How to Awaken the Holy Spirit

and Lessons in Christian mysticism

From our conversations, my godfather, a Catholic priest, was aware of my relationship with the Holy Spirit, that early on, I had spontaneously and for the rest of my life seen the Holy Spirit within as an infinite golden light, could hear its creative vibration, and had come to feel it flowing through my nervous system. When he asked me to be his spiritual director, I wrote him a letter describing how I practiced the prayer of the heart and a breathing exercise somewhat similar to the secret Greek Orthodox breathing practice for encouraging the Holy Spirit to flow up through the nervous system. I also explained a few of my experiences while resting in the intuitive awareness of deep meditation. Most importantly, I wrote about the comfort and guidance of the Holy Spirit and that a personal, interactive relationship with the Holy Spirit was real, not just imagination in this modern-day, materialistic world.

Another parish priest visiting from out of state was given the letter to read, and, having done so, asked if I would expand on it and write a course in Christian mysticism for a class he would be teaching in a couple of months. After our lengthy conversation, he told me that, along with my understanding of the Holy Spirit and the deep things of God, he thought I had a compelling story of a personal journey with the Holy Spirit that he believed Christians living in this world really needed to hear. Perhaps I did have a story to tell. Still, I said to him that, over my many years’ experiences trying to explain early Christian spiritual principles to modern-day Christians, I had concluded that I had such a very different experience and understanding of the Holy Spirit that no one would want to hear it.

I explained that most think the Holy Spirit is a reward for being good or religious and that you must be a saint or at least somewhat holy to awaken the Holy Spirit within. My feeling was that this view was backwards and that the Holy Spirit is not just a reward for faith but more of a tool that God uses in His dealings with each of us less-than-perfect souls, to no matter from where we start in life, no matter our past, present, or future mistakes, to take those who have opened and keep their hearts open to it, through whatever they need to go through so that by the end of their lives they might end up as saints. That, in its dealings with us, the Holy Spirit plays by its own rules, has its own morality, and does not at all care about any religion’s or individual’s feelings in what it does or how it does it: Does not care what religion we belong to or what we believe to be true about it or God, for when we open our hearts to it, the Holy Spirit will take us to the truth of all things from wherever we start, not by the belief in how God should be, or something told to us by preachers, or even written that we believe is holy but by the direct personal experience of God’s deep things. That a journey with the Holy Spirit is about forming a personal relationship with it, maybe not exactly like a person-to-person relationship, but a truly interactive one nonetheless, which can be more intimate, more wonderful, and sometimes, when we fall, more heartbreaking than any person-to-person relationship could ever hope to be.

Except for a very few monks who had experienced states of intuitive awareness from practicing the almost forgotten two-thousand-year-old traditional Christian meditation called the Prayer of the Heart, and or the power and flowing of the Holy Spirit from practicing the breathing exercises of the Greek Orthodox Christian monks, I believed that feeling the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit and the knowledge of the deep things of God found in the early Church had been lost to modern Christianity and the milk of the truth that Paul said was all that the Corinthians were ready to hear, (you know, believe and you will be saved,) is now two thousand years later all that modern day Christians had left of original Christianity and in my experience was all that anyone would allow themselves to hear.

But if, when considering all that I just said, these two priests still thought that even a few would be interested, I would do my best to explain some of the deep things of God written about in the metaphors of the prophets, how with practice to achieve states of intuitive awareness (intuitive mental state of the visions of the prophets), and how to establish an interactive relationship with the Holy Spirit and become open to the flow of it through their nervous systems with the breathing practice just mentioned, in other words, I would agree to do what they had requested but with a caveat.

In the lessons, I would explain the basics of Christian mysticism and how to awaken the Holy Spirit within in a way most could relate but because I didn’t think very many could handle all that I could say and had personally been through, I would wait until I was much older, towards the end of my life, to share the full story behind the lessons. After another fifty years I finally became old enough to write that story but these original lessons contain all that I do and all that anyone needs to know to do the same.

I wrote this first set of lessons fifty years ago. It was put on the web, and I received hundreds of letters, mostly grateful for what I had written, and many questions asking questions on practice. I had a couple of requests from religious websites asking to use parts of what I had written, and a priest who wanted to do the same for a book he was writing, the Abbott of a monastery in South America asking if his secretary could translate my lessons into Spanish for him to more accurately read. Then on the other side, several fundamentalists accusing me of being the devil’s minion, a few of these assuring me that I was going to spend my afterlife in hell if I didn’t repent, and then a Greek Orthodox priest, mad at me for writing about their secret breathing exercises. I was totally surprised by the volume and emotion of the responses. Before I had thought, no one would even be interested but with time came to think that with so many either loving or hating the lessons, I must have written something that needed to be said. These are those lessons.

Before the beginning

Whether from genetics or for some more mystical reason, we are all born with certain gifts and talents. Some have natural abilities in art, math, or communication, or are born with musical abilities like Mozart, a child prodigy in that field. Of course, most of us are not child prodigies in the fields we are born with natural talents, but when we pursue what we have natural abilities in, we will usually end up doing what makes us most content in life. Sometimes talent will show up out of the blue. We may be trying to do something different and unexpectedly discover we have a natural knack for it, often in music or the arts. It was like that with me, with an ability that was not special but definitely different from the norm.

I see little use in explaining this in detail, but from early childhood trauma to about the age of fourteen, I had been experiencing daily headaches for years, half a dozen aspirins or more every day, kind of thing, and thought that a class on dealing with traumatic memories might help. Following the suggested techniques, I started looking into my mind for the memories related to the trauma. I first became aware of individual memories that, when looked at in a certain directed way, dispassionately, that is, would lose the negative energy they were holding: exactly how it was supposed to work in clearing the mind of the negative energy and the influence of such things. But with continued practice, instead of pictures of the individual memories, I stepped back from it all and began to see chains of related traumatic memories as dark blocks, looking almost like boxcars in a train, resting off at a distance in my mind. The dissipation of chains of negative memories, like I was doing, was not mentioned in any of the literature or that I am aware of, and was not experienced by anyone there, student or teacher. Through the course of many hours of practice, each time looking at these chains, the darkness of all the traumatic memories in that chain would lift, turn white, the chain would uncouple, and fall apart, at times, all at once, in a rather dramatic flash and crash, looking and feeling very much like boxcars falling off a bridge that we will sometimes see in old movies. Afterward, the memories would still be available, but their negative energy would have dissipated. In time, my daily headaches of the last too many years disappeared, so far, never to return, sixty-some years later now.

Many years later, I learned that this is pretty much how mystics clear their minds of mental debris. It seems that, in practice, the key for them is to relax the mind to the point where memories can easily well up from the subconscious. For the less advanced, use a minder or record with suggested pictures or ideas, then sit back and dispassionately observe the slideshow of memories that well up from the subconscious, slowly releasing the mind’s negative energies. For beginners, success seems to be the ability to rest in a vivid daydream state; for the more advanced, the deeper intuitive states of the mind, without a minder or recording.

For me, it was all about focus, you know, looking at a memory or chain of memories and single-mindedly dissolving their negative energy. At the time, I did not yet know that intuitive mental states existed, but I did have an additional and somewhat awakening experience, which is what this first little story is actually about. You know, I promised to stay with the scriptures.

I was sitting in a study hall. I had been reading about the subject that I just wrote about, and my eyes were tired. Resting my eyes, I was casually looking over everything and everyone, with my gaze slightly out of focus, when suddenly I began to see an energy field around everyone in the room. Close to the body, the field was bluish-grey, and it extended outward in various colors. I could see this field around each hair on a person’s head. And then further out from everyone’s head was a small field of gold, resting over each person’s head, just like an upside-down golden bowl.

OK, so I seemed to have a small talent for seeing some things spiritual. But what do you do with it? When I described what I had seen to others, no one had any idea what I was talking about, and I quickly learned that when you tell a regular person about things they can’t personally see, things that they don’t know exist or even can exist, they will look at you strangely and think that you are making the whole thing up to get attention or that you are delusional.

But if I could see this aspect of our spiritual structure, the aura it is called, my feeling was that so had others. So, what I did was first to begin learning about my spiritual experiences in silence and, second (pre-internet days), to use Strong’s concordance to research the Bible, trying to compare what I had seen of this upside-down golden bowl with any experiences or spiritual observations written about by the prophets or early Christians. I did know that the prophets had written about many spiritual things in their visions that no one seemed to understand.

Looking up “golden bowl,” I found this:

Zech: 4:2: “I see a solid gold lampstand with a bowl at the top……” and

Eccl: 12-6, “Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosed, or the golden bowl is broken…. “

Later in the lessons, I will explain these scriptures in more detail, but throughout history, with all of these pictures of halos around Jesus’s and the saints’ heads, perhaps in the right light or lack of it, others had seen what I saw, and now I at least sort of knew what it was.

The Beginning

A year later: Nothing special that day, just that something was drawing me to look within, so I decided to look behind the darkness of my mind to see what was there. It’s not that I was expecting anything, but I sat down on my couch, took a couple of deep breaths, and, with each exhalation, imagined myself falling deeper and deeper into the ocean of darkness inside me. I immediately started to fall inside. After a few breaths, my face began to feel wooden; my body lost all physical sensation and became completely numb. In my whole life, I had never relaxed to complete whole-body numbness and didn’t even know that I could.

By continuing to look more deeply inside, a stillness of mind began to creep over me. It was like something had grabbed and held me, both my body and mind. I was aware but locked in place. Resting in this thoughtless stillness, I was lifted into an intuitive awareness I did not know existed. Difficult to explain. But if you can imagine the difference between everyday thinking awareness and the fog that a person might wake up in when they have not had enough sleep, it would seem the same distance between this still, crisp, intuitive awareness and what now seemed the heavy thinking awareness that I had always known.

For a short while, I rested in the wonder of it all.

Then, in this stillness of mind, in this thoughtless wonder, the golden light of the Holy Spirit appeared from what seemed like everywhere and wrapped itself around me, filled me, and brought a comfort and peace that again, I had never known, heard of, or even imagined could ever exist. The cognitive ability of intuitive awareness, coupled with the peace and joy brought by being wrapped in the golden light of the Holy Spirit, was simply incredible. At that moment, I could have died in the Holy Spirit’s arms, completely happy with no regrets.

I rested for a short while, in thoughtless wonder, filled with the light of the Holy Spirit. But as soon as I started analyzing the experience, you know, trying to be rational about the whole thing, I dropped out of the intuitive awareness state, and the Holy Spirit faded away.

As I left this intuitive state and dropped back into my everyday thinking awareness, it felt like a description I read of this transition several years later: “As if putting on soiled clothes.”

Now, the only thing of importance to anyone else in this is what I did the next day.

I had just had the most wonderful experience of my life, and I wanted it back!

So, the next day, trying to experience body numbness, the stillness of mind, the state of intuitive awareness, and the golden light of the Holy Spirit that I rested in the day before, I went over and over that first experience and determined that to repeat the experience of it I needed to repeat the sequence of events that brought me to the experience of it. I just wanted it back! You might call this a good reason to focus.

So, I again looked deep behind the darkness of my mind, but this time specifically for the Holy Spirit. With each exhalation, I again imagined myself falling through the darkness of my mind, melting my awareness into the arms of the Holy Spirit. For the second time, my body became numb, my mind became still, and once more I was lifted into the light, a clear mental state that I later came to call intuitive awareness. This awareness is the intuitive state that the prophets and early Christians experienced when having their prophecies and visions, what mystics usually call super consciousness, but I think is more accurately described as intuitive awareness.

For the second time, the golden light of the Holy Spirit wrapped itself around me and filled me with the same peace and joy that I had felt the day before.

But one more time, as soon as I started thinking and rationalizing about the experience, intuitive consciousness, and the Holy Spirit, faded away.

Before this, I had never read a single book on meditation, knew nothing of Christian mysticism, mysticism in general, or that states of consciousness existed beyond the mind’s normal thinking processes. But I learned one important thing. YOU CANNOT THINK ABOUT THE HOLY SPIRIT AND IN THE MIDDLE OF THINKING ABOUT IT, EXPECT TO EXPERIENCE IT. The Holy Spirit only reveals itself to those who come to it with an open heart and an empty cup (mind) that it may fill.

So, this is how my journey to find the deep things of God began: Being drawn by the Holy Spirit to look inside, my body relaxing and losing sensations, followed by my mind becoming still and quiet, then experiencing intuitive awareness and finally being wrapped in the golden light of the Holy Spirit, not understanding anything but the wonder of it all and the fact that I could not think about the Holy Spirit to experience it.

