Thomas: What does grounding mean? Grounding means that the flow of awareness is grounded in millions of years of living. Because in the mystical perception of time, we could say, “Oh, cells formed in the past and then they became more and more complex organisms, and these organisms evolved and until now we are all here in this world with all the species that have developed throughout this time.”
But we could also look at this differently. We could say “Cells are forming and the forming of cells is sitting here having this conversation.” All kinds of species, millions of years of life developing through space-time is encoded space-time sitting in all the species in the present moment, experiencing life right now.
That’s why we often say when life integrates part, when we heal something, it’s like energy that is not integrated creates circular patterns, energy patterns in our bodies, in our nervous systems. It’s energy circling, but often in dark rooms, like rooms that are unconscious and parts of our nervous system that we can’t feel energies, but this energy that’s circulating is creating something, and what it creates is outside patterns that seem to come back again and again and again in family dynamics in intimate relationships in the world, wars, collective things, things that reappear over hundreds of years again and again. So tiny loops, large loops in the collective consciousness are circular patterns that try to surface information that usually end up in a new cycle of similar events.
And now on all those levels, integration means when that circular pattern gets integrated into the Kundalini stream, that some traditions called it internal flow through the central nervous system channel like our Kundalinism gets integrated, and hence becomes present and joins the mature expression or the expanded perspective of this moment. And that has two streams. One is up into expression so that energy that was stuck can now express itself more, create a bigger perspective, more seeing, more awareness, and grounds itself more.
And as it grounds itself more, it builds a new layer of soil, earth, like in the season, in the fall, the leaves drop down in the winter, and in the next spring it becomes the soil of the next cycle of life. And so the same process is deep embodiment and new inventions or innovations in humanity that are new seeds of light, like artificial intelligence or digitalization or whatever, land in millions of years of living. And that is also connected to the question of initiation. What is an initiation? Initiation means that my current sense of self that is aware of this reality right now, out of whichever reason, opens up to a higher consciousness that initiates this perspective for the first time, widens my perspective into something new that until now was super Conscious, which means not accessible to me. So my current perspective, every perspective is like a filter and doesn’t allow a certain reality to show up.
So I walk through life and this is what I experience. And what I experience seems like, oh, that’s the world. Until one day something happens and poof and then say, wow, I never understood this. I never saw this. I initiated either into a much wider perception or into a much more profound transcendence of my sense of self, the locus that my consciousness operates on.
So it’s not only that my perspective got bigger, the one who experiences that perspective became more transcendent. Hence, I’m looking from a different place. So that’s why awakening or enlightenment is not just that this sense of self will be more enlightened. No, the one who is looking is fundamentally changing through the process of awakening. And it’s not just a bit more expanded version of me. It’s like the one who is looking is changing, so the whole construct of the world is changing. And that’s why we, in an initiatory process, an initiatory process is also innovation is initiation also on a collective level. When we develop more and more high-tech versions and science breakthroughs, there’s all also initiations into quantum computing and artificial intelligence and, and, and. But the danger is that we don’t ground that like in the mystical traditions. We know that an initiation is a new state of consciousness, needs to be grounded through all the energy centers, all the chakras, and open those up so that this new initiation becomes a walking state.
When it’s a walking state, all dimensions of life, because our energy centers are participatory computers, processors in different dimensions of reality, our heart chakra, root chakra, whatever, different energy centers. They participate in millions of years of structures that life developed. And so we are plugged into those. But if we have an initiation, like a new state of consciousness that appears, becomes accessible, then that new state becomes a walking reality, which means seamless, not just the state we notice and then it disappears. Sometimes this in peak experiences, this opens up and then it feels like it passes again. In plateaus, it means we can walk it. It becomes a new state, so I have access to more information.
For example, if the soul, if we walk around as a person in life, and there’s one day that I wake up and I feel, oh, wow, there’s so much light flowing into my nervous system, into my inner experience. And out of some reason, my energy field opened up to the influx of light from my soul. And then from that day on, more and more light wants to anchor itself. And what was before my personal self was my main locus of consciousness now gets expanded into, oh, that my soul is not just an abstract word, but it’s actually subtle information, subtle light that I have more access to.
So myself from being a person is now a soul and a person, and that soul is transcending the person, and the personal energy field is opening up and infused by more and more soul energy. So the person and the soul become a unit until when it’s fully transcended, there’s no difference between the person and the soul. It’s like one flow of data, but it means also that my consciousness expanded into the subtle universe. I have much more access to information. I can tune in much better with life, with people. I can feel more. I can see more. I’m part of the data field of life. So that’s an example of one level of transcendence, and then there are of course others.
