Subj: Re: [K-list] A Twist on Entities
Date: 8/31/99
Jay wrote:
I asked her if there are really ghosts in this world, she said in a very
gently tone that, "All these are not real..." Then at the moment, all the
entities that had been attaching to retreated and faded away.
El responded:
I have two comments on this:
(1) Having a conviction that entities/spirits are not real is a strong shield
against being able to perceive them, though it won't necessarily protect
against the entities actually interacting in one's life. One simply fails to
recognize that certain experiences are entity-related.
(2) The Buddhist accupuncturist who said "All these are not real..." was
absolutely right when speaking of the deepest level of existence, the One
Self level where nothing is real in the way we imagine it to be. And from
that deepest level, this post, this k-list, I and everyone reading this
message is not real either. I say this not from some philosophy I read
somewhere or concocted in my head, but from direct experience of the One Self
Source level.
El
Subj: Re: [K-list] Entities
Date: 8/30/99 6:25:30
It strikes me that the evil entity question of "Are they real or are they
Memorex?" [ancient audiotape ad slogan] goes beyond demons being scary to the
place in us which wants to understand the universe in a holistic, inclusive
way. I'd like to share one of the lessons I was given by a demonic entity
(though to this day I don't know whether it was actually a creature from the
lower or higher realms, but to me, that part doesn't matter).
The experience happened some 20 years ago during a meditation. Suddenly I
was confronted with a nightmare-vivid entity that seemed to be conveying to
me: "What are you going to do about THIS?" Naturally, my first impulse was
to stop the meditation, jump up and involve myself real fast in other
activities. But something made me pause and try to stay with it a bit
longer. I'm thinking, "This sure is freaky. How do I relate to a demon
without getting myself in deep trouble?"
Then it occurred to me to try to connect to it on the highest and cleanest
level I could, which meant with honesty, respect and appreciation. But what
was there to honestly appreciate about a bad-assed ghoul out of hell glaring
at me? Well, aside from its horrible appearance, it seemed to be a powerful
being, so I ventured, "You're the most magnificently horrible looking
creature, but I bet you have the power to appear even more terrible-looking."
It immediately responded by altering its appearance to look more hideous,
still staring at me intently. Okay, I thought, we seem to have some kind of
weird rapport going. I said to it, "That's fantastic, but I bet you can look
even more terrifying than that." We went back and forth with this exchange
several more times. Each time it assumed a more grotesque appearance than
before, and each time I responded with praise. I could sense it was enjoying
the rare opportunity to show off how ghastly it could look and it was basking
in my appreciation of its power. Note that my intent was not to summon evil
from it, but simply to relate to it on its own terms without compromising
myself.
Suddenly, it changed into the most spectacular looking being I have ever
seen. It shone with unearthly colors so brilliant I could not have said if
at that moment it was an apparition of something demonic or something holy.
All I knew was that I was absolutely floored and from the bottom of my heart
I exclaimed, "MY GOD, YOU'RE BEAUTIFUL!"
At that moment, it vanished. I just sat there stunned, trying to figure out
what had just happened. And it dawned on me that what had transpired in my
brief relationship to the entity had in fact been an exchange of love. With
this came the understanding that nothing is too alien to be unreachable and
that combined respect, appreciation and honesty can allow amazing things to
happen.
Did this experience convince me to stop regarding anything as evil?
Obviously not if you've read my previous posts. Trying to make myself see or
feel or perceive things in a "higher" way (if that is really what it is)
would be dishonest for me, and thus a rejection of the
respect-appreciation-honesty that made it possible for me to experience a
real communication with the entity. I don't want anyone to misconstrue what
I'm saying as a formula for dealing with threatening entities. I think it
worked well for me because I had no idea what was going to happen. If
someone were to try to manipulate a demon by using a similar flattering
approach, it might backfire, since demons are telepathic and know if they're
being conned. I doubt I could ever safely use the same technique with a
demon again, precisely because NOW it is a technique with expectations
attached, instead of a creative response to a woo-woo situation.
Honesty, respect and admiration are pretty good cards to bring to any table,
but they necessitate approaching every situation in a vulnerable way, without
prior rehearsal of what to do or say. Anyway, this has turned into a
cumbersome attempt to say that perceiving entities as demons -- and being
wary of them -- doesn't mean one can't also honor them for their role in the
wondrous workings of the cosmos.
End of strange story/sermon.
El
Subj: Re: [K-list] Hypnagogic Entities
Date: 12/13/99
tbATnospammagenta-logic.com writes:
Do people on the list get these sorts of encounters a lot?
They're not abduction or conscious contactee experiences, but they bear
consideration.
El Responded:
I've encountered entities in the hypnogogic state (as well as in ordinary
waking consciousness) throughout my life. A few years ago while I was taking
a nap, a female entity flopped herself down on the bed beside me. She
startled me and I let out a little yelp.
