The Great Awakening - Webpage of Michael Sharp

Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city. Rev 22:14

Ever since I started writing my mystical books I’ve been claiming to have a powerful system of awakening, and empowerment. The system, which I call the Lightning Path^TM, is based on chakra activations, in particular the Great Invocation, careful guidance, archetypal revision, and some good old fashion mysticism. The system has been in development since my own rather dramatic clearing experiences in 2002 and is now maturing to the point where it is beginning to attract professional attention. In particular, I have begun working with a registered clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst by the name of Robert Rigby. Robert has begun using the central activation meditation, the Great Invocation, in his private practice with an eye towards providing case study assessment of the efficacy and power of the Great Invocation used in isolation from, or in combination with, other therapeutic interventions.

Why use the Great Invocation in clinical practice? Well, it makes perfect sense. Unlike a lot of other spiritual teachers out there, in fact probably unlike all other spiritual teachers out there, I conceive of spirituality not as a “spiritual” process dealing with your soul or essence or inner being or whatever, but a physical process, a therapeutic process, aimed at repairing your damaged physical unit and preparing it (i.e. preparing the vessel) to contain higher proportions of your own powerful spiritual consciousness–my assumption being that only a perfectly matured, perfectly healthy, strong mind+body (i.e., physical unit) is capable of handling the awesome light, love, and power of your own higher consciousness.

And how is the Great Invocation relevant to the therapeutic process? Well, that is difficult to explain within the current psychological and sociological nomenclature and paradigms. However, I can explain it within my own nomenclature by saying the that Great Invocation functions (among other things) as a crown activator, much like entheogens function as “crown activators” or “brain amplifiers.” Activating your crown chakra provides you with enhanced mental function which, when combined with full chakra activation, provides salient opportunities to clear energetic blockages in all chakra conduits with a power and facility somewhere between the dramatic revelatory healing provided by psychedelic or psycholytic therapy (see Grof, Realms of the Unconsciousness) and traditional psychoanalysis.

Now what’s really nice, in my opinion, about the Great Invocation meditation and the Lighting Path^TM system is not it’s potential utility within a therapeutic setting, though of course this is interesting, but its utility in our general life. As I have conceived of the system, I never really considered it something that would be used by therapists. I conceived of it as something that we, (and we I mean everyone on this planet) with our damaged physical units would use to heal ourselves. Call it “personally administered psychoanalysis” if you want. The LP provides you with the tools you need to identify all the issues and blockages that arise as a result of the pathological and damaging socialization process that we, without exception, go through. And I have seen it work. Many individuals who pick up the Lightning Path^TM Core books, and who study the concepts and put into practice the spiritual technique report dramatic improvements not only in their understanding of the world (awakening) but in their ability to control (within the limits of the currently imposed “system” of energy control) reality around them. It’s a big claim and although I do keep testimonials, and we do share our experiences on the Lightning Path^TM in my online forums, nevertheless it is anecdotal and potentially biased. Now, however, we are in position to remedy that with actual evidence of the efficacy of the Lightning Path in a clinical setting.

Now, a couple things about that.

First of all, let me say that this is only the start of clinical trials. Our methodology at this point is ill formed and tentative. I suppose this is to be expected. We are charting untravelled territory here. Generally, spiritual practices are not put to scientific test. There is some interest in investigating energy medicine, and I believe some work has been done with meditative techniques like transcendental meditation, but as far I know, nobody has ever thought of putting a spiritual framework (the Lightning Path^TM) and spiritual technology (the Great Invocation) up for clinical evaluation. So, we tread carefully here knowing that we are clearing a new pathway. We remain open to positive criticism and additional expertise.

Second, we see the clinical evaluation of the LP and the Great Invocation as only the first step in a full scientific evaluation of the spirituality and technique of the LP. Following the development of an appropriate clinical methodology, it is my intent to develop an appropriate psycho-metric framework for the quantitative evaluation of the LP methodology. As I see, it this will involve the use of a battery of psycho-metric assessments that will provide a solid, scientific evaluation of the claims made for the efficacy and revolutionary nature of the Lightning Path^TM and the associated technologies.