Each day after, with varying degrees of success, I began practicing the same sequence of events from my first two experiences with the Holy Spirit. Christian monks would call this learning to pray from the heart, a two-thousand-year-old tradition in a few of the Church’s monasteries.

The tradition of praying from the heart

Please understand that my experience with the Holy Spirit is not all that unique. From the beginning, behind the scenes of Church politics, what I found by accident, Christian monks have been quietly teaching those they deemed ready its practice.

A few quotes of consequence: from two thousand years ago till now,

Evagrios the Solitary (born 345), in On Prayer writes:

“When your intellect in its great longing for God gradually withdraws from the flesh and turns away from all thoughts that have their source in your sense-perception, memory, or soul-body temperament, and when it becomes full of reverence and joy, then you may conclude that you are close to the frontiers of prayer.” “Stand on guard and protect your intellect from thoughts while you pray. Then your intellect will complete its prayer and continue in the tranquility that is natural to it. In this way, He who has compassion on the ignorant will come to you, and you will receive the blessed gift of prayer.” “You cannot attain pure prayer while entangled in material things and agitated by constant cares. For prayer means the shedding of thoughts.”

A text used in many monasteries in the 5th century, written by Dionysius the Areopagite and called THE HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, counsels:

“In the earnest exercise of mystical contemplation, you leave the senses and the operations of reason and all things that the senses or reason can perceive, to the end that you raise yourself by this unknowing to union with Him who is above all being and all knowledge.”

St. Hesychios, the 5th-century monk, in On Watchfulness and Holiness writes:

“… When there are no fantasies or mental images in the heart, the intellect is established in its true nature, ready to contemplate whatever is full of delight, spiritual and close to God.”

“We should strive to preserve the precious gifts which preserve us from all evil… These gifts are the guarding of the intellect with the invocation of Jesus Christ, continuous insight into the heart’s depths, stillness of mind unbroken even by thoughts which appear to be good, and the capacity to be empty of all thought.”

The Desert Father, Abba Cronius (285 AD) writes:

“If the soul is vigilant and withdraws from all distraction and abandons its own will, then the spirit of God invades it……”

(St. Teresa of Avila, 1515-1582) writes:

“We are not forced to take wings to find Him, but only to seek solitude and to look within ourselves.”

The catholic monk Thomas Keating (born 1923) writes:

“Let thoughts come, let them go. No annoyance, no expectation. This is a very delicate kind of self-denial, but it is more valuable than bodily austerities, which tend to fix one’s attention on oneself. Waiting for God without going away, giving the usual time to prayer, and putting up with what goes on in the imagination are the most effective practices for acquiring true devotion. The observance of them will lead to a complete change of heart.”

These are just a few quotes from the last two thousand years from those who have experienced praying from the heart, all monks or nuns.

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Big and Small bricks

From birth, we all build a mental library of our experiences, what we have read, and what we have been told and believe to be true. It is that part of the mind through which we view the world around us and try to make sense of it all. In mysticism, the only way to make that library solid is through our own experiences. Any mentor of worth will always tell their students never to take anything said or written as absolute truth, but to build their library from their own personal experiences.

These experiences of the deep things of God may be massive, life-changing revelations to a person, or, like my first experience of seeing the aura around people and the golden bowl, give me a different perspective on our spiritual structure. To have my first significant experience of being lifted into intuitive consciousness, which I did not know existed, immediately followed by being enveloped in the golden light of the Holy Spirit which before this I figured had run away and hidden somewhere after the death of Jesus and the Apostles, was a life-changing, blew down the old library and putting in a massive new cornerstone that would carry me through the rest of my life type of deep things of God experience. Those may happen only once or twice on the path to God.

But then,

Our library is also built of a multitude of small, almost insignificant experiences that probably would never mean anything to anyone, like this simple observation. It was summer. The Holy Spirit was active. Without a shirt on, I went outside to do some work in my backyard. When the sun hit my chest, I felt a ball of energy build in my heart and very distinct fingers of energy spread throughout my torso. My conclusion was that there must be some form of the Holy Spirit, or a subatomic particle akin to it, radiating from the sun that scientists know nothing about. Well, unless you are a nuclear physicist, this observation is probably meaningless. Or you might conclude, as I did, that spending just a few minutes bare-chested in the sun every week might be a good thing to do.

Or the fact that, after about a year of daily meditation, I began to hear inner sounds that eventually merged into the creative vibration of the Holy Spirit. It was C# sort of. Those ringing bowls that the Tibetan monks are seen using, well, that’s the sound they are trying to duplicate. Ok, so within I could hear Om, the finger of God, not exactly earth-shaking.

One or two massive cornerstone-type deep things of God experiences, a multitude of little seeming unimportant deep things of God experiences, with numerous bricks of in-between size deep things of God personal experiences, over the years, build a library of mystical personal deep things of God observations and understandings that cannot be blown down by anything, even relatives.

It should be understood that what the Holy Spirit reveals will be different with each person. First it will never show you what you are not open to see, so open your heart and mind to all possibilities. I have never asked to know the future either for myself or anyone else. I have never wanted the attention that inevitably comes when a person is given the gift of healing, The only thing that I have asked for is to understand the nature of existence and this is pretty much what the Holy Spirit has shown to me. Well, a few other things also.

Comfort from the Holy Spirit

I was married to a lady and had a couple of very young children, all of whom were strong, fundamentalist faith, when the light of the Holy Spirit came so suddenly into my life. Not knowing anything about what was happening except how wonderful it all was, what was the first thing I did? Tell everyone I know about the experiences and ask them what it all means. Almost everyone thought that I was totally out of my mind. Intuitive consciousness above normal consciousness, never heard of such a thing. Being enveloped in the golden light of the Holy Spirit, this guy thinks he is Jesus Christ.

I told my wife everything about these incredible (to me) earth-shaking experiences. She told her pastors, and they convinced her that the devil possessed me. She became afraid to be in the same room with me for the rest of our marriage. She didn’t believe in divorce, and I didn’t believe in leaving my kids without a father. So, we stayed together until the kids were on their own, thirteen more years. I know, old school. I just felt that personal happiness was far less important than duty. I still think that way. Am I out of touch with the times, or what?

I hadn’t learned anything about the formalities or background of the prayer of the heart, and neither in books nor in person could I find anyone in modern Christianity with any deep inner experience of the Holy Spirit. Of course, this was pre-Internet. Now everything is available.

Anyway, I felt alone in my experience, with no understanding of anything, and I just sat down each morning and tried to become open to the Holy Spirit as best I could. One day, I cried out to God in my dismay. Why does no one understand? Why am I the only one? Why, just why am I being punished like this? I should add a huge disclaimer here, but all I can do is relate how the following experience felt at the time. The reality of it is, well, my understanding of such things has changed over fifty years and so many more wonderful, and sometimes (to me) earthshaking, experiences. It’s just that this was the first time that I realized how personal the Holy Spirit could be.

I was deep inside, experiencing intuitive awareness, but had been wallowing in my dismay. There was a rip in the heavens. I felt it. Out poured the Holy Spirit, which I saw with my physical eyes. It descended like a golden cloud and wrapped itself around me as if I were a baby in its arms. It rocked me back and forth for a few moments, and when it lifted from me, all my grief over no one else understanding and my isolation from the world lifted with it, so far never to return. I cannot describe the peace, comfort, and joy. The reality of the experience, do the heavens rip? 

But it was at this point in my spiritual journey that I realized something that has stayed with me throughout my life. Yes, just like others, I believed in the Holy Spirit as God’s finger of creation but now I understood that I also had a very and I do mean very personal one-to-one relationship with it. This experience changed my view of everything. It no longer mattered that no one understood, or what anyone thought of my relationship with God and the Holy Spirit, or even me. I no longer needed to explain or convince others of the truth of the deep things of God that I had begun to experience. Put it out there, yes, but without the personal baggage that usually comes with the attachment to the results.

Truthfully, many of my life situations and experiences with the Holy Spirit are so personal that without this relationship, I doubt that I would have the strength to write about any of them.

Anyway, Jesus said it better than I can. Do not cast your pearls before swine because they will tear you to shreds. Especially if, like me and many others, you start having spiritual experiences and do not understand the process. No one around you is going to understand. When you start telling others about your wonderful experiences, you are going to lose friends and even family because they are all going to think you are crazy or one of the devil’s minions. I know better than most. I will repeat it. Learn silence as a virtue.

Learning to Give It to God

When the mind has run through its rationalizations and has come to the end of what it can do, if at this moment we reach out to the Holy Spirit and ask for its help, it will more likely be there for us than at any other time.

There is a practical aspect to this that, over the years, I have come to use occasionally and may be of use to you—first, a few things. I don’t ask the Holy Spirit what socks to put on and such. It has enough things to do without nonsense like that. When I have asked for the Spirit’s help, it has been because I have not been able to figure it out on my own. Second, understand that the validity of the answer we get from the Holy Spirit has a direct relationship to the depth from which we ask the question.

Ok, having said this, this is how I have practiced it. When I have had something that I really needed help with, I would go as deeply inside as possible, ask the question, and pray (sometimes depending on circumstances, plead, as the intensity of the asking is important) for the Holy Spirit’s help with the answer. Then I let the question go and will not allow myself to think about it. The last part is important. Get your mind off it. Your mind will only get in the way of things. I will ask the question deep in meditation sometime during each meditation period and then forget about it. For me, this is at least a couple of times a day until the Holy Spirit comes up with the answer of how to proceed or not. Usually, within a day or so, I will receive a reply.

Answers have always come as a flash when not expecting it, and quite often the insight will come with a noticeable flash of the brightness of my whole mind: Not in my mind but of my entire mind, which is a sign of intuitive awareness. When I experience the brightness, I am assured that what I am being told is the real deal, not just my imagination. Anyway, this is how it has always worked for me, and hopefully for you too.

It’s all about our hearts.

I was doing some personal research into the lives of the Desert Fathers. To bring the Spirit close, they would try to get their disciples to develop a deep sense of inner sorrow. They write that it is a sorrow that you do not want to get rid of. This seemed to be a really, really, really stupid thing to cultivate. I have always been sorry for my sins. I have always rather hurt myself than another. But I could not understand why a person would want to go around in a state of sorrow, mentally beating themselves up over their sins. We all make mistakes. Just get over it and do better the next time.

Feeling irritated, I put the book aside for my devotional time. I rested in the intuitive calm for a few minutes, and the Holy Spirit lifted my awareness above my mind’s thinking. Suddenly, a sorrow poured through me that was so deep it went all the way down to my bones. It was beyond feeling sorry for one man’s sins. It was like feeling all of the pain and suffering of the world at once. But as the Holy Spirit filled my mind, I understood the grace of God extending to me and all of humanity. Oh, what sweet sorrow that I did not want to lose.

I was mistaken in my previous thinking: for me, the sorrow had nothing to do with my petty sins but everything to do with the Holy Spirit opening my heart so deeply that my soul could reach out beyond its ego sense and embrace its innate humanity. Without the Holy Spirit opening my heart and bringing the experience of it directly to me, I would never have understood.

The Bible says that the seat of our emotions is in our hearts. Of course, it is not our literal hearts but the heart center in our spiritual body that is the seat of the soul’s ability to feel beyond itself, beyond its humanity, and to experience the deep things of God and, eventually, the very presence of infinite consciousness within. The whole spiritual process that Jesus left to us is nothing more than a war between the ego mechanism of our personalities and our hearts, and allowing the Holy Spirit to open our hearts and diminish our ego sense and take us to the deep things of God is how this battle is fought and won or lost. As St. Clement wrote, diminishing the ego-sense and opening our hearts (purification) is only the first step on the spiritual path. But to me, it also seems the hardest.

The spiritual goal in this life that so few of us attain or even strive for is to diminish our egos and open our hearts to God, all of humanity, and existence as much as possible before leaving this world.

The reason that we see the gifts of the spirit around some of those that we call saints and not mankind as a whole is that these particular saints have opened their hearts and diminished their egos to a point of selflessness. The full power of the Holy Spirit will not function through the ego or egocentric individuals. The reason for this is that the full power of the Holy Spirit can only be used by the mind after it has risen through the opened heart. True, we will sometimes see miracles among ordinary people, but this usually only happens at a point of crisis when the mind’s thinking processes have collapsed, and the only thing left is the heart in its purity, crying out to God.