But that initiatory process changes how I look at life, what I experience, and the one who is experiencing life is changing through that process. Same when we heal, when we heal doesn’t mean we become an old version of ourself. Healing is we become somebody that we don’t know yet because healing is restoring life into a bigger version of myself and the whole spiritual journey, of course, too. So as we walk, the walking is transforming us and it’s changing us into deeper and wider perspectives onto life.
And so coming back to the technology is often initiatory processes open something up and it feels exciting, but then the inner work that we need to do is to ground that initiation. How do we ground the digital age? Because it’s not the digital age completely new and the rest of the world disappears. No, the digital age is being grounded through millions of years of how life developed, and that integrates it into everything that has been developed before.
And hence it becomes a seamless non-dual state. But if you don’t integrate it, then it seems like other, like something other. It has somewhere like there’s separation built in, it’s othered.
But every initiation or most of the initiations, since they go deeper or they are wider, bring up the trauma that is stored in millions of years of living and billions of people. And therefore, in this time when we develop this fast-paced technology, which on the one hand helps us to connect here and to also create, which is one part of grounding is creating digital intimacy, digital attunement, digital resonance that grounds digital spaces. But on the other hand, it also circulates trauma impulses, wars. Everything that’s happening around the world is circulating much faster and affecting many more people and many more people’s traumas. So that creates a lot of symptoms right now that I think we are all aware of. And so that gives us the chance if we take that challenge on, it gives us the chance to transform a lot of our individual and collective past.
If not, then it increases just the suffering and then it leads to more polarization because it will push the hypoactivation, like the numbness, the indifference, the depression, the heaviness, and the hyperactivation, the stress and the fear and the anger, they will drift more apart, and they will create very manifest symptoms.
If you don’t integrate it, then it will polarization, fragmentation, other ring will just become stronger and stronger. If we integrate those things that come up, then we open the pathways for technology to ground itself, so then we can live a locally anchored life as a global citizen. I can live a healthy in person and connected relationships while I’m a also digital citizen, but it’s not either or, it’s fluid, it’s integrated and the subtle dimension of life and the digital dimension of life, they are different expressions of the same state of consciousness, so that I can use Google or whatever to get information from the worldwide web equals that I can tune in with a situation, a person, circumstances, and get that information through consciousness.
So when my third eye, my heart, my nervous system is more aligned or are more aligned, then they form a unit, one energy center that is in an open data exchange with the subtle information field. If there’s a lot of fragmentation inside, then it feels like I can’t really access that. And so the healing, the grounding inside is grounding this age, but the challenges we face are they have to come up because they are in us, otherwise they wouldn’t come up. If something comes up, it has to come up because it’s there and it’s not a mistake that it’s coming up. And so that the fact that we feel this individual and collective turmoil means we need tools to integrate that, individual tools and collective tools, and we don’t have enough collective tools at the moment. I believe we are collectively too illiterate to handle the collective trauma layers that are surfacing. We need to develop skills to do this as communities, otherwise it will be feel like an overwhelm all the time and stagnation and create a lot of symptoms and violence and what we see right now.
So I think this is also how initiatory processes that are individual often for individual practitioners, they happen often in jumps or stages, but there’s also collective initiation that the collectives in history we saw big jumps in consciousness throughout the ages, which are collective initiations so that our collectives started to move into a new perspective, new insights.
Because through the expansion into this global information sphere, our nervous system is also building many new connections that create a global self and a collective nervous system, the data is flowing much, much faster than 50 years ago or a hundred years ago. And that is also a new state of consciousness. That’s a new dimension of learning. It’s a much faster data processing digitally, but also consciousness wise. And so one of the challenges of our generation, because spiritually, every generation is being born into certain challenges, life questions, and that kind of global collaboration and also global consciousness as a state of consciousness that we can ground, hence regulate, hence unify, is part of the challenges that our souls signed up for.
This is happening for a reason with everything that’s happening that seems challenging. It’s not just, “Oh, it’s going to unify the world and we love each other and everything is great.” No, because we didn’t love each other in the past and we need to develop that love where it seems the hardest, where we reject life because we want to say, “Ah, well, but why is it hard?” It’s hard because we did hard things to each other for thousands of years, and now we cannot just expect that it’s going to be easy because we need to integrate those things in order for it to turn into love. That’s why I often say love doesn’t happen where it’s anywhere loving. That’s already the effect of love. Love happens where it’s hard to integrate something, where it’s hard to relate to something, where we don’t understand others, where we don’t understand their motivations. That is where love expands, because where it’s loving, it’s anywhere loving.