Of course, this is a longer term project and I see it unfolding over a period of several years but it has begun and I hope that it will be revolutionary in nature. Although demonstrating the efficacy of the Great Invocation and the Lightning Path^TM are important, in the long run the greater contribution that I see will be in the shift this brings in our perceptions and approach to spirituality, spiritual knowledge, and spiritual practice. Rather than seeing spirituality and spiritual practice as an arena where “anything goes” and where even questionable spiritual techniques hold global respect and admiration, hopefully we will develop a critical sensibility towards spirituality and, more importantly, an expectation that we, as scientists, citizens, and Immortal Spirit inhabiting a physical unit, have a right to demand empirical verification from the teachers, gurus, churches, and spiritual systems of this world. Hopefully, from it will no longer be enough to simply claim “guru” status by channeling famous dead people (Ra, Thoth, Archangel Michael, or claiming divine revelation through the burning of bushes or the study of ancient texts. This is new world spirituality. Fruitful, grounded, epistemologically sophisticated, scientifically grounded, accessible, and embodied.

ms

Alright so this little article is going to talk briefly about channeling.

And what’s channeling you ask?

It’s a good question.

As it is understood in the popular new age movement, channeling is basically the ability to connect with “spiritual” entities (i.e., entities not in a body) through some secret mystical, meditative process. The actual process differs for everybody. You “aum” a chant, or smoke some ganja, dance yourself into a delirium, bang some drums, ingest an entheogen, and then “snap,” you begin communicating with Spirit.

Now when an outsider looks into the new age or modern alternative spiritualities and sees this, who can blame them for being a little skeptical. When I first looked into the new age a few years ago I was skeptical. But you know, my skepticism was only at the start. I mean it wasn’t too long into my investigation of all things spiritual that I myself actually started to channel. A few years ago, after I did some chakra work and clearing, one day I sat down at my computer and the ideas began to flow. And boy, did they flow. I wrote on epic story of genesis, a book on ascension, a book on chakra activation, a cosmological statement of God, a basic spiritual primer, and a bunch of poems and parables in the space of only a few years.

After that experience, channeling became legit in my eyes. For me, there was no other explanation for it. The ideas came too fast and too furious. They were too well coordinated, and, in many cases, too novel and outside my normal experience to be anything other than “from the outside.” The clincher, at least for me anyway, was when the ideas I was getting allowed me either to a) understand things that I have never understood before or b) were verified by me later through some additional reading or something.

And that’s channeling.

Channeling is what happens when the bodily consciousness of your Physical Unit connects with something “outside” itself.

And just what is it that is outside of the physical unit.

Well, if you judge by the westerns who do it, channeling is a phenomenon confined to communication with “famous” entities like Ra or Laksmi or Sananda (a.k.a. Jesus Christ) or somebody else. Usually these entities have come to save the planet. These “saviors,” whomever they may be, then provide the lucky individual with mystical information about the spiritual worlds using words like ascension or end-times or service quotient or whatever. If you go by how the westerns do it, channeling is all about normal people (or reborn prophets) talking to famous dead guys and gals who, being dead apparently have nothing better to do than make our worldly affairs their after-life business.

But is that the case?

Does Ra have a real interest in humans?

Is Thoth involved in the channeling of tarot decks?

Well, maybe. I mean, after doing it myself for over six years, and bringing what I think is some pretty useful and unusual information into the spirit world, I think it is possible for somebody to be talking to Ra or channeling Thoth or something like that. But, at the same time, and after doing it for seven years, I’m also kinda skeptical when people say that. For me, it sets off alarm bells. For example I know, after seven years of doing this, that keeping control of the ego, keeping good boundaries around it, and even maintaining a good sense of identity, can be challenging when you open your bodily consciousness to the fabric of consciousness. The problem is, the fabric of consciousness, the light that is our spirit, is powerful, bright, and awesome at any level. When you compare that against the diminished and damaged ego of so many of us, it’s real tempting to attach one’s identity to some “powerful” otherworldly entity. I mean, some of us feel so terrible and guilty about ourselves that we’d rather be identified, or be the identity of, anybody else. How cool, and positively aggrandizing to the ego, is it to be talking to Jesus Christ or channeling Sananda or the great “white” brotherhood. It’s even better if we actually are these cool figures.

Truth is, it’s an ego trap—and a subtle one at that. And it’s very easy to fall into. Truth is, as your skill as a channeler advances, you can come into contact with these powerful entities. They descend into your energetic space and you actually do feel like you are these entities for a time. This doesn’t mean you are though. It just means you are in contact and you have to remember and not be tempted into becoming identified with energies that are really only there to help you and impart information to you.