She was very surprised and exclaimed, "How did you know I was here?" I
answered, "Because I can hear you and feel your presence." (Sometimes I'm
able to see them, too.)
A few seconds later, a male entity entered the room and began talking to the
female. I didn't catch all of their conversation, but I heard her say to
him, "I don't know what I'm supposed to do with her. She's advanced but she
isn't at a level I know how to work with."
Apparently, I was their spiritual tutoring assignment, but I was as much an
enigma to them as I am to a lot of people on this plane, LOL!
El
Subj: Re: My bizarre experiences
Date: 98-07-18 20:21:29 EDT
It may be true, as lady christos wrote, that nothing is completely evil, or
completely dark. My take on it is that everything is in some way in service
to the Light, willing or not. But that doesn't mean that evil has no real
power to harm us. The extraordinary healer/saint Padre Pio was routinely
besieged by demons who beat the sh-t out of him, on occasion breaking his
arms and legs. He did not seem to fear them or resent their attacks on him.
There is an adage, "The greater the light, the darker the shadow." Could it
be that the purer one becomes, the more savage the powers of darkness (on
both sides of the veil) one must contend with? Or perhaps it was Padre Pio's
complete identification with Christ (he bore the stigmata) that brought out
the shadow creatures with such a vengeance. There may be such thing as being
"too good." Probably not something most of us have to worry about...
El
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 1999
Subject: [K-list] Enlightenment
Recent posts (mine, Angelique's and indirectly, Jay's) have brought attention
to the All That Is, God/Goddess One Self level, which, when directly
experienced, is described in spiritual literature as "enlightenment." When I
first had direct experience of this state some 30 years ago, I, as El Collie,
ceased to exist as a separate individual. The literature speaks of this as
dissolution of the ego -- the loss of one's sense of being an isolate self
amidst others. There was only the totality of universal/divine
consciousness. Three days later, when I "came down" into my personal
identity again, I could have said that I had an enlightening experience, but
NOT that I was enlightened. I had just been permitted, by grace or fate, to
know some of the sacred mysteries, just as now, by grace or fate, I'm
experiencing risen K. Aside from an innate passion to uncover the truth of
everything (not that I always succeed), I did nothing consciously to seek or
earn these experiences.
IMNSHO (newly coined acronym: "In my not-so-humble opinion," LOL), most who
claim to be enlightened were, at best, given a visitor's pass to the deepest
level, then returned to their human-ego state. (One sign that someone isn't
really highly evolved is their egotistical boasting about how much they are!)
A very, very few have remained centered in the One Self state: Buddha, Jesus
and Neem Karoli Baba seemed to have achieved this. There are others. The
Buddhist monk who deliberately set himself on fire to protest the suffering
on all sides in the Vietnam war seemed to personify enlightenment. Media
film coverage (broadcast worldwide) showed him sitting unflinching as the
flames consumed his body. After he had burnt to death, only one part of his
body remained uncharred -- his heart. His fellow monks later tried
repeatedly to cremate his heart to complete the death ritual, but the heart
proved indestructible. In the PBS documentary that told the full story, I
think they said that the monk's imperishable heart remains enshrined in a
Buddhist temple.
Until we have reached that kind of self-detachment and unconditional love, I
don't think we can honestly claim to be enlightened. Yet not being
enlightened doesn't mean we don't have any valid insights, it just means
we're still learning.
El
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1999
Subject: [K-list] Reflections
-- El's in-yer-face, self-absorbed, superior-to-everyone online journal --
After my recent post about having my inner life turned around once I focused
on telling the truth, it occurred to me that someone might think this was
fairly good advice for anyone. From my experience, if I'd taken this route
much earlier in my life, before I'd developed a solid heart-center, it could
have been destructive. Until I'd learned about compassion and consideration
for both my own and other people's limitations, making truth-telling my #1
priority could have been ruthless.
Following the truth allows one to see both the elegance and flaws in many
things, but without heartfulness, blatant honesty can sound savage (and
incite riots and get a few lynch mobs coming after you). When I realized
that my guide didn't mean I had to blurt the truth no matter what the
consequences, I could utilize his advice in a wholesome way. Or at least
this is how I came to understand it and reap the benefits thus far. I still
use discernment in what I say (or write), being attentive to stating what I
know/feel to be true (which doesn't mean I always get it right).
I can sense when something I've said is "off" even slightly because it feels
shaky. For instance, as soon as I'd said in a recent post that I wished I
could be more humble, I knew there was a wobble there, but I was too tired to
figure out why, so I let it go. Later I realized that while I do admire
humble people, I'm equally in love with passion in others and in myself.
>From what I've observed, passion and humility don't seem to coexist in any
but the most extraordinarily clear beings, so I feel lucky to have even one
of them. Although I know my passion can become obnoxious at times, I'm not
ready to trade it in for humility. Next lifetime, maybe.
