BY PAUL KAIHLA — Pamela Wilson has many moving parts — part spiritual muse, part Gestalt Therapist and part post-modern mystic, in the sense that she can induct an audience into an expansive state using voice and anchors the same way that the late great Milton Erickson did with patients in hypnosis.

Featured in the Soul’s Code slide show, Female Mystics, Wilson comes as advertised: I and 60 others were moved by the power of her presence the other night in a simple hall in Berkeley, CA. She held an over-educated and highly-experienced audience in her sway, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones.

Wilson is fond of revealing the ways in which the mind acts as a blunt instrument. It obscures the fundamental.

What would that be? The degree to which we are so thoroughly extensions of the same fabric of reality, and only show up as distinct personalities when looking through the prism of the world’s gross appearances.

Or as Albert Einstein said: “A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”

You aren’t what you wear

Or as Pamela Wilson herself puts it: “We wear a form.”

In that department, the universe has distinctly smiled upon Pamela Wilson.

The Napa Valley, CA-based resident has a movie star’s looks but, naturally, doesn’t carry any of the bling or baggage that usually goes with it. She speaks with the gentle, intentional manner of a kindergarten teacher.

If Pamela’s spiritual starting point sounds too much like The Matrix for you reading these words, lay that at my door. The experience is different when you walk into a room that has her attention.

The mind loves to make comparisons, so here’s one: she is cruising through all of which life presents on the up-and-down outside, from a very deep center on the inside. A metaphor: I strongly sense that her internal

experience is like the windless ‘eye’ at the center of a hurricane or tornado.

To make more comparisons, here’s the kind of paradigm-shift she made:

Most of us: The fundamental denizens of reality are the objects we see with our eyes — like the chairs and people in the auditorium — and the thoughts we carry around in our heads about our own situation (and judgements about others).

Pamela: The baseline of being is constituted by nothing — a vast, empty formlessness we humans sometimes call consciousness, or awareness. To turn Einstein’s famous phrase, our belief that we have individual identities and personal stories is a kind of optical illusion of consciousness, which has a mischievous yet playful property.

The metaphysics of meditation

Pamela helped us take a few steps down that path at the beginning of her appearance. She cued us, during 20 minutes of silence, into observing the streams and loops of self-talk that fill our awareness. If the mental noise in our heads is akin to radio static, she tuned in the channel set on clear air:

Guided by that spaciousness, many feelings arise. A white-haired man who arrived early to sit in the front confesses that he feels centered and present at the moment but fears a chronic anxiety will return after he leaves the event.

Pamela invites him to consider that all thoughts and feelings are made from the same bricks and mortar, or substrate: presence.

Whether they are positive or negative, their natural cycle is to appear and then disappear. Kind of like snowflakes.

What arises as worries, fears and regrets wants to disappear. Yet we have a habit of swatting them back into play with a mental backhand, just as they’re about to dribble off the court.

We “crystallize” anxious thoughts and self-reprimands precisely by labeling with the above tags. No one consciously wants pain: But we effectively render those sensations into habitual pressures by judging them bad. A voice in our head intervenes, places anxious thoughts and self-reprimands in the column of life’s should nots — and seeks to banish them.

The paradox is that the mind’s apparent counter-measures are the very impulse that holds these “negatives” in place in our systems. “There’s no better velcro for identification than opposition,” Pamela responds.

Another way to apprehend anxious thinking, Pamela counsels, is to see the train of thought as a service. The mind has many services — protection services, suggestion services, etc. Accept the first-principle that they are services, not foreign invaders vectoring into your space. No matter what appears, say to that thought-loop, “You are welcome here.”

Pamela makes a beautiful analogy to the satellites and space-junk orbiting the Earth in the Clarke Belt: “Do you think the vastness of space complains that those objects are there? It couldn’t care less. You are that space.”

Step 2 in this two-step, she asks the white-haired gentleman, “Now that you’re here, can you ask that presence that displays itself as anxiety, ‘What are you’? Underneath. ‘Where do you come from?’ “

Our favorite line of the night: “At this moment in timelessness we are all called to act like sages.”

Pamela Wilson is a spiritual teacher with an international following. Among her next workshops: Berkeley, CA on August 28, 2011 , and at the Science and Non-Duality Conference in San Rafael, CA, October 19-23.

