams and fleeting visions, of the ET visitors and their activities around the planet, we can begin to see the enormity of the task ahead. The variety of species invoked and involved seem close to countless, and embracing that variety appeasr to be the path of least resistance now that ignorance and denial have lost their earlier luster, and official admissions have permitted the mainstream to indulge in what has been called the ‘limited hang-out’, where truths and half truths have bben carefully blended with misleading solemnities that rattle our cages and keep us chattering. The Arcturians, Sirians, Pleiadians, Mantids, Greys, Nordics, the list goes on, perhaps not as endless as the count of planets and galaxies but impressive all the same. In this embrace we move toward the brotherhood of all sentient beings, just as we do with the urging af animal and mammal activists, and those clairvoyants and clairsentients who advise us to open up to the equally vast repertoire of nature spirits, elementals and devas. Elves, Sprites, Salamanders, Shee, Techno-elementals, Goblins…the potential, encounters accumulate as we look to loosen our attachment to scandal, war and outrage.

One wonders if we might, as idividuals with our knapsack of agendas, disppear into these seas of sentient life. As I advance on my own inner journey through the planes and their populations, I cannot see how we can possibly avoid it. Will our greater selves then emerge, more accepting and loving than triumphant? I dare to suspect they will. As they always have, in increments of advancement, those clowns of the monadic plane, down through the torrid history of sweat and suffering that characterises our journeys through the mazes of all histories. both lanetary and galactic. By thus enjoying being lost we will see that we are found. Maybe discovered in the lost and found. And then handed back to the rightful owner, or one who, for the time being, fits that description.

As we develop our psychic sensitivities, or as they develop themselves, I’m never sure which, various manifestations come to our attention. And depending on the day nd one;a genda of activities, they come and go. Some days I find myself passing people and feeling some aspect or other of their aura as our energies briefly merge. Past life personalities and activities bubble up briefly, quite often at variance with ‘who they are now’. I wonder why I am seeing this and what good it might do. Certainly when dealing with those who have sought my advice it can be quite useful, but with relative strangers who will doubtlesly remain so, it would seem to be little more than entertainment, the revelation stage having passed for me some decades ago.

The visions would likely include some aspect that needs to be confronted so that it ceases to upset the apple cart of the current personality. The schemer deceiver, the paranoid warrior, the self-satisfied issuer of judgements, the compulsive libertine or seductress, the slave of timid conventionality: all of them need to be retrained into behaviour patterns more acceptabe ot the current life project, but they are left to be dealt with through the norms of psychology, either professionally or picking up the latest best seller.

But modern psychology seems unequiped to deal with the multi-purpose aims of the soul, all of which are set into motion in the pre-birth state, now recognised, at least by those on the inner path, as pivotal. If you choose to work on your self confidence, all that third chakra owning-your-own-power stuff, more or less to make up for several lives where slavish devotion to conventionality made you hopelessly timid, your life could develop into a love of power and manipulation which regular psychology will attempt to restrain in the interest of familial and societal norms. Without, of course, plumbing the depths of why you were doing it in the first place.

Similarly with libertinism as a counter force to lives to fearful pride in celibacy: the rule breaking rebel to counteract of obedient religiosity. The computer geek from the fisherman. The post-feminist woman of power from the submissive daughter or obedient wife. The charity creating investment banker from the hermit hoarder of gold. The pastor turned soldier. The bourgeois bureaucrat from the isolationist subsistence farmer. Warmongers to peacemakers and back again.

Overdoing all of these roles can be seen as neurotic if not sociopathic, mistakes that have to be rectified. When past and between life regression therapy becomes integrated into psychological practice and pre-birth choices are recognised as legitimate and acceptable if staying within recognised bounds of civility and criminality, will life as we know it change for the better? I suspect so. But no more than incorporating the existence of ‘aliens’ and ‘nature spirits’, both with their viable world views, into our daily lives. We get bigger as we go, embracing more and more until nothing exceeds out grasp.

      Sometimes I find myself poised in the perfection of the moment, unwilling to disturb the spontaneous arrangement of objects and inhabitants of the room, the street or the open expanse by objectifying, theorising or otherwise categorising the sudden harmony of the passing seconds.  Let them be the puppets of the energies activating their presence and fluid posturing.  Let me the silent witness surveying the ongoing creation of every instant.  Let the ambitions and desires unfold as they wish.  Let the actions and reactions reverberate.  Let me detail among details. Let the symphony orchestrate itself.