Relief from pain

Even when we are not old, many of us have a terrible time with pain and illnesses. I am not saying that deep prayer will cure the problem, but it may help us cope a little better. Perhaps my own experience will help explain. For several years, I had been doing a type of production work that strained the muscles on one side of my neck. The muscles on that side became stronger than the muscles on the other side. The long-term problem that resulted was that when I would sit down for my devotional time (trying to sit with my spine relaxed but erect), very painfully, my neck would continually be pulled to one side. My devotional time was two hours in the morning and two hours at night, but after an hour, the pain would become so intense that I could not handle it and would have to stop. Eventually, I decided to stay with it and put in the whole two hours, no matter how bad the pain became. For an hour, the pain kept building until it was almost unbearable, and I would usually stop. This time, I focused more deeply and continued. Within a few minutes of deeper concentration, I heard a small snap inside the center of my head and was instantly numb from head to toe, resting in incredible peace. I had not been lifted into intuitive consciousness to experience this. It seemed to come naturally as a deeper focus during my devotional time, as the body’s energy was drawn more deeply within.

Throughout the period of my neck problem, in my devotional time, I would feel the pain build for a while, then there would be a snapping sound in my head, and after that, for as long as I wished, I could continue my meditation in total comfort and peace. Think of the blessing of being able to do this for those who are recovering from injury or illness. The most crucial point of all this might be that if we are not strong enough or willing to work through the pain or periods of spiritual dryness, we may never have the opportunity to open ourselves to the blessings that can result.

A student writes about her similar experience: “Mr. Lawrence, I just wanted to thank you for sharing your contemplative journey and allowing others to learn from you. I have practiced contemplative prayer for about 5 years and am currently at the lonely stage of “nobody likes me.” I have read most of St. John of the Cross’s writings and also St. Teresa of Avila. I am also drawn to Brother Lawrence of old, for I wish to do everything for the love of God, for Himself, not for reward, experience, or any other reason. That is my desire, and the Lord is working in me by the power of the Spirit to grant the desire of my heart.

I discovered, quite by accident, one day, that contemplative prayer does relieve pain. I have had reconstructive surgery for a birth defect that went unnoticed until I was 35. I now have fibromyalgia, an arthritic disease of the muscles, ligaments, and tendons. It is an invisible illness. And that is difficult sometimes, for I appear well, but sometimes suffer excruciating pain.

God has taught me much through that pain and continues to use it to strengthen me spiritually. But when it is rough going, resting in the Spirit virtually removes all pain except for the most vicious. And the Spirit gives me the strength to bear that until my medicine for attacks begins to work. You are right about this in your contemplative prayer lessons. It would be wonderful to share this ability with people who would benefit from it. ……….

Thank you for the help you have given me. There is much food for thought and prayer. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit,”

A physical explanation for a spiritual process

First, a simple observation of the spiritual process. Understand that the Holy Spirit resides in each of us, good and evil alike. It is God’s finger and the substance of creation and the enlivening power of all living things. Its activity within is what makes living things different from rocks. Its activity within our nervous system also makes humans only somewhat different from the animals around us.

If a person wants to be a professional musician, they will generally put in hours and hours of practice each day for years. They are forming brain cell connections that enable them to be aware of the tones and rhythms that most of us are not. Brain scans of professional musicians show that the areas of their brains related to music are more fully developed and larger than those of the average person.

They did the same type of scans on taxi drivers in London, where the drivers have to be able to remember every street in the city as well as everything related to those streets. They found that in those drivers, the part of the brain related to memory was much more developed and larger than in the average person.

It is no different with the Holy Spirit and God. The awareness of both the Holy Spirit and God is innately within every human on this planet. To become aware of both, as a professional musician would, we need to put in enough practice time to create the neural connections that make the awareness of the Holy Spirit and God a continuous part of our lives. There is nothing supernatural, nothing magical about any of this. Bringing the spiritual into the physical body is mostly a brain-cell-and-nervous-system thing.

If we were born perfect (in the ancient Greek of the bible, teleios), say with the genetic profile of Jesus or the spiritual power of his soul, we would never have to practice anything but being quiet. The strong underlying impulse that develops the brain cell connections to experience God and the Holy Spirit would already be there, or at least in the process of being made there. All we would have to do is grow up enough for our nervous system to mature and for the brain and nervous system connections to form automatically, and we would be continuously aware of the Holy Spirit and God in our hearts for the rest of our lives. To me, this is what the story of Adam and Eve was really about: the soul’s potential for continuous awareness of God (the Garden of Eden) and of Jesus through his gift of the Holy Spirit, giving us a way to bring that continuous awareness to fruition.

Just a side thought to end this. Because neural cells in the brain and nervous system are so important to spiritual development, it is important to as much as possible, stay away from those things that impair, suppress or over stimulate their functioning. You know what they are.

The evolution of man’s spiritual nature

The journey to the realization of God as a soul for everyone on this planet and everything in all of manifest creation is the evolution of the individualizing structures that manifest Universal Consciousness as individual consciousness. On the physical level, the journey is the process of the Spirit’s unfolding of spiritual capacities in specific areas of the human brain and nervous system. These areas are where the soul’s spiritual body impinges on the various nerve plexuses of the soul’s physical body. These specific areas are the gates to the higher levels of awareness that we must develop to investigate the Kingdom of God and become aware of the soul’s true nature. It is the Holy Spirit that opens these gates, or more accurately, it is the Holy Spirit that stimulates the growth of the nerve connections within the brain necessary for the soul to use the physical body to realize the higher reality. It is no different than learning any new skill. The proper nerve connections must be in place before the skill can be achieved as a part of oneself. The evolution of mankind’s consciousness is a gradual process in which the nervous system becomes increasingly attuned to the Holy Spirit.

It is pretty apparent to me that the Holy Spirit is the guiding hand behind the evolution of the human species. In another few hundred thousand or perhaps a million years, the human nervous system will probably have evolved to the complexity necessary for mankind to naturally (any process that innately follows God’s will) and spontaneously develop an awareness of the higher reality and gifts of the Spirit. When one considers that the last species to rule this planet, the dinosaurs, lasted over 100 million years, a few hundred thousand to a million years for the human species to develop a natural spiritual consciousness is but a drop in the bucket of planetary time.

The nature of the universe

One day, while resting in the intuitive calm, I was lifted by the Spirit. It pulled my awareness above where it usually rests in my head, and I seemed to be floating above. From this awareness, I looked down into my body, and it was as if I were viewing the basic structure of creation, the smallest particles of existence. I could feel the spaces between what seemed like an ocean of hollow spheres of light, swirling in constant motion. I don’t pretend to understand exactly what I was looking at but I realized that over the years, my eyes had not told me the truth; for there appeared to be nothing solid in this universe. At least this was my conclusion from the experience. 40 years later I was listening to a physicist in a documentary on the nature of matter and energy explaining that there is no such thing as solid. It’s good to know that science is learning and coming to agree with what the Holy Spirit has been showing mystics, forever.

On the practical side, to exist in this universe, everything must be in constant motion. By the nature of this universe, everything must constantly be changing. This applies to our bodies, our experiences, our lives, our loved ones, our world, our religions, our social and political institutions; everything. In all of the manifested realms of existence, including the heavens, nothing can or will stay as it is. There is a saying that “This too will change,” and it always will. Trying to keep people and circumstances as they are is as futile as trying to stop the tides or swim upstream. It is best to live with the nature ebb and flow of the Holy Spirit, it’s called grace.

The Nature of the Mind

Many times, the visions we have in contemplative prayer are not of the outer world but of our own nature. During one period, some mental mechanism had unlocked or moved away from me slightly. Instead of looking through the mind at the world, I was apart from the mind, looking not through it but at it. It was as if I had become temporarily detached from its usual influence. For a couple of days, I went around touching everything. The shift in consciousness made everything seem so much crisper and clearer, like getting a new set of glasses. Before this, I had read that we are not our minds, but this time, I, for the first time, felt it. As we progress on the spiritual path, we will go through several shifts in consciousness. Usually, they happen so gradually that we don’t notice them until we look back at how we were a few years before.

A student wrote of this experience: “I know it’s not the end of the month yet when I normally write to you, but I did want to relate some recent events to you and ask your advice. The Spirit was busy, moving between the crown of my head, the point between the brows, and the center of my brain. I couldn’t do anything else during my devotional after the breathing but watch this movement. I think I finally had a small experience of what you refer to as “looking beyond the darkness of my mind.” I felt myself falling away from my busy mind. I was looking back on my busy mind from a place just beyond it where the stillness was. I was feeling a stillness I had never felt before. It only lasted a few minutes, but my breathing practically stopped during that time. It felt as though I had stepped away from my mind.”

The mind can be our best friend. By this, I mean the rational or thinking part of the mind, coupled with the subconscious. Trained, it is what gives us the momentum, the inertia to find God. This is what I mean. If the mind is trained to move in a particular direction, its natural inclination is to keep moving in that direction. If you train the mind to meditate between seven and eight in the morning, it will try to do that every day. The mind seems to like staying in set patterns. Most meditators, even those of short duration, have had the experience of not being able to meditate at their regular hour, only to have the mind at that hour try to meditate in the middle of what they have been distracted by. It is for this reason that it is much easier to follow when we do our devotionals at regular times.

For those seeking God, the mind left untrained, left unbridled, can be their worst enemy. The unbridled mind is constantly seeking greater activity and sensation. Eastern mystics call it the monkey mind. Try to calm the untrained mind too quickly or too strenuously, and like an outraged monkey, it starts going into all sorts of contortions. This is the most significant problem for new meditators. Training the mind for quiet meditation requires a long, gentle, structured process, so be patient and gentle with yourself, and give yourself the time to let your efforts come to fruition.

The main problem with the mind is that for most of us, it distorts everything it sees. For most of us, our minds are not yet clear panes of glass but are, as St. John of the Cross explained, muddied and rippled. Looking through the clutter, we cannot see reality or ourselves as we truly are. The subconscious part of the mind holds pain, fear, mis-emotion, all the distorted opinions and tendencies that have been imposed on us from childhood up to have been imposed on us by others and society in general, as mind stuff whirlpools. The whirlpools spin off ripples of irrational opinions, fears, hatreds, compulsions, and unworthy habits that sometimes dominate our lives. Because of the mind’s programming, clutter, and the distorted vision through which it experiences life, the soul cannot clearly see God or its true nature.

The play of mind and spirit

Thoughts are real things with real substance and energy. Do not ever believe that you can think and think along specific lines, and because no one can read your mind, your thoughts will not have consequences. Do not ever think that you can do a harmful thing, and because no one saw you do it, it will not come back to bite you.

Your mind records everything that you think or do. Nothing ever, and I do mean ever, as in the tiniest little thought or action, is not recorded by your subconscious and put on its shelves in storage. So, what, who cares? Well, unless you are satisfied with why this is happening to me, I don’t deserve this; you need to care.

First, a couple of basic facts. The mind is very much like a pond of water. In its depths, it holds everything we think and do. Every thought a person has creates a ripple on its surface that never disappears but sinks into the pond’s depths, into the subconscious. When we think enough thoughts along a particular line, enough ripples will have accumulated in the depths to create an upwelling of energy, a compulsive impulse in the mind that moves a person into actions that correspond with the accumulated power of each of our thoughts along this line of thought. This can be good or bad. So, watch what you put in your mind and watch your thoughts. Your thoughts are real things with real energy, and they can lead to serious consequences when not adequately controlled.

This is the underlying problem, but it gets worse. The upwellings, that is, the compulsive thoughts that arise from the subconscious, bring about actions that do two things. First, with each action taken along that line, acting on the compulsions makes the upwellings in the mind stronger, over time worsening the compulsion. I do not need to be specific about this. Even virtuous deeds performed compulsively are spiritually harmful. Second, when not controlled, unhealthy compulsions can and usually do grow ever worse and can and usually do have very real, damaging consequences.

And now, the good or bad part of all this. Each of us lives in the ocean of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is everywhere and in and as everything. The Holy Spirit’s interaction with our minds is all about energy seeking its own level, which is the positive and negative energies that live in our minds. The Holy Spirit will always seek balance in our lives. It is no different than water seeking its own level, with the Holy Spirit facilitating the flowing of energy from high to low. We cannot run from the Holy Spirit. We cannot hide a single thought or action from it. As a natural part of the task that the Holy Spirit has been given (the finger of God), sooner or later, it is going to bring about those circumstances in each of our lives that will help level out the imbalances in our minds. Good or bad, we can sometimes hide what we think and do from others, often from the surface of our own minds, but we cannot hide the imbalances in the depths of our minds from the actions of the Holy Spirit.