A companion piece to Pamela Wilson’s first column for Soul’s Code, Age of Sorrow, Age of Wakefulness, this meditation invites you into restorative rest and gratitude for every granule of your being. Invite someone close to you to close their eyes, and try reading these words to them sotto voce.

BY PAMELA WILSON — Sit quietly and look inside, feel the sensations in your chest. Notice how some are protective. These are the “felt” defenses. Honor and thank them. Now look behind them to what they are protecting. There might be a quiet, or an ordinary, openness. Let yourself get curious, and feel it.

You might notice it is restful, with not a lot happening there. Rest and allow the body to be nourished by the stillness. If there is a sense of relief or gratitude, let that express itself. . .if there is any lingering agitation, let it be as it is and notice it is appearing in a calm openness.

Now, the mind might express some doubts; if it does, allow them — and invite the mind to take a rest.

As your attention is resting, notice that it does this naturally when it encounters peacefulness. Also invite the body to rest. Any sensations and emotions will alert you to where there is remaining tension, and where gentleness is needed. As everything within starts to relax, feel it deeply with gratitude.

Now, observe attention itself  . . . become curious about its ability to soothe body and mind.

Express gratitude for no reason, and then rest as you are.

When the body and mind are at rest, it is easy to see who we are, innate naturalness, the presence that is always in the background. Before, your attention was on the personality — not the property of being that was wearing it. Now that role can be surrendered.

Somehow, the body, emotion and sensations have always known our true nature. They have always presented themselves to this gentle openness within, asking for kindness and understanding.

GUEST COLUMN: KATIE DAVIS author of Awake Joy: The Essence of Enlightenment — All love is one Love and when we fall in love with one another, it is said that we are experiencing the divine. Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi poet, defines love as a mystical moment, when two spiritually-connected individuals meet.

We call it love at first sight.

In this meeting of eyes, Rumi romantically writes, we not only experience the union of two loving souls but also the Love that is the crux of the universe.

Whether ethereal or everyday love, such as mother for child, when this cherished moment appears, we often have the misperception that someone or some other thing caused this rising in Love. In truth, we lose ourselves. This disappearance creates a crevice through which radiant love shines. There is only This Love and it is ever-present.

Love requires no other. Kirtana, a lovely songwriter and guitarist, sings:

Beloved, I have waited throughout all time . . . to welcome you. . . into these arms of mine.

Free of any other, in an effortless, spontaneous instant, Kirtana dissolved, the present moment disappeared, and only beloved remained.

Beloved is the sacred substratum of our existence, which is free of lovers altogether. It does not reside within the confines of “throughout all time.” It is discovered in the twinkling of an eye of no-time. This self-discovery allows unconditional love to emerge into our lives, our relationships and into the world.

As time travelers, we are identified with being a lover who loves someone else. As long as this subject-object relationship remains, true love cannot thrive. We expect and demand this or that to satisfy our self-created sense of lack.

This lack is the ego’s belief in individuality as identity, and its separation. It manifests in this world as the never-ending search for personal love, gratification and acceptance.

The false sense of “me” hopelessly pretends to separate from totality, and then expects someone else to fill the resulting pain gap. It fears the loss of a lover; it feels jealous, competes and needs.

It voices its love for the divine and faithfully expresses deep longing. Yet, it stubbornly insists upon maintaining its sense of separation and of course, the result is suffering. Nonsensically, it then blames someone else for the pain. It is the divided one, who is longing and searching, that sustains our estrangement.

Love is not personal. It cannot be gained through any other. Love cannot be given to you, nor can it be threatened or taken away. It is essentially who you are. When you are seeking a lover, you are actually searching for love. You are overlooking that you are what you are seeking, which is why it cannot be found.

Before you continue this search, my invitation is to discover that you are love’s conscious fulfillment. In this discovery, you then have the opportunity to meet romantic love in wholeness. You are free of the pre-existing condition and pain gap. You no longer need to complete yourself.

If you are already in a problematic relationship — as personal relationships can only be — as true lovers, you can disappear together. Free of “you” and “me,” we intimately rise above the push and pull of personal relationship and preciously rise as the Pure Love that we genuinely are.

In its purity and wholeness, Love is synonymous with self-realization. It is the realized maturity of the human being. Then, romantic love does not need to bloom. When the perfect lover appears, the rose already is there.