     I see there is nothing missing from the ballet of gestures.  All is known and understood as each moment empties itself into the next as the river of time lets its sailors glide through the endless theatres of character, plot, conflict and resolution, until the game of life gives up its secrets, settles its debts and divines various futures to fit with the variety of desires.

     All that is left is to let the moment sing its song, its ongoing unending theme with variations.

The full expression should be: facing up to infinity as it extends in all directions.  And for me it  implies letting go of all the culture bound baggage that insists otherwise, the ones that imply a walled laneway leading to a brick wall that cannot be surmounted unless one’s faith is supreme.  I would have used the phrase confronting one’s immortality had I not already employed it (in 2016 for “Confronting Your Immortality: beyond belief and into eternity – living the ascension”).

       This all came about as I read the essays of Sharon Butala in This Strange Visible Air, where as an aging writer she deals with the many challenges of aging in and around the 80 mark, the deaths and divorces, the distant friends and family, the compact condo instead of the sprawling country home surrounded by prairie, and the many small ailments unfolding month by month.  Her writing, as always, flows and ripples, rendering all her troubles with an ease that belies her pain.

     At one point she speaks of the “dark cloud blotting my personal horizon who was Mr.Death himself, hanging around waiting for me to give in” and that as she “searched for that mental clarity and stillness out of which she writes books” that he had been without her noticing “tainting my every thought, desire, activity and ambition”.  Thinking that she had been “mature in accepting her condition of old age”, she had in fact, been “letting him stain and spoil her last years”.  She does not pretend that recognising her quandary somehow resolves it, but reasons that “reconciliation with mortality is the biggest struggle any old person has to deal with, except for those who deny and deny until the day they are dropped to their knees by a heart attack or cancer diagnosis, when, in a perfect rage they go to their graves still gripping the edge of their coffins with their dead fingernails.”

     I include the dramatic language to illustrate how those without insight or knowledge dither in the face of their delusions.  It’s the fate of those who refuse to explore beyond the tribal confines of sceptical materialism.  A sad fate for sure and one that those of us on the inner journey would love to ameliorate if only we could get beyond their fear of the unknown and strangely mystical.  We are the wingnuts, the wanderers in woo-woo, and I think for the most part we accept our status, if in fact we care at all.

     We know, or we do when we think about it, that in the modern world, bereft of faith, except that mandated by science and its handmaidens in the media, it is considered a move of great maturity to confront your mortality.  Popular culture portrays the indulgent, careless avoiders who mindlessly engage in the challenges at hand: education, religion, career, relationships, the nurturing of offspring, the hungry pursuit of pleasures, the devoted contribution to the smooth running of society.  The sustained avoidance of inevitable mortality is seen as the prime mover in the various frantic activities that bring status and self-worth to the ego.  Disease and calamities are employed to bring the careless to their knees and confront that spectre of death dancing about them.

     The big brave purveyors of culture slap the silly avoiders with death and feel proud of their achievement.  But those of us who explore what seem like the fringes of experience know that the real adventure is confronting one’s immortality – the many lives, planes and planets that become the furniture of infinity as we move to the music of multidimensionality.  We suspect or even know that mortality, and the facing of it, is but the first step to securing a spot on the journey to everywhere.  We’d love to tell the children if it did not spoil their fairytale, so we bide our time, even as we know time is but another fairytale.

 For me it’s not the meaning of life as it is for some, always looking under rocks for clues, or joining this or that group for a sense of belonging.  Nor is it the search for a purpose, some series of tasks and duties that gives their amorphous existence some shape and forward motion.  No, for me it’s more looking about after a nap, trying to remember who exactly I am.  There’s a seductive kind of anonymity to that territory you return to after the brief bliss of a snooze.  You stretch your limbs and take a few steps.  Perhaps the washroom is appropriate.

     So you toddle off in that direction as the jigsaw pieces fall into place.  All those details that give you a character and mold you a personality for moving though society in a way that calms the anxieties of others.  By the time you finished emptying your bladder the dilemma has been resolved. You know who you are and what’s expected of you.  Your thoughts, feelings and perceptions are back in place, ready for action.

    Yet that space where anonymity ruled retains its tempting aroma.  Not to be tied to a name, a race, a religion or social insurance number, being just anybody instead of just somebody, or even no-one at all, a bubble of unknowing that kinda does know but won’t say, it’s tempting for a tryout and often a return engagement.