In the early stages of channeling, ego problems are common. Don’t get me wrong though, this is not a reason to stop channeling, but it is a reason to go slow, be careful, and take the claims of people who claim to be identified with the powerful energies of other than their own identity with caution. It may be that they are channeling who they say they are, but it may also be symptomatic of some pathology and if there’s pathology, then they are probably not a clear channel for information. It’s a question you have to ask either of yourself if you are beginning to channeler, or of others if you are just starting out on your spiritual journey and coming across information from people who claim to be channeling.

Anyway, there’s a lot more I could say about channeling but I think I’ll leave that for my article series Opening to Channel. To close this little musing off I’ll just say this. Opening to high level spiritual communication is very cool and something that we can all learn to do. It’s no special gift and you don’t have to have any special talent. Like other things spiritual, it’s just a question of intent and visualization. It’s not rocket science! In fact, if you’re serious about spiritual development, it’s something you have to do. As I say in my article series on channeling (which are excerpted from The Book of Magic), you can’t make rapid progress in your own spiritual development while you’re confined to “indirect” methods of communication like intuition or emotional sensitivity,[1] or if you are confined to listening to others who may or may not be clear channels for information.

You want to make rapid spiritual progress?

You want to learn to express your own spiritual consciousness through your own physical vehicle?

Then you take responsibility for the information you get.

When you’re ready, do what I did. Set your intent, make the connection, and open the channel. After the foundational spirituality you’ve get with the first few books of the Lightning Path, opening communication to The Fabric is quite literally the next step in your personal spiritual maturation process.

ms

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Opening to Channel Series Articles

• Opening to Channel I - Preliminaries
• Opening to Channel II - Opening
• Opening to Channel III – Detecting the Channel

Read The Death of Newton - An expansion of the ideas presented here

I wanted to talk a little bit today about building a bridge between the world of science and spirit and I wanted to talk about myself as an example of such a bridge. In order to do that, you’ll need to know a little bit about me.

By training, I am a sociologist. I studied at the University of Alberta in Canada, received my PhD, and went on to do standard sociological type things. I edit a journal, publish sporadically, and try to fulfill my professional duties and family responsibilities as best as I can.

Nothing remarkable, I agree. But this traditional academic side is not the only side of me. You see, a couple of years ago I found out that in addition to being a sociologist, I am also a mystic. After doing a bit of personal “experimentation” with what could be called “spiritual technologies”, I began to have an expansion of consciousness that, if I were to rigidly adhere to the dominant scientific cannon (i.e., materialism), I would be hard pressed to explain. A lot happened to me. I began thinking in millennial terms (i.e., we are currently moving through a significant and prophesied transition in the life systems on this planet), I became sensitive to “energies” and “fields”, and, perhaps most interestingly, I began to write spiritual books.

Now writing spiritual books isn’t in and of itself remarkable. A lot of people do it. What was strange for me was that I was writing with no external reference point. That is, I wasn’t researching what I was writing. I simply sat down at the computer, “opened up” my consciousness, and the ideas began to flow. What was fascinating to me was that they were ideas that my physical body and mind were not familiar with. That is, I had no external reference point. The fact was a lot of what was coming out of me I had not known before I wrote about it. It was new and the only source was inside of me. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, “curiouser and curiouser”.

Back when I started this in 2002 I couldn’t talk about this to my colleagues. The problem was, I had no scientific frame of reference. The only reference I had was the New Age movement or New Age spiritualities and while I personally had to admit that something was going on that couldn’t be explained within the standard materialist cannon, there was no way I could use the lingo of the New Age movement in respectable scientific circles. Not without becoming a laughing stock anyway.

And so there I was existing in two worlds all at once. I had a traditional academic career and a blossoming career as a mystic and I couldn’t figure out how to bridge the two. Not that I didn’t want to bridge the two. I did. Nobody likes leading a double life. But the problem of bridging was made difficult especially considering the kinds of things I was writing. I wrote, for example, a new creation story (The Song of Creation), a book on “Ascension”, a book on meditative practices and activating chakras and kundalini, and even a book on the spiritual technology of the Tarot. All of these topics had precedent within spiritual circles but not one of them made any sense in scientific circles.