When we pass from this earth, there is only one thing that we will feel from God: Absolute and unconditional love. That is His part. It is called grace. But what determines what happens to us after we pass from this earth is brought forth by the Holy Spirit using the process that I have just described.

St. Isaak of Syria writes: “If something has become deeply united with your soul, you should not only regard it as your possession in this life but believe that it will accompany you into the life to come. If it is something good, rejoice and give thanks to God in your mind; if it is something bad, grieve and sigh, and strive to free yourself from it while you are still in the body.”

I do not think the Holy Spirit judges us so much in this life or the next; it simply brings about the circumstances that will balance the energies out of balance in our minds and our lives. And if you have given yourself over to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, where you can feel it in your life, you can expect the process to be much more intense.

This interaction of the Holy Spirit with the mind, bringing the various needed circumstances into life for the soul to learn what it needs to learn, this subtle and occasionally not so subtle play of life is what mystics call karma, and the bible calls an eye for an eye. I call it a natural balance of energy.

Divine Consciousness as Soul

All the saints who have directly experienced the true nature of God tell us (In ways that they think the followers of their denomination can best understand) that God is not a “big person” in the heavens.

Evagrios the Solitary in On Prayer writes: “Be on your guard against the tricks of the demons. While you are praying purely and calmly, sometimes they suddenly bring before you some strange and alien form, making you imagine in your conceit that the Deity is there. They are trying to persuade you that the object suddenly disclosed to you is the Deity, whereas the Deity does not possess quantity and form.”

St Cyril of Alexandria (378 to 444) writes that God is “incorporeal, immaterial, impalpable, beyond quantity and circumscription, beyond form and figure.”

In other words, God is not staring down at His creation, rewarding and punishing mankind like some petty Roman deity. God’s true nature is far beyond the concept of a personality located in time and space, up there somewhere. The far most significant part of Divine Consciousness is like an infinite, unchanging sky, an omnipresent consciousness that rests behind creation as a limitless, unchanging, formless, and unmanifest presence. But at the same time, this formless unmanifest presence manifests on the surface of Itself that which dreams the dream of creation that is each soul and all that is manifest as the heavens and earth. This is what the greatest of the mystics tell us, anyway.

I will try to explain the best way I know how: with an example that came to me many years ago while practicing in the desert, followed by another commonly used example. Hopefully, between the two examples, I can clearly convey my and other mystics’ understanding of the soul’s true nature in God, so you can understand the concept, even if you choose to disagree with it.

The first example is as follows. Souls are a part of manifested Divine Consciousness, very much like the little whirlpools of air that I have so many times seen in the desert are a part of the sky. Called dust devils, the little whirlpools might seem different from the sky from which they are made, but this is only because of the debris each has picked up on its journey across the land. It is illusory: For it is only the movement, support, and flow of the whole sky that is carrying the dust. The whirlpools have no separate existence from the whole of the sky. They can only maintain the appearance of an individualized structure if a creative impulse supports them. Remove the creative impulse, and the whirlpools are “immediately annihilated.”

As St. John of the Cross explained, the same concept is true of the soul. Expressing itself through the substance of creation, the soul is that pure Infinite and omnipresent consciousness, individually focused as each soul by the creative impulse, the wind of God. By identifying itself with the captivating and illusory structure of creation (the bejeweled angel Satan) into which it is born, the soul is deceived about its true nature and temporarily loses its awareness of its own perfection and unity in God. The soul becomes lost in its own dream, its mistaken sense of separateness. (The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) and casts itself out of the garden of the awareness of its own structure of individualized divine consciousness (the tree of life) into a self-involved, self-created world of thorns and thistles. This is my understanding of the meaning behind the story of Adam and Eve.

Through the action of the Holy Spirit, on earth or in the heavens, it is the innate impulse (the grace of God) and natural evolution of the soul to eventually burn away the dust, look to its true nature, and find that it is not the substance of creation after all, but rather “I am that” greater reality and individualized infinite consciousness behind the personality I have dreamed myself to be. As an inseparable part of infinite consciousness, as a wave in the ocean of infinite consciousness that is God, each soul exists as one of the countless individualizations existing within the whole. Each soul will eventually come to realize the simple truth that Moses spoke: “I am that” and will come to rest as “I am.”

Extending everywhere, within, and as everything, infinite divine consciousness (God) is all there is, ever has been, ever will or can be, and souls as well as all of creation as individualizations of It, are not now, never have been, and never can be separate or apart from the whole of It. The soul, as well as all manifest creation, would “immediately be annihilated and cease to exist,” if divine consciousness were not it. The truth is that only divine consciousness exists. All things are One Thing. There is only God and that which exists in Him or Her, but actually it, as the case may be, is still only it.

Nicholas of Cusa (1401 to 1464) writes: “From the infinity of your mercy, I see, O Lord, that you are infinity embracing all things. There is nothing that exists outside you, but all things in you are not other than you. You teach me, Lord, how otherness, which is not in you, does not exist in itself, nor can it exist.”

St Symeon, The New Theologian, (949 to 1022) writes: “How then was the Word everywhere before making the world and, when He had made it, how was He shining in it without the world comprehending Him? Pay careful attention: God, “Who is everywhere present and fills all things,” was not, Scripture says, separated from it by location when He created this sensible world, but by the nature of the glory of His divinity, it being evident that nothing created approached or comprehended Him at all. Indeed, being inseparable from all He is as clearly in all.”

St. Catherine of Siena (1347 to 1380), speaking to God, writes: You, eternal Trinity, are a deep sea: The more I enter you, the more I discover, and the more I discover, the more I seek you. You are insatiable, you in whose depth the soul is sated yet remains always hungry for you, thirsty for you, eternal Trinity, longing to see you with the light in your light.

You are a fire always burning but never consuming; you are a fire consuming in your heat all the soul’s selfish love; you are a fire lifting all chill and giving light. In your light, you have made me know your truth: You are that light beyond all light who gives the mind’s eye supernatural light in such fullness and perfection that you bring clarity even to the light of faith. In that faith, I see that my soul has life, and in that light receives you who Light are…

Truly, this light is a sea, for it nourishes the soul in you, a peaceful sea, eternal Trinity…. This water is a mirror in which you, eternal Trinity, grant me knowledge; for when I look into this mirror, holding it in the hand of love, it shows me myself, as your creation, in you, and you in me through the union you have brought about of the Godhead with our humanity.

Take the mystics’ usual example of the ocean. In the whole of it, you cannot isolate any of its waves from the body from which they come, the body that supports them, and upon which they owe their existence. Their substance cannot be removed and isolated, and they remain waves. Waves are more like impulses created by the wind or other creative forces that, as impulses, travel across the surface of the sea. You must realize that the particles of ocean water do not travel the thousands of miles from land to land that makes up the birth (individualization) and death (reabsorption into the whole) that is the lifespan of a wave; that only the impulses travel and can be said to be waves. The waves have no substance of their own, so they cannot say this is me and not the ocean. Take away the wind or other creative impulse, and what happens? Isn’t the whole of the ocean still there? Not one particle of it is missing, but the waves cease to exist. This is the nature of all creation.

This is true of the soul. There is no point at which you can isolate the soul’s being from the whole of God. Like a wave, the soul is an impulse created by the wind of God that rides upon the surface of the body of Divine Consciousness. The saints who have directly experienced God repeatedly tell us that the soul has no substance of its own, that it can say this is me and not God. If the Wind of God should stop blowing, what happens? The whole of Divine Consciousness is still there. Not one particle is missing, but the impulse, the manifested divine consciousness, returns to formlessness, returns to that point in time before manifestation, and souls, as well as all else that is manifest as the heavens and earth, will have ceased to exist.

On a more personal level, where I do have an understanding, one of my students wrote this question: “You have stated that God is not a personality. Does that mean that God is not personal? That we do not have a relationship with God as a human son and father would have, as the Gospels seem to portray Jesus having with His Heavenly Father?”

Answer: We cannot have a more personal relationship than that which we have with God. Divine Consciousness is the very core of our being, and most mystics relate to God in a very personal way. This is the soul’s nature. But this does not mean that the ocean of divine consciousness, that is the Father, Christ, and Holy Spirit, are personalities or a single personality that relate to us as we relate to them. The saints tell us over and over that God is not a big person in the sky that we can point to and say, “God is there, not over there.” The essence of our being is infinity, just as God is infinite, but the soul is individualized infinity; infinity with a single focused point of individualization through which it relates. From this viewpoint, everything tends to be personalized. The ocean of divine consciousness, God, is not individualized and relates to each soul from the whole, from infinity. God is the closest thing to us and yet is impersonal with us as well as everything else that exists within the whole. Knowing that each of us is His own infinite dream playing out within Himself, it is as if God has stepped back and is simply watching the love, hate, and drama of each play.

But at the same time, through the Holy Spirit, God is intimately available to His creation. At the many times that I have reached out to God, through intuitive consciousness or even in moments of distress, I have sometimes been answered with very personal responses like visions, comfort, or understanding. But over many years and many experiences, I have come to a much better understanding of the nature of these responses. I am not saying that it is not God who has responded, but only that I have come to a better understanding of how something so completely impersonal can respond so personally. It is one of those revelations that, instead of being told, should be experienced over the many years of one’s life, and then only after we have stepped back far enough from it all and have taken a deep, hard look before the truth can settle in.

Consciousness as light

“When the mind is completely freed from the passions, it journeys straight ahead to the contemplation of created things and makes its way to the knowledge of the Holy Trinity.” (Maximus the Confessor)

There is only infinite consciousness, and this is what we call God. In a myriad of forms, only consciousness exists. There is a main trinity of aspects to the infinite consciousness that we call God that inwardly manifest themselves to us as light.

Usually, the first thing that we see inside of ourselves is the Holy Spirit. We are standing on it, breathing it, and our bodies and minds are made of it. It is God’s hand extending to all individualized creations. (souls) Becoming open to it is not the end of the path; it is only the very beginning of a lifelong cleansing process culminating in the direct experience and knowledge of God and soul. But of what value is the boat that carries us to our Father if all we do is occasionally read the operator’s manual and never get in the boat and let it take us anywhere? The boat is the wonderful golden light and sound of the Holy Spirit. It is here for each of us: If we will only reach out just behind the darkness of our minds for God’s hand.

The light of the Christ aspect of God is a more subtle perception than that of the Holy Spirit. It usually takes many years of silent prayer, when the center of consciousness in the middle of the head, the Gate to the East, begins to open, before it can be seen behind and within the light of the Holy Spirit. (For me, it took approximately twenty years of meditation, three to four hours a day, before I could rest in it regularly.) The Christ aspect is the cosmic intellect of Divine Consciousness. It is that part of the triune nature of infinite consciousness that, using the Holy Spirit, directed the creation of the heavens and earth, that is, all manifest existence. Souls are individualized through this aspect of Divine Consciousness. All souls are of the body of the Christ of God. This aspect is seen inwardly as a luminous, deep blue ocean of light. Only after we rest in the light of Christ and more, will we begin to understand the peace that Jesus gives.

The Father aspect of Divine consciousness and the true nature of the soul is an even more refined perception of light than that of Christ. It is seen just behind and within the light of Christ. Everything is contained within its nature. If you hear a description of its true nature, that is not it, at least not the whole of it. Its nature as each and all must be experienced to be understood. It cannot be told. When this aspect is first seen within, it will often look like a white star floating within the deep blue ocean of light of Christ. When we enter the light of the Father, it will expand as our true self into infinity and seem brighter than a thousand suns.

Over the years, as we fall deeper and deeper into God’s arms, we are experiencing deeper and deeper levels of consciousness manifested as light.

Consciousness Creates Reality

This lesson is about my simple observation of why some things do what they do and are what they are. It’s just me musing about the nature of existence, and many are definitely not going to like this one.

What we call God is not a big personality in the sky up there somewhere that we can point to and say There He is. It is not even a he or a she but pure consciousness, the greater part of which is formless, infinite, and an eternal awareness that we call God. All of manifest creation is made of this formless consciousness, but formed as almost infinite singular consciousnesses of varying degrees of awareness; the whole of this being much smaller than but within the whole of one infinite consciousness. Science is always trying to find that particle or wave form that is the foundation of all other existence. Well, consciousness is it, and I don’t know that consciousness will ever be something that science can put on a table to dissect but realize that it is the foundation of our being.