     One of my teachers, influencers as the saying now goes, wrote about a century ago that waking up and not knowing who you were or are, even for a few seconds, is but a taste of higher self consciousness.   The higher self that births so many of us sentient beings in human form, all of us thinking we’re pretty special stand-outs from the crowd when in fact we’re merely another experiment in incarnation, one of millions in the many societies that thrash their way to dominance before gradually fading from view into the debates of historians and archeologists.

     This taste of ‘no-one going nowhere’ can induce the state we might call delirious if we were in it long enough to lasso a description from the wash of perceptions.  It is a hint of how higher self feels, so full of sentience and forms yet transcending them all in its bemused kindly shepherd role.  Its existential dilemma is that it has none and would only know about it if you filed a report attesting to its power.  Sure it recognises that mewling lost sheep scenario but does not give any more due that it deserves.

     Remember excitedly telling your mother about some afternoon adventure that five year olds find unbearably fascinating, usually as she was trying to do three things at once?  You got it.                                       

 Finishing up the third volume of Michael Posner’s oral biography of Leonard Cohen, as full an account of a celebrity’s life as one is likely to get, complete with as many contradictions, paradoxes and self-indulgent scandalous behaviours as you can handle, I was struck by Cohen’s seemingly endless dependence on gurus and teachers to give meaning and significance to his path through life.  That he moved eventually from the rascal Zen Buddhist horndog Roshi, a lifelong drunk with a penchant for abusing women students who seemed to infect Cohen with his attitude that dispensing with the strictures of conscience was some kind of spiritual achievement rather than some psychopathic indulgence tolerated in a patriarchal tradition as shameless as Catholicism, to spend many months attending the talks of the Mumbai based Advaita teacher Ramesh Balsekar, whose teachings and moral character remain unimpeached, speaks well of his quest for greater understanding in the glamorous turmoil of his existence.

     To this we can add a number of relatively enlightened Rabbis and Kabbalists with whom he dialogued over the decades, lending some intellectual heft to the poisoned chalice always on tap at Mount Baldi.  I had known of his repeated trips to Mumbai but not in quite the detail provided by Posner’s witnesses.  It did not take long, however, to come across one of the glaring faults that teachers of traditional Hindu and Buddhist thought are prone to.  They assume, quite righteously on many occasions, that their sacred bibles of traditional teachings have no need of revamping in the light of fresh experience and what we new-agers might term evidence.   Just like their Christian colleagues they will decry all afterlife knowledge derived from spiritualism as prone to illusion and the deceptions of lying spirits and all theosophic thought around reincarnation and the karmic links between lives as surplus to requirements and prone to padding the ego with praise.   Few, if any, will risk pushing the envelope beyond the knowing of their student years.  It’s always: more mindfulness, more prayer, more devotion.  Remain in the temple/ church, keep up that tithing, do not risk the temptation of the individual path with all its emotional entanglements.  Father knows best.

    Let me quote one glaring example from one Pierre Tetrault, visiting Mumbai to track down Cohen and this new teacher he’d heard of to gain his blessing and participation for a film in production:

     “Anybody have any questions for Ramesh?  I put up my hand.  At that moment we see Leonard walking up the street.  We go in – there’s two chairs at the front and one is for me. About twenty five people, including Leonard, are on the floor.  Now the teacher asks for my question.  I say, One of my best friends committed suicide.  I can’t get rid of the thought that I should have picked up on it.  Ramesh asks, Did you choose your parents?….No….Choose where you were born?… No…..Choose your brothers and sisters?….No….Your school?   On and on.  If you had so little control over your own life, how can you think you could have controlled your friends?  I start sobbing.  When I stop I feel a hundred times, a kind of catharsis.  At the end they did chanting – Leonard was singing.  It was blissful.”

    How could Ramesh, deeply versed in the teachings of Advaita, not know, of the soul’s pre-birth existence, it’s past life karma, its advisers and choices?  In the new age community everyone knows this.  The archive of life between life regressions is huge despite being fairly new.  Many nde’s experiencers have discovered their life choices were not any kind of fate or deity mandated action but a pre-birth decision, one of many.  Although I’d seen such craven ignorance in other teachers I was still surprised to see it here, …more fool me.  The deliberate removal of individual responsibility and god-connection.  Right, shit happens but don’t deal with it cause it’s none of your business; give it all over to god.  I’ve heard many Christians say much the same.

     On his website Balsekar, while acknowledging that “Consciousness is all there is”, defers to the deity in his “Letter to God”.  After listing all the gifts he has been given (good family, rewarding career etc) he observes, “If you stop fearing god it is more than likely you will start loving god .  The greatest is to find freedom from the fear of god: I do nothing, he does everything”.