How to bridge?

For a long time I struggled with a need to bring my two careers together but then the pieces started to fall into place. The first piece of the bridge came when I wrote my last book, entitled The Book of Light: The Nature of God, the Structure of Consciousness, and the Universe Within You. This book is deeply mystical. In it I talk about the nature of consciousness and its relation to the physical universe and I present a theory of the fabric and unfolding of consciousness that is, in my mind at least, remarkably logical and consistent. It is also a bit revolutionary when judged against standard church or scientific dogma. For example, in the book I say consciousness is the root and everything around us (including us and even the dimensions of time and space) is just a part of that fabric of consciousness. I also say “we are all god” and make a distinction between God with a big “G” and God with a little “g”. God with a big “G” is all of us “in God” and God with a little “g” is what we normally think of as God. That is, God as omnipotent overseer of creation.

The theory of creation that I came up with all made sense to me and I liked the theology that came out (it was non-hierarchical, inclusive, empowering, and unifying), but it wasn’t enough. Even though the book made sense to both my mystical side and my scientific side, in my mind it wasn’t the bridge.

Something was missing.

But what?

Now, I’d like say “and then, it hit me”, but it didn’t really. The remaining components of the bridge, i.e., the realization that a connection between the two areas could be made, crept up on me slowly and came in the form of a hundred little enlightenments. For example, I came across some of the writings of some ancient mystics and realized that I had managed, in my mystical isolation, to come up with identical theories of consciousness. Then I read up on the Sociology of Religion (a sub field of my beloved sociology) and realized that academics do research spiritual topics. Third, I began to become more aware of consciousness research. And fourth, I read the description of an experiment with with chicks at Quantum Biological Communication (http://www.quantumbiocommunication.com/project/). In this remarkable experiment chicks are apparently able to control a moving robot simply by their unconscious intent!

And then, it hit me.

I understood why that experiment worked the way it did. I had the theory and I had written about it in The Book of Light and The Dossier of the Ascension. I even had a phrase to describe the impact of consciousness of physical matter. “As above in consciousness, so below in Matter”. Well, “I” didn’t have the theory. We did! The mystics had it. We, sitting in our mystical trances, had been talking about the nature of consciousness and reality, and how the two interconnect, for so long that the result of that experiment would be totally unsurprising to us. In fact, if you told a mystic about that experiment you’d probably get an inscrutable Buddha Smile. The words “I told you so” would be behind that grin.

But what was really amazing to me was that I had found an actual physical experiment that fit the theory of consciousness I had developed in The Book of Light. For a scientist trained in a materialist paradigm and understanding the profound resistance to non-materialist research, the smack was profound. And so was the impact on my budget. I now had a name and a research area. I could now find the authors and the books and so I plunked myself down and started buying from Amazon.

I’m still new in the process. I’m only marginally familiar with the area of consciousness research but I already feel like I have found a home. I understand what’s going on and I “resonate” (New Age term describing the realization of affinity) with the research.

Now I just have to fill in the gaps.

But I know, it won’t be that hard.

The bridge is already there.

Science and spirituality, science and mysticism, have converged. It’s a done deal and its there in our mutual interest in consciousness.

That’s the bridge!

It is our mutual interest in consciousness that is the root from which a new scientific paradigm is growing. I can already see the contours of the new paradigm and although the outlines are hazy still, I know its going to be different. The new paradigm is going to be as different from our current science as science was from religion when it took over after Galileo.

It is very exciting. Perhaps most exciting is the potential for unification. Speaking both as a scientist and mystic, I believe that this new paradigm will be a unified paradigm. The new science/spirituality will provide our little community on earth with the Holy Grail of research inquiry enlightenment inquiry . a grand unified theory of everything.

It is already here. The seed has been planted and if I may be so bold, let me suggest a mantra for the new unified theory of everything that will as scientist and mystics continue to merge in the middle of the bridge. It is a simple mantra that bridges science and mysticism with a simple, mutually understood concept. Any mystic would understand it and it opens the Book of Light for the rest of us.

The mantra is simple.

“Consciousness is the root of all things.”

It is the collective realization of this simple axiomatic principle and the gradual unfolding of our understanding of it that will unify science, bridge it with mysticism, and usher in an entirely new paradigm of scholarly inquiry.

Count on it!

Michael Sharp, PhD.