The War on the Sacred Sovereign Self
and the Inversion of the Living Flame
I am not a great Yogini, nor do I have exclusive knowledge of the process of awakening. But what I am, what I have always been, is a deep seeker. I began studying practices of Yoga very early on, I began teaching at 22 (though it is of course debatable if I should have been teaching so young). The foundation of my embodied practice was always born from a deep and internal curiosity and thirst for both knowledge, and wisdom. This was combined with my life path as a dancer, through which my singular pursuit was to sing the song of the divine self. All this, to better understand and actualize my own being, to bring my voice, my body, soul and spirit into this world fully so that I might answer the majestic call of the living flame. I am grateful for the many wonderful teachers that have helped to guide my way.
My own personal practice has always been born out of deep self exploration and experiential knowledge. I do not, nor have I ever, taken for truth what someone else tells me, unless I come to it through my own personal somatic experience, my own embodied gnosis. Perhaps this is born from my stubbornness which has undoubtedly gotten me into trouble, but it has in this regard served me well. The spiritual and religious texts that I have read have been read through the lens of mystical inquiry, and I seek to understand any truth being transmitted in the center of my own sacred bones.
From a very early point in my awakening process, I struggled with understanding the hatred of the ego. Over and over again I heard teachers speak about the nullification of the ego, that the ego was ugly and bad and the root cause of all misunderstanding and harm in this world. From this perspective, it was our job as spiritual aspirants to make it go away, to nullify it, to wrestle with it, to slaughter it.
I found this approach ultimately to move in complete opposition to my experience of the sacred. It felt like a witch hunt on the Self. There was always something within these covert ego war tactics that did not sit well with me. I began to feel that this guidance, given by so many as the predominant perspective within spiritual communities, was very deeply mislead, at least as it related to my own personal and human evolutionary process. For how could I grow, if I did not honor my individual nature, experience, and voice?
It was later on that I heard tantric teacher Igor Kufayev say that the ego was not some criminal that we should drag into a back ally to stab and kill. That the ego principle was vital to a healthy awakening process, that without experiencing the healthy I, one would inevitably be lost in the process of awakening itself. The process is far to overwhelming and without proper preparations can leave many in states of in between, lost in the ethers for an undetermined time. This was one of the very first moments I heard a teacher give a wildly different understanding around the ego principle and the experience of individual soul evolution.
When I began to study with Dr Vasant Lad, a gentle and profoundly humble teacher who genuinely teaches from a tantric perspective, I found a completely different approach to the principle of the individuated self. I found the medicine knowledge that my soul had been longing for for many years. It was the first time that I heard a being express what I truly felt internally. Dr Lad spoke very differently about understanding the ego, the Ahamkar. Within this context the ego is the individuation principle of consciousness, a very necessary and exquisite function which brings the beauty, glory, and uniqueness of each of us into this world, a delicate blade of grass in a meadow’s sea.
When one does not possess a strong center, a healthy I, how can one expand out infinitely in all sacred directions? The center is the point from which all radiates, the sacred hoop of each individual world. The center must be defined in it’s sacred proportions so that we can unfold ourselves into the experience of cosmic consciousness and it’s sacred geometries.
I felt cradled in this incredible wisdom understanding - that at the root of it all I did not need to slaughter and exile my individual nature, I did not need to slaughter my own sacred blade of grass. I felt that through the awakening process the sense of I-ness would simply grow from experiencing the exquisite nature of the profound beauty of the self to encompass the experience of the cosmos herself. The personal-I is unified with the cosmic-I, a drop in the cosmic ocean.
This is not to say that we should not work to temper the ego experience, and to expand our empathy and compassion for all sentient beings in this world. This expansion of empathy seems to me to be a natural expression of the sacred I. In my feeling, when we hold compassion for our own being, we begin to be able to see how much suffering exists within the world, and we are able to hold greater love and compassion for others. We project our experience outwards.
This is my perspective, and it does not need to be yours, or anyone else’s. I’m sure that there are infinite ways to awaken, and as many paths as their are human souls on this planet.
I truly believe that.
But I will say this.
Many within the spiritual and creative communities remain in deep denial, bypassing the reality of what is occurring in the here and now on our planet today.
Much of this denial, in my feeling, stems from an inability to look deeper into “science”, the inability to question the dictums that have been made by the powers that be, and ultimately, the inability to honor another soul path.
Even if one does not believe what I believe, the total incapacity to allow for another truth reality, a reality shared by millions upon millions upon millions of sovereign souls, feels deeply disturbing.
This to me speaks of a deep loss of center, and a profound loss of self-honor. For when we are able to honor our own self, we are also able to honor another. Through this allowance, we no longer feel the need to control another human being, another human life, another human fate. We have the ability to release each soul to their own sovereign destiny, and hold empathy as a constant.
This deeply misguided stance is an epidemic, a mind virus, as self righteousness and virtue signals reflect total allegiance to the dictums of the state and fortify a complete lack of compassion for another reality and experience. I wonder now (as so many great spiritual philosophers have said is the case in the past - including Steiner, Gurdjieff, Sri Aurobindo ) if malevolent forces have not inverted the sacred sense of I-ness, the beautiful truth of the sovereign experience of the Divinity of the Self, hijacking reality very purposefully towards their own nefarious ends.
For the attack on the sacred sovereign soul is ongoing.
It is a war that is undeniable and relentless.
Those of us who who walk this path feel a deep foreboding as we witness so many attempt to deny, disallow, and to obliterate our truth experience. It is profoundly chilling.
For any path, any way that attempts to enforce itself on another, that attempts to control the fate of millions, simply cannot be aligned with the highest truth, and the highest good.
This is an inversion of goodness, an inversion of beauty, an inversion of truth, and an inversion of the living flame.
I know this to be true.