Katie Davis is the author of “Awake Joy: The Essence of Enlightenment.” In 1986, she radically and spontaneously awakened without practices or teachers. Since 1999, she has been traveling worldwide to share the message of conscious freedom, cause-less joy and perfect peace that is available for every human being right now through awakening and self-realization.  Dig deeper on her site.

BY MICHELLE MORRA-CARLISLE – Being corralled like cattle in a crowded subway underground, I always wonder where everyone is going. And my own destination was a mystery to them, one gray slushy day, as I held onto a steel pole and got jostled about. What would they think if they saw what was in my purse – a small bundle of tobacco wrapped in red polka dotted cotton and tied with string?

That, amazingly, is the “fee” they charge at Dodem Kanonhsa, an Elders’ Cultural facility created by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto. It’s in a highrise office building, on a busy street with no trees in sight. To step out of an elevator, down a hall and into a peaceful “lodge” is surreal to say the least. I was sure I felt some kind of magic, even though I knew the magic was government funded.

I was about to finally meet Marjory. A friend of a friend of my sister’s had found her “visions” uncannily accurate. Even the other healers at Dodem spoke highly of this special member of the Ojibway First Nation, Turtle Clan.

The New Female Mystics: A Soul’s Code Slideshow

I’m not sure what I expected, having never been “healed” of anything. I had seen televangelists wrap their hands around people’s temples, then yell and throw them across the stage, perhaps shocking a life-altered feeling into them. My two attempts at hypnosis had left me feeling like a fraud because I really “saw” nothing (feeling pressured to have a revelation, I just made something up with my conscious mind).

Marjory was older than me, pretty and soft-spoken, but fairly serious. In contrast I felt ditzy as I tried to explain my general lostness: “I’m not sure why I came to see you. I guess I don’t know where I belong or who I am.”

A story just for me

We were in a large room with decorative wooden floor, walls and ceiling, and a built-in bench lining every wall. A CD was playing soft music and nature sounds, and a small wisp of smoke was rising from near the bright window, where sweetgrass and sage were burning in a metal bowl.

“Did you bring something for me?” Marjory asked.

“Yes!” I unzipped my purse and handed her my little bundle of tobacco. She thanked me, then added the tobacco to the sweet-smelling pile and stoked the hot ashes.

In the middle of the room was a table the size of a gurney, covered with soft blankets and a pillow. She asked me to remove my shoes and lie down.

I closed my eyes. In what I assumed was Reiki-style, she passed her hands over my head, face, neck, torso, arms, legs and feet and was silent for a long while. Then she started to speak. I’ll omit the very long pauses between sentences, but here is my best recollection of what she said:

“I see you arriving from the sky onto this earth as a baby, but you are not ready to be here yet. Someone sets you down on a table, on a beach, by the ocean. And they wrap you up in a sort of stretchy nylon straightjacket. You are struggling to break free. The material isn’t very strong, more like pantyhose, you know? But you are stuck. You try to poke an arm out, or a leg, but you are getting very frustrated. Meanwhile, birds are flying overhead. The sky is big, blue and sunny…

I took a peak at Marjory. Her eyes were closed.

“Several women unwrap you, then they take turns picking you up and holding you, keeping you safely off the earth until you are ready. You weren’t ready to leave the sky. So they hold you, love you, keep you safe for a long time. Then one day when you’re a little older, a toddler, it is time…

“A woman gently sets you down in the sand. You crawl, and you are smiling. You put your ear to the ground and listen. You can hear a herd of buffalo running at a distance, and you are thrilled to feel the rumble of it against your ear. Then you start to run and dance in the sand, looking up at the sky.”

“What I get from this,” Marjory concluded, “is that you have a tremendously strong feeling for the sky. And yet it is still yours. To feel grounded, just look up.”

When I opened my eyes, I felt thoroughly rested and pampered. “So?” Marjory asked. I sat up, got my bearings, and told her about how right she was.

She was delighted to hear that I had written a (not quite finished yet) novel about people with the gift of flight; that I had had such vivid flying dreams as a child that I would wake up breathless, dizzy and convinced that I’d seen my neighbours’ rooftops and my own backyard clear as day; and that as a teenager I didn’t play sports but always found the tallest trees to climb. I was already doing what she had just advised: looking way, way up at the sky, the clouds, the stars, the moon, to be elevated both figuratively and literally. Maybe now I would remember to do it more often.

