Synchronicities, Signs and Musings. My Journey.

I have decided that I must begin to share my experiences. I have been on a bit of a writing hiatus and i feel like I've finally figured out why. I am terrified for some reason to reveal any of them. I’m not sure entirely why but I feel that somehow someone will lose respect for me, will not take me seriously perhaps. Maybe people will think I’m making it up, I don’t know. But I feel more and more that I am not being one hundred percent genuine in not revealing them, like I am denying an essential part of myself. I have told myself that my hold up is that I must start from the beginning and explain how I got to where I got, but it has become more of a crutch than a vehicle for beginning. So instead, I am going to just start here. I will get back to the beginning, but I am afraid that if I don’t start somewhere, I might just continue to put it off. So here goes.

I will begin with this past weekend in San Francisco. I went out to apartment hunt as I am starting graduate school at SFAI in August. I unfortunately never have time to read so any book takes me months to conquer and my current reading project has been Daniel Pinchbeck’s “2012.” I’ve been reading it since it popped off the shelves and called to me back in December and I finally finished it on the plane on my way there. The funny thing about reading in that way, is that invariably every time I would pick up the book to read sections of it, whatever I was reading became almost absurdly relevant to what was going on in my life at the time, almost like the way was made for me to receive the information which led to a teaching of some kind that I had to get right at the moment. For the rest of the flight I played the open-the-book-to-some-page-and-see-what-jumps-out-at-you-game. This is somewhat of a consciousness awareness practice I like to play to see what the universe is trying to tell me at certain points in time if I happen to be open enough to receive the message. What I found was very interesting, the first one being the following passage.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you,” as said by Christ in the Gospel of Thomas. (Hence why I am writing this).

Arriving in San Francisco I had already felt that the air was charged. Doors opened, people answered the questions I had before I had a chance to ask them, I was clearly at the right place where I needed to be. I spent the day public transporting it from one end of the city to another and then back again. I often needed to look at my map and always I never had it out for more than a minute before someone asked if they could help me. Things arrived when they needed to, the people I met along the way all felt like I knew them before and everything felt perfectly in rhythm. I didn’t fight it. I went with it.

I’ve found over the years that happens to me very often. I meet people and many times it feels very strongly that I’ve known them before and it always turns out, they feel the same way. I’ve taken these meetings as signs that I am in the right place and I am doing the right thing. Whether positive or negative, these people in my life are here to teach me a lesson in some capacity. I view everything in life as an opportunity to learn. Every instance, every situation, every moment is set up for us to learn something from it if we so choose. People that fall into the “I swear I’ve met you before” category, especially since every romantic relationship I’ve ever had does, are more like an entire class or even a semester of similarly themed lessons rather than just a single one. I used to be somewhat on the fence about past lives, but because of these personal interactions, I’m a firm believer.

The whole day opened up like a flower, revealing to me what I needed to see exactly when I needed to see it. That evening, there was a light rain, which from I was told is exceptionally rare for July. The 5 minutes of rain cleared and I began walking from where I was staying to catch a bus. I was on the phone with my mom and then a girl who was just coming out of her apartment looked surprised and told me to turn around. I did. I beheld the most spectacular rainbow rising up from the fog. The sky was a particular shade of vanilla ice cream through rosy colored glasses and the rainbow was illuminated by the neon rays of the setting sun. I asked if that happens often there. She said she’s never seen one before.

I continued to walk and I finally reached by bus stop. There I saw the other end of the rainbow, perched inside a cloud of wispy grey, glowing in a mystical fiery haze. Those several minutes were spent in a particularly aware state. Like the veil of Maya was lifted and I was present in every moment, the air itself seemed to take a breath and I was caught in between layers of reality, feeling the static charge and electricity vibrating and singing around me. Hello San Francisco. I am also grateful to be here.

I realize that what I’m about to say gives the impression that I am firmly rooted in believing the world revolves around me. Let me preface by saying that the world in fact revolves around everyone for several reasons. Simply by the fact that we perceive reality from our own individual perception organs, we experience the world through our very own filters for ourselves. Since we are built by much of the same stuff, we can relate our perception of reality to one another, but we still have distinct ways of interpreting that information based on our personalities etc. No one can experience things for us and we can certainly influence the world in how we look at it. For example, if we are having a bad day, generally the things that happen are taken negatively, reinforcing our bad day. Same thing for the opposite is true. On a quantum level, our very perception of something influences how it can be perceived directly. So let me stretch what I said earlier a bit and go so far as to say that we have direct influence on our reality. There’s just a lot more out there than just one electron isolated in a laboratory environment. So getting back to my point, I’ve noticed that over the years I receive signs that I am doing what I need to be doing and the intensity of that sign is directly related to how important it is that I do what I am doing. I’d say that rainbow was a pretty damn big thumbs up for several reasons, one of which might come to light as time goes on.