Everything we can see, or measure, is consciousness manifesting or falling about. Even the supposed emptiness of space is consciousness. If you look at the growing crystalline structure of rocks, this is consciousness evolving. If you look at the simplest forms of life, it is conscious evolving to increasing states of awareness. Eventually, it evolves into the awareness of animals that are aware but not self-aware. But consciousness keeps evolving. Then comes self-awareness, you. But don’t feel all that special. Apes, some monkeys, chimpanzees, whales, dolphins, elephants, etc., are all self-aware.  But I am smarter than they are. Except to you, this means nothing to infinite consciousness and its evolving universe. Sorry to have to tell you this, but they are all souls. Your cat and dog, etc., even though not self-aware, are individualized consciousness, souls of varying degrees of awareness. You pet owners who have and love your pets as family already feel this.

Isn’t there anything beyond my self-awareness, you know, that makes me so special to God? Again, sorry to tell you this, but yes, there is. It is God awareness, the knowing by direct perception, of the same quality knowing that you are self-aware, same as but so much deeper. It is an expanded awareness knowing that our existence in God is not separate from Him, but as an infinitely small part that exists within the whole of the infinite consciousness. A person knows and feels this no differently than the quality of how they feel about their own self-awareness. Mystics in varying degrees have known and have felt this awareness as a part of themselves for as long as there have ever been mystics. It is the next step of consciousness evolving beyond our self-awareness. It is what a mystic is, with varying degrees of awareness, someone who feels this innate connection as the fundamental nature of their being, that is, being one with and of the same substance as God. I and my Father are one is true for all of us.

Back to consciousness, manifesting and creating the reality we live in. Slow down the vibration of consciousness, and it becomes energy. Slow the vibration of energy, and it becomes matter. Individualize infinite consciousness into a singular viewpoint, and it becomes a soul. Everything is consciousness and inseparable from the whole. In other words, everything is, but one thing, and it is what it is.

Now, a few more observations, or maybe just my own musings from big to small, for you to think about or ignore as you choose. If you look around, everything exists as it does because Infinite consciousness has decided that it is to be this way within itself. The infinite consciousness that we call God sets the basic rules of reality in each of the heavens and also the material universe we live in, But infinite consciousness is not bound by the physical laws that it has created, and neither are those who cannot tell where God ends and they begin. But these rules, in small ways, can be modified by the combined or a well-connected individual consciousness that feels itself as a part of the infinite consciousness and even by the combined consciousness of us common folk.

For instance, astrology. I see not a single material reason that astrology should mean anything. But it seems to. I mean the Three Wise men who saw the coming of Jesus were, I think, Indian astrologers who saw his coming in the star charts of their time. The star in the Bible that most think of was added a hundred years or so after the fact, written for spiritual children. You know, as Paul said, stories that are the milk of the truth. But I have noticed that even the astrologers of today who know what they are doing are scarily accurate about things. I see only one reason for it. So many people have believed in astrology for so long that the collective consciousness behind this belief makes it a binding reality for everyone on our planet. In other words, our combined consciousness has created not an opposing reality but a small modifying reality within the whole of God’s reality, but only for those living on this planet.

Dropping down a level. The story goes like this. The Christian mystic and Trappist monk Thomas Merton died from an electrical accident while visiting Thailand. The belief in the area was that when a Buddha, an enlightened soul, someone who is born again unto the Holy Spirit, dies, a crocodile will be seen eating a dog. It is said that this is precisely what happened when Thomas Merton died. I don’t think that a crocodile eating a dog occurs often enough to be a coincidence. My feeling is that unless someone paid that crocodile, a regional belief may very well create a modifying regional reality within the whole.

Dropping down another level. Most Christians have heard the story of Jesus turning water into wine and feeding the multitudes with a small basket of fish, in other words, creating fish to feed the many from nothing. The saints of many religions are said to have done the same kind of thing. When you consider the energy held by even a minute amount of mass (think of the atomic bomb), this is truly extraordinary, but the thing is that there is no such thing as nothing. Everything is but one thing, everywhere. There is only consciousness everywhere, and the more one experiences themself as it is, the more powerful the soul is in creating and modifying realities, which is all that miracles are. Jesus said it himself: my Father (infinite consciousness) and I are one, and to a lesser degree, in knowing the reality of it, this is also true for the rest of us.

But being a saint or even being nice is not necessary for creating or modifying reality. Often it is about strength and focus of the mind, sometimes from chanting spells and such, you know, the dark side of the force. My friend of forty years told me this story about her grandmother. A madam, known for her spells and such, wanted the grandmother’s husband, and my friend said, put roots on him and took him. She also put a spell on my friend’s grandmother, and she suddenly went blind. After going through all his money, the madam threw my friend’s grandfather to the curb, but the grandmother remained blind. A few years later, out of nowhere, the grandmother’s sight was fully restored. A few weeks later, it was found that this was the very day the madam had died. What this tells me is that a modifying reality is only held in place as long as the person who created it is still in this universe. I think this is true of both curses and blessings.

That I know of I have never had to deal with a curse or roots or such but I have read that if you feel like something of this nature coming, it is possible to keep it off you and even bounce it back to its maker by imagining the light of the Holy Spirit as a circle of protection around you protecting you from such things, which is actually creating a counter modifying reality. Unfortunately, in this world, whoever can make the strongest modifying reality seems to win. But it must help to have the Holy Spirit on your side.

Dropping down another layer and getting back to quantum physics. In researching the smallest particles of matter and energy, it is said that simply observing the experiment changes the outcome of it. Why would this be? It’s simply that everything is consciousness, and everything is connected. Separateness is an illusion of the mind in both quantum physics and high-level spirituality.

Which brings me to think about our dreams, which do not come from nothing but rest in and manifest from our individual consciousnesses. The people and places in our dreams seem to be playing their separate roles, but when we wake, we understand that everything we see is a manifestation of our singular consciousness. This is but a reflection of what infinite consciousness, God has done with each soul, but on a much higher level, of course.

This brings me back to the apostle Paul. He wrote, for now we see through a glass darkly, that is we live as if in a dream, but then (with enlightenment, being born again unto the Holy Spirit, teleios, the bibles word for spiritual completion, translated in the bible as being perfect, but is also the bliss of Sufi Muslims, nirvana of the Buddhist,) or in my words, the direct experience of realizing our individual consciousness as a part of and inseparable from the whole of infinite consciousness, Paul says that “then” after this experience we will come to know ourselves as God knows us. It is called the Christ consciousness or the God realization that I just tried to explain.

I fully understand that we regular folk, still seeing through the glass darkly, will always fight over the meaning of words written by others. Many will listen to the preachers telling them that if they don’t believe exactly as they or their related organization teaches, they are going to hell or some other seeing-through-the-glass-darkly, dumb thing. But try to realize that that’s all they have. Words of others with no actual spiritual experience of their own, or of any depth of it anyway. But, with using just a little common sense, understand that with all of the different words from all of the different saints of our different religions, each describing the possibility of the same singular experience of being one with God, realizing that we are all a part of the whole of it, and not in any way separate from the whole, that maybe this can give us something to think about beyond our minds’ incessant lie of being separate and isolated from everything. It is a lie, the Garden of Eden original lie of our being.

And now to our Spiritual Anatomy, as in the process of dying, written by

Well, I never believed it was King Solomon.

Ecclesiastes 12:1: “Remember you, Creator, in the days of your youth,”

12:5: “Because man goes to his lasting home and mourners go about the streets,”

12:6: “Before the silver cord is snapped…”

Early in my spiritual life, as I would sit in contemplation and would come to a stage where my awareness seemed to rotate inside my body: A rather odd feeling because my body would be facing forward, but my awareness would be facing in a totally different direction. One day, while in this state, I looked down at myself. What I saw was two bodies. First, my physical body, but partially outside of it, a silvery white spiritual body. Connecting these two bodies, the bible describes it as a silver umbilical cord. At death, this cord snaps, and the soul’s relationship with the physical comes to an end.

12:6: “and the golden bowl is broken…”

Remember the first experience that I wrote about? Seeing a golden bowl over each person’s head. And: (The halo, the same golden bowl that Zechariah writes about, the highest center of consciousness in the spiritual body)

12:6:” …and the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the pulley is broken at the well.”

And the physical body can no longer utilize the Holy Spirit flowing through the channels and centers of the spiritual body.

12:7 “…and the dust returns to the earth as it once was, and the breath of life returns to God who gave it.”

A student wrote of an experience she had before reading my lessons: “I must tell you that I read your contemplative prayer lessons and found them inspirational. I had an experience a couple of years ago when I was trying to understand how to be filled with the Holy Spirit. ……. Well, upon waking one morning, I experienced a light feeling and looked down and saw myself and my husband asleep below. I rose through the ceiling so fast I shot up through the sky and could see the stars around in the dark night. I looked down and saw this silver cord that you spoke of. I got frightened. And suddenly I was whisked away back into my body. I woke up terrified and did not know who to discuss such a situation with. I did not know anyone who would understand what I was going through at the time. I let fear get in my way and did not realize that my seeking understanding was bringing me closer to the answers that I was searching for. Well, I stopped trying, and now I realize that there is nothing to fear. That someone else has gone through similar experiences, and that it brings you closer to the Holy Spirit. I will start to pray in search of the Spiritual closeness that is meant for me to endure and not let fear turn me away. Thank you for your contemplative prayer lessons on the internet. I know it will reach many who are seeking an understanding of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

The vision of Zechariah

While he was in the state of intuitive awareness, Zechariah writes of a vision that he had of the soul’s spiritual body.

4:2: “I see a lampstand all of gold,”

(The Spirit within the human spine, the tree of life)

4:2: “with a bowl at the top.”

(Remember my first spiritual experience of seeing the golden bowl, the halo seen around the heads of the saints, the highest center of consciousness in the spiritual body.)

4:2: “on it seven lamps with their tubes,”

(These are the wheels of light spoken of by Ezekiel. They are the seven main centers of consciousness in the spiritual body and their connections to the lampstand of the Spirit within the spine. They are associated with the spiritual body where it impinges on the various nerve plexuses located along the human spinal column and into the head.)

Just as the physical body is not a lump of clay but a complex structure, so it is with the soul’s spiritual body. In the physical body, the main distribution channel for the Spirit and grosser nerve forces is the spine, the brain, and various nerve plexuses. In the spiritual body, the main channel for the distribution of the Holy Spirit and higher spiritual forces is described in this vision as the golden lamp stand with a bowl at the top and the seven lamps with their connecting tubes.

The seven lamps are the gates to the seven basic realms of existence (The seven heavens that Mohammed traveled) within the Kingdom of God, and the seven basic states of consciousness that the soul travels through to God realization.

The spiritual body’s centers of consciousness

“The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work were as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.” Ezekiel 1:16

On many occasions during deep contemplation, I have been drawn to the front at what mystics call the gate to the East and have seen the golden light of the Holy Spirit, as a wheel of light around the deep blue light of the Christ aspect of divine consciousness and even the white light of the Father. These many experiences with the light have not come from super consciousness, as seems to be the case with Ezekiel. But then his visions seem a lot more dramatic than what I have experienced.

As our consciousness in the physical body is located within the brain, our spiritual body has its consciousness located within specific areas of its body; for instance, empathy is seated at the heart center. Each area of spiritual consciousness has its own specific vibration of the Holy Spirit, and the resulting color from this vibration is seen inwardly as a wheel of light that comes from each area. (It is no different from splitting a full spectrum of what appears to be white light into its different vibrational colors.) Each area in the spiritual body can be heard and seen inwardly as different frequencies of vibration of the light of the Holy Spirit and can be felt outwardly where these areas impinge on the physical body.

I was listening to some music when I began to feel the vibration of the centers of consciousness along my spine and into my head. Each center had its unique frequency that would be stimulated, and I would feel physically when the music hit the note at which the center vibrated. I felt seven areas of vibration along the spine and into the head, exactly where the great mystics have written they could be felt. The area at the base of the spine had the lowest frequency of vibration, and the areas increased in vibration, with the area at the very top of the head having the highest frequency of vibration. All areas seemed to vibrate within the human range of hearing, or perhaps it was just a harmonic. As the vibrations poured through me, moving up and down the spine with the music, it felt as if I had become a musical instrument being played by God.

It is obvious to me that it was the assorted colors of the wheels of light and different vibrations of the Holy Spirit located within the centers of consciousness in his own spiritual body that Ezekiel experienced with his visions of light and sound.

“And I looked and behold, a whirlwind comes out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire enfolding itself, and a great brightness was about it, and out of the midst, therefore, was the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire.” Ezekiel 1:4

“As the appearance of a sapphire stone” Ezekiel 1:26

“And I saw as the color of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it,” Ezekiel 1:27

A student wrote this question about his experience: “Could you please tell me of the significance of the appearance of a circle of white light after doing contemplative prayer and the breathing process, and later the appearance of a smaller blue light in the center of the circle of white light?”