The subway was just as crowded on the way back home, the city just as chaotic. But again I had a secret. Not a satchel of tobacco this time, but a nugget of some newfound peace.

If these revelations from Marjory were not entirely new, why did I feel so refreshed and clear-headed? What had I gained? The nice feeling of being told something I might have already known but had now been validated. I really wasn’t ready to be on this earth as a child, and did require extra coddling. I could not relate to other kids. I was afraid of everything and everyone. Being picked up and loved and coddled really did help, but also kept me in a straightjacket of dependency. It took me a long time to feel strong and free enough to crawl in the sand alone.

What Marjory did teach me about myself was how it all comes together. I still love the sky – and always take a window seat on an airplane – but am now also firmly planted and have found my place here on the ground. If I am ever lucky enough to feel the vibration of a distant buffalo herd, it will surely drum the message into me more than ever that I belong here.

(Read the first part of this two-part series)

GUEST COLUMN: NIRMALA — After being in the presence of Pamela and Neelam, I just couldn’t let this desire for Freedom go. I had the sense that there was surgery going on in my chest, like it had been ripped open.

Despite the fact that I absolutely knew there was nothing I could do about it, now that I had admitted I wanted this freedom more than anything, I could never turn back to my old life.

So, I gave my share in our house to my wife and quit medical school.

Freedom happens

It’s certainly not necessary to have a spouse leave you, give away your house, drop out of school, or quit your job, to be free, but I did all that so that I could follow Neelam through Europe and on to India.

A few weeks later, something Neelam said in a satsang helped me to realize, in the same way  I had realized there was nothing I could do to get freedom, that there was nothing I had to fix about myself to achieve this freedom. In fact, trying to fix myself had been a lifelong task and a huge burden.

It’s not getting what you want, but wanting what you’ve got

I had participated in endless workshops, training in self-improvement techniques I used as attempts to become a better person. Finally, I understood that none of that was necessary: not only was there nothing I could do to become free, but fortunately there was now the recognition that neither was there anything I had to do to become free.

This story could stop here because from that point forward I just became happier and happier. Even awakening and freedom no longer mattered. I was perfectly happy the way things were. This was the letting go of the desire for freedom that Hale had spoken about.

India: Finding yourself in the rocks by the Ganges

Eventually, we went on to India and ended up near Rishikesh at an ashram called Phool Chatti in the jungle on the banks of the Ganges. There, we spent our days in satsang with Neelam and our nights singing devotional songs. Often late at night after everyone had gone to sleep, I would sit by the river along a stretch of ten-foot tall rapids. The river was an incredible roaring presence of rushing white-water in the darkness.

One night, as I was sitting there under the full moon, I recognized that the rock that I was leaning on was me — “Oh, yeah, this is me; this rock is inside of me.” Once I realized that about that rock, I saw the same was true of all the rocks in the huge field of boulders along the river’s edge.

Then, since the rocks were so obviously “me,” the river was obviously “me” too, not just this stretch of the river but the entire Ganges from one end of India to the other. Very quickly, I saw that not just the river, but the whole continent was “me.”

It struck me as obvious that it was all inside “me”—and then it was the whole world and the whole solar system and the entire galaxy and the universe. This kept going until the mind couldn’t keep up. There was no longer any possibility of my mind containing all of this endless space, and yet it was all “me” in the same way that one of my limbs was “me.”

An infinity of space and time is captured in each Soul’s Code

Then there was a wonderful moment when “me” included not only infinity in terms of space, but “popped” to include all time. It was obviously who I had always been, and it included all the past and all the future. Then I laughed and laughed and rolled around in the gravel because it was suddenly so silly that I had imagined myself to have suffered. I had always been so free that I was even free to have this illusion of not being free. That’s how complete the freedom is. So, I just laughed and laughed.

What I realized in that moment is that all there is and ever has been is Awakeness. There’s no need for awakening in awakeness itself. All of life is just the play of this that has always been fully awake. I would like to emphasize that the specifics of this experience are not important.

This awakeness/consciousness, like the snow flakes of a snowstorm, does not reveal this profound truth the same way twice. What is important is the transformation of perspective that the realization allows.

Nirmala is a spiritual teacher in the Advaita tradition of nondual spiritual teachings. He is the author of several books, including Nothing Personal: Seeing Beyond the Illusion of a Separate Self. See Nirmala’s free ebooks at Endless Satsang.