When I recall moments like that in my life there is always a sound associated with the memory. During the actual moments of being completely present, there is always a strange ringing in my ears somewhere far off in the background, like an electric under current of some kind, identifiable, but not quite at the same time, almost like the kind of sound vibration that you can feel rather than specifically hear. My memory of it is somehow a bit more distinct. As I was just reading about the Aborigines using their ceremonies to retain the creation of the world and to preserve the Earth’s vibrational tone, I had a small revelation. In yoga, the opening of the heart chakra is associated with a sound, which after much practice, can be heard. It is the sound of the Earth, the tone of the universe, the primordial sound. I have an odd assuredness that the vibration I sense rather than distinctly hear is this sound, this same sound that has been tapped by cultures and ancient spiritualities around the world.

Incidentally, this same sound is associated with the color blue. When I go into an out of body trance I am always flooded with a certain color blue. My portal, my vehicle is my heart chakra. I was born open. Bleeding, bloody, raw, and painfully open. I spent much of my adolescence and early 20’s trying to harden myself from it, to kill it, to make it go away so I didn’t have to feel so much. For those of us like this, there is no lesson on how to deal with this. We are not taught at an early age to understand the great gift we actually have. Instead, we perceive ourselves to be weak and spend much time trying to make ourselves stronger.

After what I affectionately refer to as my “Cosmic 2x4 to the head” experience many years ago, I was abruptly and without warning, reopened. I couldn’t stand it, everything was so acutely bittersweet and poignantly beautiful and painful at the same time. Shambhala Buddhism teaches that this bittersweet, this melancholy is true warriorship. To be a warrior is to be open in your heart. To bear the bloody and painful heart, like the open heart of Jesus in the sculptures and paintings, and to face each day from this ground. To be brave is to be open to the world. When learning this I had wondered what about if you couldn’t help but being open all the time, whether you liked it or not. I didn’t feel very brave at the time. I felt like I was the world’s pin cushion.

I had asked a wonderful teacher of mine how to deal or even simply understand not only what was happening to me personally, but how does anyone at all cope with being this open. I thought what he said was absolutely perfect. “You get used to it.” Little by little each day, it doesn’t become easier, you just get used to it. Not only do you get used to it, but the strength that comes from it becomes stronger and more acute. I began to feel things more sharply, but my strength for bearing it is better. I don’t get overwhelmed by it quite as often necessarily, but when it does overcome me, it is tens times as powerful. I’m not quite sure which is better, but I am giving into the progression it has taken. What I’ve found most interestingly, is that I eminate it outward more strongly now as well. I am able to project this energy that seems to radiate from me deliberately into a space or say, into a sick bird, and I can see the difference it has made, I can see the healing it can cause. Others too can tangibly feel the prickliness of the air in the room which has somewhat dispelled my original notion that I was totally imagining all of this. I sense that despite this strange new ability which seems positive, there is a balance exacted somewhere else and I must be very careful as to how I use this gift.

For the rest of my stay everything glittered. The trees were glowing, the buildings and streets all seemed familiar. I’ve only been to the city once before when I was 5 and most of he time was spent at the zoo. My instinctual familiarity with everything definitely did not come from that visit. Everywhere I went I was found by a friend, someone with whom striking up a conversation seemed like exactly what needed to happen. I continue to be in awe of these things as small miracles of synchronicity. I once had a conversation with my friend about feeling overwhelmed when having too much to do. She had said that her mantra has become everything will fall into place where it needs to be. I said mine was trust in the universe, it will all work out the way it has to. Then I commented, but then I have trust issues. However much that makes me giggle when I think of it, the truth of the comment I think pertains to everyone. We all I think have some unacknowledged sense that things work out the way they should in some way shape or form, but we still don’t necessarily believe that they actually will. I found it almost uncharacteristically easy to trust the universe during this entire trip.
I was speaking to a newly acquired past life friend over the weekend about it means to be home. Home is a strange and moving target for me as I generally refer to home as wherever I am staying at the moment, where my parents live, my ethnic country of origin, and several distinct places in the world where I’ve visited, namely Tahiti, and now San Francisco. Now on my way back home to Cleveland, I have the feeling that I am also leaving home somehow. Crazy.