     Elsewhere while affirming the non-existence of the ego and individual he affirms the existence of a god figure, usually male though not, thankfully, on a throne, and I wonder if he has ever in meditation glimpsed the god consciousness and merged with it long enough to know that he is not and never has been separate from it, and that the teaching he embodies and spreads lacks not only the relevant updates of modern knowledge but the essential understanding of incarnation.

     While we are here, getting bruised in the school of hard knocks and bleeding out our supply of self pity, it is wise to recall the god consciousness that remains at the core of our being, that knowingness which supplies as much accepting serenity as you might need in tense unpleasant oppressive situations.

That the god figure needs to be consulted and surrendered to is a dogma of many religions and results from the ignorance of their founders who assume that seekers need a helping hand in availing themselves of the god consciousness.  At this point in our evolution we can drop that requirement and know the god in each of us, and that when we surrender we surrender to ourselves.

The first question has to be: who gets to define the ‘overactive’ in astral body?  The excitability quotient is not easy to ascertain at the best of times, although on occasion it can be obvious.  When I flash on my youth, it is easy to see my own excitability, those energies of attraction, passion, anger, envy, resentment, embarrassment, and all their footloose cousins.  It is no problem to see that younger me being mercilessly driven on that carousel of emotions, that boy who preferred the debates of the intellect and the steady accumulation of knowledge through reading and research but could not reign in that wild horse that might gallop off in almost any direction at the drop of a hat.

     And this at a time when esoteric literature, both the traditional and new-age, advised on the benefits of serenity attained though meditation, yoga and silence.  It was the seventies, that decade of gurus, swamis, ashrams, rituals, retreats and temples.  It didn’t take long to see the fake gurus and teachers accumulating disciples, real estate and cash, some glaringly obvious and others quietly working their scams away under the guises of humility and piety.  More than a few acquaintances returned from their treks into the mystic East, even if it was not any farther than Massachusetts.  And of course as many survived the deceptions as did those the rigours of psychedelics.  I satisfied myself with bemused chuckles and further study.

      Into middle age and beyond my volcanic emotions settled, much like any person moving through the years without any specific attachment to spiritual teachings and disciplines.  Married friends learnt to park their own perhaps raging emotions to deal with those of their children.  As I slide inexorably into my senior years, where retirement leaves plenty of space for the pleasures of serenity, whether planned or accidental, I can clearly see the turbulence of the astral body as an attribute of youth itself and little to do with personality types or psychological categorising.  Achieving balance and serenity through practice in one’s twenties is nearly impossible but for short stretches. It has become obvious that teachers always knew this but kept their encouraging smiles active so paying students would help keep up whatever costs and overheads were pressing.  Like the military and corporations , ashrams and churches require devotees who are willing to swap their independence for the benefits, material or spiritual, advertised.

    As an old man now it is plain to see the paths that the young follow are rocky whatever their choice, as the turbulence of the astral body takes many years to tame, and that taming is often not the result of practice but the inevitable dwindling of the fiery powers of the astral body, many of which are fueled by the irresistible tingles of the second and third chakra.  I was never much with those gurus, now I know why.

The first question has to be: who gets to define the ‘overactive’ in the astral body?  The excitability quotient is not easy to ascertain at the best of times, although on occasion it can be obvious.  When I flash on my youth, it is easy to see my own excitability, those energies of attraction, passion, anger, envy, resentment, embarrassment, and all their footloose cousins.  It is no problem to see that younger me being mercilessly driven on that carousel of emotions, that boy who preferred the debates of the intellect and the steady accumulation of knowledge through reading and research but could not reign in that wild horse that might gallop off in almost any direction at the drop of a hat.

     And this at a time when esoteric literature, both the traditional and new-age, advised on the benefits of serenity attained though meditation, yoga and silence.  It was the seventies, that decade of gurus, swamis, ashrams, rituals, retreats and temples.  It didn’t take long to see the fake gurus and teachers accumulating disciples, real estate and cash, some glaringly obvious and others quietly working their scams away under the guises of humility and piety.  More than a few acquaintances returned from their treks into the mystic East, even if it was not any farther than Massachusetts.  And of course as many survived the deceptions as did those the rigours of psychedelics.  I satisfied myself with bemused chuckles and further study.