Answer: The three main aspects of Divine Consciousness are seen as the golden light of the Holy Spirit, the blue light of the Christ aspect, and the white light of the Father aspect. When seen as circles of light, you are probably looking into one of the centers of consciousness (lamps on the lampstand) along the spine or into the head as you practice your exercises. It is a particularly good sign of greater sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.

What happens to the soul after death is based on its spiritual structure

I was resting in intuitive awareness and was lifted by the Spirit. The whole universe seemed to appear before me. It looked like a giant Christmas tree ornament hanging on nothing. While in this state, I clearly understood that the whole of God is not to be found at the center of the billions of stars within our galaxy, the Milky Way, or even at the center of the two trillion galaxies that make up the immense strands and clusters of matter and energy that exist as the observable physical universe. The whole of the physical universe that mankind feels is so vast is more like a small cluster of diamonds resting on one of God’s fingers. (as if the universal consciousness we call God had fingers)

While resting in intuitive awareness, symbols in the form of mandalas, that I seemed to completely understand kept scrolling across the bottom of my vision. When I dropped back into thinking awareness the first thing I said to myself was, WHAT.  I lost the clarity I once had resting in intuitive awareness.  I could not bring the awareness back with me.

The heavenly realms, each brighter and larger than the one under it, would make up the jewels that rest on God’s fingers. The heavens are not a single place. Did not Jesus say, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions?” The heavens are more like a series of separate universes divided by vibrations of consciousness. Mohammed speaks of consciously being taken through the seven heavens, and this relates to the seven of everything the bible talks about from the beginning to end of it. The physical universe is at the bottom of the heavens and has the coarsest vibration.

There is a point that I am getting to here. As we develop spiritually, as we open each of the centers of consciousness in our spiritual body, the gates, and they are literal gates, our consciousness will become more highly attuned and will increase in vibration. When our bodies die, and we leave the physical realm, the more highly attuned our consciousness, the more it has expanded and developed in this life, the more centers of consciousness we have opened, the higher we will be able to go into the heavens, and the less restricted we are when we get there. It is strictly a matter of vibration of consciousness.

Sorry, but you really need to realize the truth of this. Only those whose consciousness is fully developed (Born again unto the Spirit) can roam the series of universes known as the heavens at will and fully choose how they wish to serve God. The rest of us, well, look at your mind because that’s where you will end up in God’s kingdom. We will be stuck at whatever realm our consciousness is attuned. If we want to move up in the heavens, well, open the next gate. That’s just the truth of how it works, or you can believe the milk of the truth, that no matter what you have done in your life, all you need to do is to believe, and from the next moment on, and at the end of your life, you are destined to walk on golden streets and grow wings or some such. Believe as you will, but the truth of it is that the spiritual journey is not about belief or who you think you know but is structural. Seven heavens, seven gates, seven basic levels of consciousness, seven lamps on the lampstand, seven wheels of light, seven stars in Revelations, etc. It is all structural.

Jesus said that he was preparing a place in heaven for his followers but what is not said is that you have to raise your consciousness to that level to get there.

The Nature of Scripture

The deep things of God are written, they are right in front of our faces. It is just that they are hidden in plain sight in the metaphors of the prophets, the writings of the Apostles, and the carefully chosen words of later saints. From the few examples of scripture provided in these lessons, it should be obvious that there are at least two levels of awareness being referred to in the bible. We need to understand the reason for the scriptures and writings of the saints being written as they are. The tradition in that part of the world was that the average person was not capable of understanding the higher realities of God and was therefore only given surface duties to do: Be good and follow the law. This is what the early Christians referred to as the milk of the truth. Much of the bible was written as a metaphor. On the exoteric side, the scriptures were written as morality plays, but underneath, they were explanations of the nature of our existence in God. This is evident from the first of it in the parable of the Garden of Eden, where the soul loses its awareness of God, to the last of it in Revelation, where we are told metaphorically of the battle that the soul goes through to regain full awareness of God. Everything ties together in between. For good reason, the number seven is symbolically described by seven lights, seven stars, seven candles, etc., which are all symbolic of the seven major centers of consciousness in the spiritual body, the seven basic states of consciousness the soul travels through to the realization of God, and the seven heavens of the basic realms of existence in God’s kingdom.

There are seven basic states of consciousness. Each state of consciousness has its own vibrational rate. Each vibrator rate corresponds to one of the seven realms of existence known as the earth and heavens. In the spiritual body, there are seven main centers of consciousness that, as each is developed, give the soul access to that realm of existence. The journey to directly experiencing God as the soul is the opening of these centers. When seen, the centers inwardly appear as circles of light within circles of light, ask Ezekiel. When seen in another, they might appear as lights branching off the spine or as described by Zechariah as seven lamps on a golden lampstand, which actually is the golden light of the Holy Spirit within the spine.

I remember going through the bible and the writings of many saints after having so many mystical experiences of my own and thinking” experienced that, touched on that, now I understand what they are really saying, etc.

The Awakening of the Holy Spirit and Lighting the Lamps on the Lampstand

In reading the gospels, I had always wondered where the power of the Holy Spirit had gone. In early Christianity, it was just bouncing around everywhere, and among Christians today it seems to have disappeared. It had been ten years since the Holy Spirit had first appeared to me, and I had yet to speak or even hear of a single Christian who had any deep and genuine experience with it. OK, I watch TV. But all that I have seen about the Holy Spirit is platitudes, trash, and make-believe, sorry. But it is usually, you may not see them around me, but I have angels holding my hands, sort of thing. It is evident to me that the early Christians had something we don’t: the power of the Holy Spirit through Jesus and the apostles, of course. Over the centuries, the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit have been lost for most Christians. My thinking is politics in the Church, but you can choose your own reason.

Fortunately, there is another way for each of us, as individuals, to awaken the Holy Spirit within, far more powerful than traditional fasting. I first learned of this while reading the writings of the Greek Orthodox saints. I came across a reference to a breathing practice that the Greek Orthodox monks use to awaken the Holy Spirit, or more accurately, awaken the nervous system to the Holy Spirit.

The quote started with: “You know, brother, how we breathe, says the holy faith.”  Saint Nicephorus I, Greek Nikephoros, (born c. 758, Constantinople—died June 2, 829. This makes the exercise at least a thousand years old, and who knows how much older than that.

My reading started from there and went as far as I could take it at the time, pre-internet. Well, this is a secret practice that, even today, is not openly discussed or written about, and at the time I could not learn the whole practice. When you don’t know the whole of a practice, you just don’t do the practice, rule of thumb. Even when I just mentioned the practice, an unhappy Greek Orthodox priest e-mailed me with his opinion of what I had done.

The Ethiopian Orthodox church has used breathing exercises for the same purpose even longer, but I never learned their techniques either. OK, keep your secret practices. I did what I had always done. There are other breathing exercises from other spiritual systems, all of them to awaken the nervous system to the Holy Spirit’s presence, and I think I must have tried most of them. I found the best of them, for me that is, adapted it for my use, and continued with the practice. Its purpose is the cleansing of the nervous system through the movement of the Holy Spirit rising through the spine. The bottom line is this. Those who only practice the prayer of the heart seldom awaken the Holy Spirit enough for it to rise through the spine in adequate strength to light the lamps on the lampstand and therefore never attain the gifts of the Spirit that come from each lamp’s lighting. There are exceptions. Whether by accident or on purpose, or by whatever circumstance, the great Christian mystic saints that we all read about simply had to have their lampstands fully ablaze to do what we have all read that they did.

The beginning of it sometimes happens with the prayer of the heart, even with us, lesser souls. When I wrote of coming to a point in my meditation when I would hear a snap in my head, and my body would go numb, well, this experience only happens when the Holy Spirit begins to enter the bottom of the lampstand (spine), the central spiritual channel (sushumna). So, perhaps it was going to happen to me no matter what I practiced.

Why a Breathing Practice

There is a technical reason as to the how and why of doing the various breathing exercises in all the different spiritual paths. The structure of it was described in a metaphor by Zechariah.

Zechariah 4:11-12-14 “And the two olive trees (nerve pathways that mystics call the Ida and the Pingala) on either side of the lampstand (spine)?” I asked. “What’s the meaning of them? And while you’re at it, the two branches of the olive trees that feed oil (the Holy Spirit) to the lamps (centers of consciousness)—what do they mean?” He said, “You haven’t figured that out?” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “These are the two (nerve pathways) who stand beside the Master of the whole earth (spine) and supply golden lamp oil (the Holy Spirit) worldwide (to each and every soul).”

The thing that is so great about what Zechariah has written here is that, although he is speaking in metaphors, there is nothing ambiguous about what he is saying, which perfectly describes the main structure of the spiritual body and, second, the function of the two nerve pathways along the spine.

The mystics who know in-depth about such things and the varying spiritual systems that each may teach are all based on this one premise spoken of by Zechariah. The practical application of this understanding is to awaken and stimulate the rising of the Holy Spirit up through the spine, opening each center of consciousness (lamp). To do this, it is necessary to first circulate the Holy Spirit through the two pathways alongside the spine. Different systems use different methods for this (alternate nostril breathing, inhaling through the nose, exhaling through the mouth, etc.).

Anyway, using a breathing exercise to awaken the Holy Spirit in our nervous system is the most powerful spiritual process that I am aware of, used by Orthodox Christians for over a thousand years, used by the Ethiopian Orthodox church longe, rand now my primary spiritual practice, and the only exercise that some mystics ever use.

Well, this is Different.

I had been practicing the prayer of the heart for about ten years, and then had added a breathing exercise. Shortly after this, I began to feel the flow of the Holy Spirit up my spine and resting in my head, with various electrical sensations and other sensations for the next year or so. In two years, the flow felt like a river, and in three years, this.

I had been on retreat for a week when the next morning, after arriving home and starting my regular devotional routine, it was as if a dam or a blockage had given way in my spine. The Holy Spirit began to pour up my spine and throughout my nervous system, well, like I said, a river, but like a stronger river. Suddenly, the wind of the Holy Spirit that Ezekiel and other prophets allude to began blowing throughout my body. The Spirit would concentrate upon specific areas along my spine and into my head. The Spirit seemed to rise through my body, gently bending my spine backward, holding me like this for a few minutes. As it continued to flow upward through my spine into my head, the Spirit flooded into my eyes, making them spasm mildly.

Every day during each devotional and even during the rest of the day, storms of the Spirit began flowing through me. This was my experience of the lighting of the lamp at the base of the lampstand, the spine.

Over the next few weeks, the activity of the Holy Spirit diminished throughout my body, but heat and pressure began to build at the nerve plexus at my navel. There were a couple of years of on-and-off, gradually increasing pressure of the Holy Spirit in this area of my spine, then after a couple of years, the pressure became constant, and I started running full body fevers on and off, not feeling any different from the flu, and nausea like from a bad case of allergies.

Look, at the very beginning of these lessons, I said my experience with the Holy Spirit had nothing to do with what was written by others, saying how wonderful it all is. True spirituality is a cleansing process of our physical, mental, and spiritual bodies. It is a structural thing, and it is not always wonderful. For me, the lighting of the lamps has never been fun, but that I know of is the only way to achieve the potential for the full spiritual development offered by the Holy Spirit.

At the end of about two months of what I just described, I felt the Holy Spirit break through the nerve plex at the navel and move upward in the spine to the solar plexus area, gradually starting to build pressure there. Same process here. There were a few years of building pressure, then constant pressure from the Holy Spirit in the area with fevers and nausea for a couple of months, followed by a breakthrough and the pressure of the Holy Spirit moving from the solar plexus to the heart area of the spine.

When the Spirit flowed into my heart, it was as if my heart had been set on fire. It would burn and burn.

I would do my regular devotional routine, and the Spirit would begin to flow into my heart. My heart would start burning, and I couldn’t get it to stop. There would be so much energy that the burning would go into my lungs, and I couldn’t even take a comfortable, deep breath. My devotional routine was mostly breathing exercises at the time, and it would get so bad that I could no longer do them. I would stop my devotional routine and, in a week or so, the flow would subside. Only then could I take a deep breath again and continue with my normal daily spiritual routine.

My lungs went out on me six times that first year: The last time for a month. I went to a doctor, and he could find no physical reason for it. How do you tell a doctor that the Holy Spirit has been rough on you lately? I didn’t.