I've never had anyone point out something cruddy about myself that I hadn't
already noticed. I'm acutely aware of my shortcomings, and spent much of my
life beating myself up for my inadequacies and imperfections. Some years
ago, I told a new friend that when speaking to other people, I tried to tone
down the brazen side of my personality. He responded, "Really? I like you
as I've found you." It was one of the most beautifully supportive things
anyone has ever said to me. When I'm able to tell the truth from my heart,
the more I find of me, the more I like me too, crud and all.
-- End of journal entry --
(Regular K-list discussions may now resume)
Date: Sun, 21 Nov 1999
Subject: Re: [K-list] If There Is A God...
In a message dated 11/19/1999 5:57:57 PM Pacific Standard Time,
revoATnospamerols.com writes:
If there is a god, why is this earth such a hell? How could a god,
he-she-it, bring into being such a world where all of nature, beautiful
as it may be, "lives" by killing.
And look at "great" American companies that oppress their workers,
making life miserable for the many at the bottom so that an evil few at
the top can amass more wealth than anyone could possible need...how can
any self respecting god allow this?
El responded:
Mark Twain had an answer to this which often gave me dark-humor satisfaction
during times when my own heart wailed inconsolably at the suffering and
atrocity in this world. Twain said, "God is a malign thug."
I no longer believe this (but still find it funny). I perceive real evil in
the world, yet I've come to understand that it serves a spiritual purpose.
What I'll call the pastel shades of Love -- experienced as bliss, peace,
happiness, and the utter contentment of the cosmic-uterine pre-birth, pre-ego
oneness -- usually get shattered on this plane. Then the heart feels
bewildered and horrified and outraged and cannot comprehend what Intelligence
would throw sentient beings into this pit of hell. But in time it discovers
that the vibrant colors of Love -- all the most dynamic stuff -- come into
being here in this place of constant friction and challenge and ferocious,
sometimes monstrous teachings.
It isn't until the soul has passed through these fires that its greatest
creative potential can unfurl, when it learns it can dance with the Darkness
as well as rest in the blessed embrace of the Light. I don't mean this
flippantly. The "dance" is serious and asks a great deal from you, and it
can't be learned from a book or seminar or from reading what I'm saying here.
But in some way you eventually come to understand that fertile/desolate,
beautiful/hideous, yin/yang, creation/destruction are a necessary pulse that
beats in every iota of the manifest universe.
It's a living koan: an impossible, glorious, absurd, sublime, staggering,
exquisite, incredible conundrum which can drive you up the wall until,
eureka, it suddenly starts to make sense. (I'm just beginning to get the
drift of it myself.)
El
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999
Subject: Re: [K-list] deities.
I'd thought I'd just remain spectator to the God/no-God debate, since my
feeling is that it's a personal issue which doesn't need to be resolved by
committee. Then I realized that my own slant on the subject is something
I've never seen or heard presented anywhere. So why not break new ground...
and wind up alienating everybody, LOL.
What I'll say here arises from an experience I had of God/Self/Void some 30
years ago. I'm not asking anyone to believe my interpretation of the
experience, just stating it as my frame of reference. The experience
annihilated my previous conceptions about the nature of reality and sent me
on a 20 year search through every religious, metaphysical and occult text I
could find, trying to see if anyone else had encountered what had been
revealed to me.
I discovered that nearly every tradition alluded to (or directly described)
my experience. Yet had I read any of this prior to my experience, I couldn't
have fully understood what they were saying, just as when I read Gopi
Krishna's K story years before my own K awakened, my idea of what he meant by
"luminous vital currents in the body" is a whole lot different from what I
know it to mean now.
All of this is a laborious prelude to say that
God/Source/Tao/Whatever-you-call-it is so fantastically, colossally
paradoxical that if you say:
(1) God exists -- it's true
(2) There is only Self -- it's true
(3) The Creator is in all things -- it's true
(4) God is nowhere -- it's true
(5) God is all there is -- it's true
(6) There is no God -- it's true
I'm not trying to be mind-fuck cutesy about this. The Center/Source is
omnipresent, so that from any vantage point or from any specific focus of
awareness -- i.e., any one of us -- no matter what the perception of it is,
it remains true. It's an infinite mobius strip paradox: God is and God isn't
and God never was and God always will be and magic is alive and God never
died and nothing is as it seems and everything is as it seems... and ALL OF
YOU ARE RIGHT!!
And having said that, most of you are probably now convinced that I'm
certifiably insane. Well, that's what you think. Now I must go ride my
purple llama into the prismatic cuisinart, tra la la ole'.
El
Kundalini Gateway Memorial Tribute to El Collie.
Members Remember El.
El Collie in her own words
Selected posts.
Her Poetry.
Her Beloved Charles.
Her thoughts about the K-list.
Archive of all her posts.
Signs and Symptoms of Awakening.
Kundalini Mailing List Archives.
Kundalini Gateway Index.