      Into middle age and beyond, my volcanic emotions settled, much like any person moving through the years without any specific attachment to spiritual teachings and disciplines.  Married friends learnt to park their own perhaps raging emotions to deal with those of their children.  As I slide inexorably into my senior years, where retirement leaves plenty of space for the pleasures of serenity, whether planned or accidental, I can clearly see the turbulence of the astral body as an attribute of youth itself and little to do with personality types or psychological categorising.  Achieving balance and serenity through practice in one’s twenties is nearly impossible but for short stretches. It has become obvious that teachers always knew this but kept their encouraging smiles active so paying students would help keep up whatever costs and overheads were pressing.  Like the military and corporations , ashrams and churches require devotees who are willing to swap their independence for the benefits, material or spiritual, advertised.

    As an old man now it is plain to see the paths that the young follow are rocky whatever their choice, as the turbulence of the astral body takes many years to tame, and that taming is often not the result of practice but the inevitable dwindling of the fiery powers of the astral body, many of which are fueled by the irresistible tingles of the second and third chakra.  I was never much with those gurus, now I know why.

     I was reading a book, interesting and enjoyable, when the author wrote about choosing a course of action that was “in our best interests”.  A common enough sentiment and one I have used myself in many a conversation.  But as we pursue our course along the inner journey where all conventional assumptions are challenged and sometimes overturned, such thoughts often turn into questions.  I found myself wondering what are “our best interests” exactly?

     Well, it depends on who you ask.  Your parents, your spouse, your boss, your banker, your pastor, your team mate, your drinking buddy, your doctor or chiropractor,… all these would shape their opinion from their experience and education and happily provide you with a slant they sincerely feel useful.  Now what about your spirit guide, your higher self or your wise friend who died last year and keeps popping into your dreams?  Or maybe your long time neighbour or that grocery check-out clerk, both of whom you’ve been chatting with for years?

     On this, our inner journey, shorn of the paradigms and guidelines others inhabit, the notion of “our best interests” is, well, amorphous, vague, and I would venture, nearly impossible to pin down.  We all know by this point even the most oppressive turns of ‘fate’ can be blessings in disguise.  We might not choose that steep rocky hill to climb but once we find our feet upon it, we know that we’ll ‘climb that hill in our own way’ and that ‘every day is the right day’ to do so.

      We all know that when handed a lemon we can make some lemonade, take the energy of the issue  and shape it into some workable solution, but the metaphysical question is, – who hands us the lemon in the first place?  Perhaps predictably I would answer our higher selves or that level of knowingness that provides the launch pad for what was then our upcoming incarnation.  And in occasional deeper meditative insights I have glimpsed how certain ‘themes’ were set up several lives before some sort of completion was attempted.  For example, several incarnations in the countries that were to become Great Britain gave me roles that were useful not only in ‘my’ attempts to harmonize my pagan self with the then new Christ energies sweeping the planet but also in the gradual formation of a national identity out of the debris of warring tribalisms and religious squabbling.

     The down side of this development, where national pride could not resist the lust for conquest and then empire, with all the distinctly mixed blessings of colonialism settling themselves into the unavoidable solution of commonwealth.  It’s a pattern empires cannot seem to avoid, the rise and fall of power, wealth and influence, the many recent European examples being the most obvious, but the ancient ones – Roman, Egyptian, Sumerian and Chinese supplying the basic template.  I suspect the ones of ‘pre-history’ and ‘myth’, the Lemurian and Atlantean, where ‘I’ and others have spotty memories but little historical evidence, were much the same.  The metaphor of growth and decay, supplied by the seasons of nature seems not only useful but unavoidable.

     Those are some of ‘my’ lengthy excursions but I know from the regression (past and LBL) archives  that others have experienced similar long term planning and execution.  Some have extended that into an understanding of our arrival on Earth from other planetary systems such as Sirius, Lyra and  Andromeda to willingly participate in the experiment of dense materiality and free will that our harsh mistress Gaia offered.  Our cycles of incarnations in many sentient forms, including but not exclusive to the human, can be viewed, as the song goes, the longest and strangest trip we’ve been on.  With the many personal experiments in creativity, destructiveness and stability it can become another empire in itself, the empire of the many me’s.  In that context the notion of what’s in our best interests looks charming and quaint.

    It hardly matters what you do or don’t do:  every path has its pitfalls and prizes, every choice has its  palette of consequences, every action has its karmic rewards and retributions.  It’s not that you have to do something, it’s that you can’t avoid doing anything.  Actions will chase you to every hiding place, forcing you to interact and finally empathize.  Sympathy for the little devil in you and everyone else, regardless of planet or quality of performance.