I was determined to press the flow of the Spirit to the limit and was not about to cut back one bit on my exercises. In my naivety, I figured that if I could keep up this pace and keep the Holy Spirit this active, I would be enlightened in short order. So, I called the SRF monastery where I had learned the breathing exercises and asked for someone to send me diet instructions for handling the heat and discomfort. I had read somewhere that adding clarified butter to the diet would help.

Instead of a letter, the monk in charge of the spiritual practices of the rest of the monks at the monastery, a brother Adonay or something like that, called me. I do not know what his position is called, but this monk rested in continuous non-duality, continuous Christ consciousness. It is a blessing to ever even get to talk to someone like this. Few of the greatest mystics that we have all read and admired have ever attained continuous non-duality. He was ever so kind but was quite blunt about my situation. He said that I was not yet spiritually advanced enough for the hours of my routine and that if I didn’t cut back on it, I would permanently damage my nervous system. So much for my ego. (One more time.) When I cut back on my routine, the problem never happened again. Now, many years later, I am doing more hours than I had to cut back on then. But the good thing is that this was the fourth lamp on the lampstand that had been lit for me by the Holy Spirit. It all works out in God’s time, the Holy Spirit’s time, not in our time. This might be one of the hardest things to learn. It has been for me.

I have read of the saint referring to the fire in the heart. I recall a biblical scholar who had stated that the early Christians were speaking of religious enthusiasm. So much for religious scholars with no experience of the Holy Spirit: Now I knew what the saint was writing about, the lighting of the lamp at the seat of the heart.

A couple of years later, it was Thanksgiving Day, and I had just finished my third helping of everything I could hold. This is just one of those wonderful traditions we all need to do at Thanksgiving. Full and content, I went outside to be by myself and enjoy the moment. (You know, to figuratively go belly up to the sun like an overstuffed lion) I sat on the porch for just a few minutes. I must note here that I knew the breakthrough was coming sometime soon. I could feel the heat building in my throat for about six months, and I had been running full body heat on and off all day long for a few months. I had been spaced out like with an allergy problem for as long, and was feeling the occasional periods of nausea that had always come with the past buildups of the Holy Spirit: I was feeling all of the normal symptoms that I had come to expect as my nervous system tried to cope with the intense buildup of the Holy Spirit within it.

Back to Thanksgiving Day. Everything I have read on the subject has always said that heavy food just kills the Holy Spirit’s activity, so it wasn’t like I was looking for anything at that moment. As I sat there, my sinuses cleared, and the airflow became perfectly even between the two nostrils. Now, that’s a good sign that the Holy Spirit has just started to enter the central channel in the spine and is moving upward through it. As with the other breakthroughs, I began to feel the movement of the spirit opening and moving through the center, the lamp on the lampstand located at the pit of the throat. Flowing upward from there, the Holy Spirit spread out into my ears, and then it poured into my head, feeling like an electrical storm. It then flowed into my eyes, causing them to spasm mildly. Well, that’s how I sat, filled with turkey and trimmings in the stomach and filled with the Holy Spirit in my head, with one more lamp on my lampstand lit by the Holy Spirit.

Well, that was the fifth lamp of the seven on the lampstand to be lit and opened. After the Holy Spirit had risen through all the centers of consciousness in the spine (lamps on the lampstand), it started working in my head. There are two main centers in the head: the Gate to the East, located between the eyebrows, and the golden bowl at the top of the head. Along with this are several minor centers to be opened. After this, there is no further place for the Holy Spirit to work on or clear, that is, if the cleansing process ever ends. The lighting of each lamp brings with it the spiritual potential of the gift of the spirit associated with that lamp (center of consciousness).

The Holy Spirit’s power is not from you, only through you.

When all the lamps are lit, only then will we have the possibility of developing our full spirituality, but even before this, spiritual things may happen.

It was shortly after the awakening of the center, the lamp at the pit of the throat. I was attending a class on the comparative study of the bible and the Bhagavad Gita, the most sacred of the Hindu scriptures. At the end of the class, we would all hold hands, and the instructor would offer a prayer. After a few weeks, I noticed that a lady attending the class would always make sure to hold my hand at this time. She would almost push people out of the way to make sure of this. Finally, I pulled her aside and quietly asked her what was going on. She said that she was sensitive to the Holy Spirit and wanted to avail herself of it flowing from my hands: That she had never felt it in anyone that strong. All that I knew was that my hands would get hot at this time. We talked of spiritual things.

Shortly after, there was a time when I was meditating in between jobs in my work truck in a church parking lot and had a minister come over and ask about the golden glow surrounding my truck, and we talked of spiritual things.

Or sitting on the floor, doing some repair work with my job, and having the homeowner walk back and forth behind me a half dozen times, and finally stop and ask, “Who are you that I am feeling this?” We talked of spiritual things.

Or the sales lady who was at my home setting up that year’s advertising for my small business. She seemed nice, so, as I do, I silently asked the Holy Spirit to come into her life. She immediately burst into tears and went through some kind of catharsis, sobbing for a while. When she got herself together, I apologized and told her what I had done. We talked of spiritual things.

And the time when a customer I had never met opened the door to her house for me and stood there as if shaken. Finally, she said, the exact words: “I have been waiting for you my whole life.”  It wasn’t me that she was waiting for to do the repair work she needed, but for the Holy Spirit to come into her life. We talked of spiritual things. I could go on and on, but for what?

A Little Personal Example

Capuchino showed up on Christmas Eve, as no more than a kitten, literally hanging halfway up on my front screen door, an orange tabby, thus his name. He was with me for the next sixteen years when he had a stroke and was paralyzed from his waist back, and had to drag himself around. By then, I could feel the Holy Spirit strongly flowing through me, and every day I placed my hands on him and asked the Holy Spirit to heal him. Day after day, nothing. He could not take care of himself, and it was a mess. I was willing to take care of the mess, but he was in such misery that I eventually took him to the vet and had him taken from his misery. I have never forgiven myself for being so helpless. I waited for his return.

A few years passed, and no cat showed up at my door, so I finally went to Paws, a local no-kill rescue shelter for dogs and cats. Walking through the cat rooms, I tried to pet many. Wiggles, they had named him, a twenty-pound Russian Blue, reached out, pulled my hand to him, and would not let go. He had been brought in with two siblings by a person who had too many cats, so I took all three. The people at the shelter thought I was a saint, but, truthfully, I needed my new cats’ company as much as they needed a home.

Maybe four years have passed. I walked into the kitchen, and Wiggles was lying on the floor, mostly unable to move his back legs. My thought was, Oh my God, he is too young for this. He could still somewhat use the kitty litter I left beside him, so it was not devastating, just heartbreaking. For a week, every day, I put my hands on him and asked the Holy Spirit to please heal him. Again, every day, nothing, no improvement. So much for my spiritual abilities when actually needed.

Finally, I looked at myself and asked what was it that I didn’t understand. I feel You flowing through me, what am I doing wrong? I came to a conclusion that points back to the earlier lesson, but was a later understanding in my life on how consciousness creates reality. You might think about reviewing it.

I was asking the Holy Spirit to do something as if it were separate from me, even after I had come to fully recognize that I and everyone else existed as a part of the whole of divine consciousness and were not in any way separate from the whole of it.

That night, I went to Wiggles, lying on the floor, still unable to stand and walk. I placed my hands on him and looked within myself to recognize that it was only God in and as me that allowed me to exist as a part of His infinite consciousness, not separate from Him, and that it was as this that the only thing could do anything. So, with this feeling inside me, instead of asking God for anything as something apart from me, recognizing myself as this small part of God, I visualized Wiggles as well and whole.

The next morning, he was standing and walking, and in two days, you would never have known that his back legs weren’t working and had ever had a problem.

I can live with all this as a coincidence. After all, how I feel about this little story is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. But the principle should be remembered in your own life. Divine consciousness is within each of us as us, and hopefully we will come to recognize that it creates the reality we live in, and the power of the Holy Spirit that may come through us is this realization, not from our personalities, which only feels separation.

A curse, yes, I mean a curse, a blessing, a healing, turning water into wine, raising Lazarus from the dead, are each only small modifications of the different realities possible within the whole of reality, the infinite consciousness we call God that creates the greater reality of each and all of existence.

By the end of these lessons, from varying views and said in different ways, I will have written about consciousness as the main theme of these lessons. Hopefully through all of this you will have come to your own understanding, one that you can live with. I say it in this way for a reason. Even among the greatest mystics there is no agreement as to the true nature of an individual’s existence in God. Are we individualized divine consciousness as in yogic teaching an Atma, or soul in Christianity. But in Buddhist teaching this concept is an illusion and actually we are the whole, God acting and focusing through individualized mental processes that mistakenly think they are separate from everything and we are in fact only dreams of an infinite consciousness that has created us as dreams within itself.

If the greatest mystical minds can’t agree on the fundamental nature of our being, common folk like me have no chance of figuring it out. So, I usually try to believe in what makes me most uncomfortable which is usually is closer to the truth of things.

My understanding of the infinite consciousness we call God is quite simple. Our bodies have discernable boundaries. This is my body and that is yours. One ends before another begins. The same is true of our minds. Each mind has its own limited space and is separate from another’s mind by the function of its own individual workings. These are my thoughts and yours are a separate thing. There is a spiritual energy sheath within or around these things. I saw it as my first experience on this path.  It is the golden lampstand and the lamps attached with the golden bowl on top. It has boundaries. My lampstand, spiritual body is mine to develop. Yours is yours. There are said to be two more sheaths within the consciousness that makes up a sentient being but since I have yet to directly experience them, I cannot confirm or deny this directly.

But consciousness is different from the sheaths that seem to isolate its focus. There is only one consciousness, God, one awareness behind all that exists, one consciousness that expresses itself through each mind, each life function and everything else, all that exists only because it rests within this one infinite consciousness. From the heavens to the material universe to the realms we cannot even imagine, only one consciousness has created and is within all things manifest and unmanifest. It has no walls, no boundaries where we can say that God is here and not there. It cannot be isolated but is always infinitely one continuous thing. This encompasses each and every one of us including you. God, infinite consciousness is the core of our being and no matter how mad we get at how God runs things, none of us can leave it, Him,

The separateness we feel comes from the fact that infinite consciousness has associated itself with each mind and the mind’s feeling of separateness. Its walls and boundaries, so to speak, making who we are. God has His own reasons for this arrangement and certainly has not told me the why of it.

Being born again unto the Holy Spirit is the experience of expanding our awareness to the point where we can embrace infinite consciousness, God as the greater part of ourselves, while still functioning through our limited minds. For now, we see through the glass darkly but then, well we may experience and knowingly rest infinite consciousness, God has given this ability to us, but  I wonder if any of us can truly understand the full nature it. It’s like that with the deeper things of God.

Practices

With my initial experience with the Holy Spirit, I have always thought it best to rely on its strength to draw us within and let meditation take care of itself. My first real spiritual experience was the melting of my awareness into the Holy Spirit, and that is what I have tried to do the rest of my life. For me, it’s simple, others might say simplistic, give yourself over to the Holy Spirit, and let it cleanse your spiritual anatomy and reveal the deep things of God as it will. Just give yourself to it, be steady in your practices, and then do your best to stay out of its way.

Mystics of most traditions have written that in the average person, the Holy Spirit lies asleep at the base of the spine and needs to be awakened for it to flow up the spine, throughout the nervous system, light the lamps on the lampstand, (centers of consciousness) reveal the gifts of the Holy Spirit and take us to the deep things of God. As I have already written, I eventually found a breathing exercise that was to be quite effective in this awakening. (for me)

For years, my devotional time had been three to four hours a day with the Prayer of the Heart, so perhaps when I began the breathing exercises, I was awakened sooner to the flowing of the Holy Spirit than it would be with someone who had no previous meditative experience, just a guess. After starting to do the breathing exercises, my devotional time remained at this pace, which is where it has remained.

I like to relate the breathing exercise I practice to John 4:13,14 – Jesus answered and said to her, “But the WATER that I shall give him will become in him a FOUNTAIN OF WATER springing up into EVERLASTING LIFE.”

Regardless of a person’s previous experience, using this breathing exercise that I am about to explain will help to awaken the Holy Spirit and, at the same time, relax the body and naturally quiet the mind, taking us deep within without even trying to meditate.

Whether your meditation time is thirty minutes twice a day, or you have built up your time to three hours at a sitting, it is best to spend at least the first half of that time or more doing a breathing exercise of some sort to awaken the Holy Spirit and then follow this with the Prayer of the Heart or meditation to let the Holy Spirit settle into the nervous system and do its work.

I have always counted my breaths in a breathing exercise. It’s traditional in several paths. I use a Greek Orthodox prayer cord to do this, made from natural wool fiber and usually knotted a hundred times. Natural fiber, in my opinion, holds on to the Holy Spirit better than synthetic stuff, and it just feels comfortable to me.

However you choose to time it, throughout the breathing exercise, always keep looking out to infinity for the Holy Spirit. This is where you will find what Christian mystics call the Gate to the East and where we should keep our focus. But as you do this, imagine the Holy Spirit resting at the base of the spine, which is where it is most concentrated in the body. The prophets have metaphorically described the spine and its related spiritual structure as the golden lampstand with six lamps spreading out from it, and the upside-down golden bowl at the top, making seven major centers of consciousness. The opening of each lamp brings with it the potential for the spiritual ability of that lamp, ending with the opening of the golden bowl, bringing about being born again unto the Holy Spirit, what the earliest Christians called (teleios) the spiritual state of perfection.

Inhaling through your nose, with your imagination and as much willpower as you can muster without straining yourself, grab hold of the Holy Spirit at the base of the spine and be aware of where you slowly and evenly imagine it to be at different locations along the spine, (this helps it to rise up through it) try to feel the Holy Spirit flowing up your spine into your head, filling your head with its vibration. As you continue to look out to infinity to the Holy Spirit, comfortably holding your breath for a few seconds, imagine and eventually feel the Holy Spirit as it fills your head with its vibration, pressure, or light, the forms of its presence.

Next, exhaling through your mouth, still looking out to the Gate to the East, imagine that just like the overflowing fountain spoken of in John, the Holy Spirit is washing over you and down through your body and especially your spine, washing out of your body all of your aches, pains, and bodily sensations. (Most important) As you feel the Holy Spirit washing down through your spine and body as you exhale, feel yourself melting into the arms of the Holy Spirit at the Gate to the East. It is this melting in to it as you look out to infinity for the Holy Spirit that is just as important as using the full of your willpower to imagine it rising up through your spine. It is the combination of these two things that brings results. If you practice the melting into properly, you will eventually or at least can slip into intuitive consciousness while still doing this physical exercise.

With your breath out, only for as long as it is comfortable, continue looking out to infinity and melting into the arms of the Holy Spirit.

Repeat your breath, dropping deeper and deeper inside for your devotional time or until your mind becomes so still that it doesn’t want to move. When the stillness of mind comes, rest in the stillness and let the Holy Spirit take you where it will. Ok, this does take a little practice, but even before stillness, your mind will have calmed, and your body will have relaxed, perhaps feeling some aspect of the Holy Spirit.

This is my main exercise, the most important practice for me. It is simple, but, in my view, not simplistic: this practice works to awaken the Holy Spirit in the nervous system, light the lamps on our spiritual lampstand, and take us deep within.

Here are a couple of emails I received from students who tried the practice.

Question: Peace be with you. I am a Cameroonian living in South Africa. I have been practicing contemplative prayer and doing the breathing exercises for about 4 years now. I am a bit confused in respect to the flowing of the Holy Spirit. In the second half of 2008, I was enveloped by the golden light of the Holy Spirit 6 times during contemplation, and twice in 2009 I felt electrical vibrations throughout my body in 2010 till the present moment I am feeling a burning heat-like sensation at the center of my chest and on my palms with a light momentary tickling sensation and pain in my physical heart. Please, I need your help. My question is, am I experiencing the correct flow of the Holy Spirit? This question is because I have never felt it flowing from the bottom of my spine up, as you have explained. Maybe I am not doing something correctly. May mercy, peace & the love of Christ Jesus abound in you.

Answer: From what you have written, you seem to be doing everything correctly. This journey is a cleansing process of body, mind, and soul, preparing each of us for the higher states of consciousness necessary to experience the deep things of God. The Holy Spirit will work with each of us where it feels the need. It is different for everyone, but the main thing is to do your part in keeping it active by steady practice and then just let it do what it needs to do. It is the best that any of us can do……

Question: I have been practicing the breathing exercises for the past 2 months. I have been experiencing the sensation of a liquid-like movement up my spine like a snake, but stopping right in the middle. Sometimes it goes up to between my shoulder blades when I do the exercises. Two days ago, while at work helping a customer, I experienced electricity moving from the top of my head down my spine and eventually out of my legs after 20 minutes. I felt fire hot, but did not sweat. Are these signs of the Holy Spirit beginning to clean up my nervous system from the exercises?

Answer:    So, it seems, and in only two months, it’s remarkable. I always hope that those who practice the breathing exercises will experience exactly the sensations you have described. Just wonderful. Well done, and keep up the good work. But do not forget to meditate after the breathing exercises, so the Holy Spirit can bring you the experience of intuitive awareness and the deep things of God. I admit some mystics only do the breathing exercises, and the raw power of the Holy Spirit is the fastest way to cleanse the nervous system to be Born Again unto it, what we call enlightenment, which is a structural thing of lighting the lamp on top of the lampstand. But in my view, it is the best spiritual balance and understanding of the process to include some meditation to experience intuitive awareness and some of the deep things of God along the way.

Transitioning to Meditation

When transitioning from the breathing exercise into meditation for a short while, keep the visualization, but now breathe exclusively through your nose, focusing on melting deeper into the arms of the Holy Spirit. Eventually, as you feel yourself going deeper inside, let go of the visualization but keep looking out to infinity for the Holy Spirit. With each exhalation, keep imagining and feeling yourself melting into its arms, allowing yourself to drop deeper and deeper inside. This makes an easy transition from the previous exercise into meditation. That is it. After the first ten years of exclusively practicing the Prayer of the Heart, this is how I have continued to do these exercises.

It does not matter if it is the melting into the Holy Spirit, devotion, or relaxation; it is the melting into that which helps quiet the mind and takes us deep within. Do not neglect this important part of the practice. This practice should not feel like a burden but more like a pleasure, kind of like melting into the relaxation you get from drinking a glass or two of wine, but without the ill effects.

One Last thing that I do

The Breath and Stretch is more than just a stretching exercise.

I practice this exercise, or more appropriately, this and the many related exercises totaling about half an hour after the breathing exercises and meditation, and then go off to do my day’s work. That makes three hours each morning before work. OK, I get up early.

The reason I started practicing this exercise is what happened to me at the age of fourteen. My brother and I had set off walking through the woods along a creek. It was cold, but the creek was mostly frozen over. To warm up, we stopped under a rock ledge and built a good-sized fire. After several minutes, my part of the ledge collapsed, and after a rock, maybe six inches thick, a foot wide, and three feet long, clipped my back and knocked me unconscious, I woke up in the creek, paralyzed from my waist down. My brother carried me home. Fortunately, although having a couple of herniated discs, my spine had been bruised but not severed, and in about a year, I was able to walk again without too much of a display.

Keeping my back as limber as possible and the related muscles strong has been the only way for me to stop the pain, sometimes intense, from shooting down into my legs. In other words, stretching exercises for keeping my back strong have never been an option for me but a necessity.

After the beginning of my inner experiences, I thought that if I were to be stuck with these stretching exercises for the rest of my life, I might as well make them as spiritual as possible. Over the years, I have investigated the practices of hatha yoga, tai chi, qigong, and the Chinese wand, among others, to find the best exercises to use for this. The problem that I found in all these practices for making them spiritual is that when these paths were brought to the West, they for the most part have been practiced as strictly physical routines, whereas more important than the physical is that the original and underlying reason for each of these paths is in whole body health by encouraging what we Christians call the Holy Spirit, Taoists call chi, and yogis call prana to rise up through the spine and spread throughout the body, balancing the nervous system bringing a better degree of health. I remember reading the work of a teacher of the Chinese wand, asking a student whether he had yet started to feel the chi (Holy Spirit) rising up the spine, which, for me, verified my feelings about the true nature of the various exercises. Like the rest of my other practices, I adapted the best practice I could find for my own needs. In this case, the yogic exercise of the Maha Mudra, which I do in a way that is best suited for my needs.

The exercise that I am about to explain, I do for thirty minutes in the morning after the breathing exercises and meditation. It is done slowly, with full concentration on the flow of our inner energy (Holy Spirit, chi, prana), and an important factor is that I have been able to rest in intuitive awareness, facilitated by the practice of this exercise, something I would never have expected from a stretching routine.

As I could already feel the Holy Spirit moving up and down my spine, it was easy for me to tell whether I could do the stretching exercises and maintain the same movement as in my regular breathing exercises. I found that not only could I do this, but that, because I was bending and stretching my spine in coordination with my breathing, I could often feel an enhanced flow. Well, that was also unexpected. So, I have continued the practice and now consider it an important part of my morning routine.

For many, the basic exercise done for thirty minutes once or twice a day as their stand-alone routine can be an excellent place to start a spiritual journey or at least a trip to better health and lifelong flexibility. Properly done, it can, by itself, bring a person to intuitive awareness and initiate the rising of our inner energy up the spine and throughout the nervous system, balancing the nervous system’s energy. And if you learn the breathing principle of this first exercise, you can use this same principle in any other sitting, standing, lying down, squatting, lunging, twisting, or stretching exercise that you choose to do. Generic (moving-type) stretching exercises are available online and explained in myriad books, so I feel no need to do that here.

Now, to the basic exercise that I call the breath and stretch. If you have practiced the breathing exercise previously explained, it will be easy and powerful. Progressively and slowly, never stretch yourself to pain.

Sitting on the floor, on an exercise mat or carpet, or in a way that is not uncomfortable, with legs outstretched and either slightly apart, knees apart, feet together, or legs and feet close together, in other words, however you want, but with hands in your lap. Sitting like this, start with deep-relaxation breathing, or, for a longer period, with your regular breathing exercises. Do this until you are completely comfortable with the breathing exercises while sitting on the floor with your legs outstretched.

Exhaling, bend forward and with your hands reach out as far as is comfortable to touch your toes. Do this only as far as is comfortable. For a few breaths while in this position, feel yourself relaxing into it and at the same time melting deeper into the Holy Spirit.

Then, as you inhale, imagine the Holy Spirit rising from your feet and through your legs up to your spine. In coordination with where you imagine the Holy Spirit to be in your feet and legs, bring your hands. Palms pointed towards your body, and in coordination with where you imagine your inner energy to be as you feel it or imagine it rising from your feet up through your legs, then up through your spine and into your head. As you imagine or feel the Holy Spirit and your hands at that level, keep reaching upwards, and when you have reached upwards as far as you can, imagine the Holy Spirit flowing out through your hands like an overflowing fountain.

Then, as you exhale in a continuous movement of attention, intention, and imagination, feel the Holy Spirit in coordination, your hands moving back down your spine and then stretching and bending forward, down your legs into your feet. As you do this, try to feel the Holy Spirit flowing out through your hands.

Again, taking a few breaths, stretched out as far as comfortable, and looking inward, rest like this, but again only for as long as is comfortable. You should try to feel the Holy Spirit in your feet and your hands.

Here is where the possibility of intuitive awareness comes in. Often at this point, where I am stretched out as far as is comfortable, I will take several breaths, often minutes, looking within to the Holy Spirit. With each breath, I will allow myself to melt deeper into the stretch, relaxation, and the Holy Spirit, and have been lifted into intuitive awareness.

Physical exercise, done with proper breath and intention, can be a spiritual exercise that takes us deep within, and no one would ever know we are doing a spiritual exercise. (Good under certain circumstances that I have already written about.) You know, learn silence as a virtue.

A full stretching routine can be done in the breath-and-stretch method, and I think that, because you are pushing your hands forward, it is particularly effective for radiating the Holy Spirit from your hands, as well as for doing squats and lunges.

If you decide to do a complete set of stretching exercises, a little heads up. Always use your hands in coordination with where you are imagining the flow of the Holy Spirit to be in your body. It greatly enhances its movement. And no matter what you are doing with your exhalation, always fully concentrate on pulling the Holy Spirit up the spine with your inhalation on each breath. As with everything else I have written about, keep the principles but tweak them, change them, and do each exercise the best way for you.

Conclusion

The Holy Spirit can be awakened by devotion. It can be awakened through prayer that leads to silence, through meditation, through devotional chanting, through numerous breathing exercises, and even through physical exercises. God has given all of these pathways to us because we are all different and will all come to God in our own ways. The boat that carries us to the deep things of God is the Holy Spirit. I have explained what I have done and continue to do but you must choose your own path and be steady on it to find the Holy Spirit for yourself.

B. Lawrence

If you have any questions or comments on the lessons, my email is

b.lawence.comments@gmail.com