It’s the effect of our ancestors transforming some of their challenges into love where we are in a work, but love expands where the world seems other. That’s, I believe, where the territory of love embraces more and more of life, and that is where we unify collectives more and more. And on the way there, communities, because the collective is usually big, at least in our imagination, our thinking, the collective is not big. Sometimes it’s perceived as being big, but the intermediate step is healthy communities. How do we contribute to healthy networks and communities where we build networks within the collective nervous system that are more coherent? And so these networks can then jump into larger, coherent networks and create unification. But since a lot of pain that is undigested, that will come up when we do that. And that’s where love needs to expand, because when we reject those symptoms, we keep reproducing them.
So the change is also the global self is changing and we do not know what we become. Same as I don’t know my journey of awakening, who I become. That’s the nature of the spiritual journey. We don’t know where we are going. That’s inherent. We hear a calling, but we don’t know the path. I hear a calling, but I don’t know the path. The path, our definition needs to unravel itself. That’s the core essence of any spiritual journey. And if I’m willing to step onto a path where I don’t know where I’m going, then I will be blessed with the revelation in return.
And not knowing where we are going doesn’t mean I don’t know my practice and I don’t know my life, but I don’t know how the inner changes will change the self, the perspective, the one who is looking, the one who speaks, and the one who perceives that’s changing over time. And so I don’t know how, and I also don’t know where my path really goes. I have mental concepts maybe that I read in books and that I’ve heard from people, but we don’t know. We find out. And so the same is true for the global self, for the unified humanity self. We don’t know how that is. It’s not just a more unified version of the world that we know. That’s not going to be it.
It’s for unification, we also need to change. We don’t just put the puzzle pieces somehow together. No, no, the puzzle is going to change. The jigsaw puzzle is going to change as we unify because sometimes we project, “Oh, it will be this world just a bit more unified.” No, it’s going to be a new world that we don’t know that when it’s more unified, it’s going to create a perspective that nobody knows yet. That’s why listen, like being able to enjoy the uncertainty of the path is my commitment to the divine, because otherwise uncertainty in a separate sense of self is I don’t know where I’m going.
Uncertainty in alignment with the divine is a deep trust in the nature that I’m not walking alone. There is no alone. If the divine blessing becomes more and more the essence of my life, there is no walking alone. There’s always interconnectedness. So uncertainty is a commitment to the divine. In the separate sense of self, uncertainty is a trigger for existential fear because I don’t know where I’m going. And often when trauma comes into play, it’s our isolation, like the sense I feel isolated alone, I feel separate, also induces the sense like I need to do it alone, means separate versus, wow, my practice initiates me more and more into that the divine blessing, like the essence in our hearts, in our souls is walking us. And there’s one part, like there is something deep that is being trusted and uncertainty is certificate because it’s like, okay, there’s something unfolding through us that we cannot pre-meditate.
And that means I’m not projecting the limitation of this world onto the next, a more transcendent world. It’s, I can more and more become aware of the limitations of my perspective, and uncertainty is the opening into the next initiation. I know that I see what I see. I am grateful for what I see and I’m grateful for what stays hidden or what I don’t see. And in that is like a deep devotion to life. And so that uncertainty is not just, I don’t know, it means I deeply respect that there is always something as a human being that I don’t see, and because I own it it’s not a stagnation. When I own it it becomes part of the movement. If I disown it it becomes a filter that I’m looking through. If I own it it becomes movement, it can move and life or the divine can show me more of life because I devote myself to it.
I commit to it deeper. Yeah. And maybe we can just sit a little bit together with this, like how part of my commitment also to follow my calling. And I’m sure many of us had moments where we felt just I follow the calling. I don’t fully know why sometimes I do things that I do. I just feel this is the next step. And then it unfolds and then it teaches me, not that I always knew to what I’m going into. I had an intuition, maybe I had a vision, I had a pull.
And that’s also true for the global situation. We don’t fully know what we are going into, and that doesn’t mean that there’s not an inner force flow calling that moves into a certain direction, and that inner movement knows something. That inner movement is deeper than the old world that we are transcending. I guess like all the puzzle pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are becoming more multidimensional at the same time. The world’s growing in every place. And so it’s like a new dimension evolving.
It’s that in this inner force or calling, from there, many answers, insights, revelations emerge that help us to go through also a rocky collective time, that the answers are not just by looking at what’s happening outside in the world. The answers are also by what’s emerging in our hearts as we are in contact with this world because seemingly certain structures in the world have to fall apart, have to dissolve because they’re not anymore timely, but that creates uncertainty. Where are we going? Because the world as we know it seems to be in a turmoil, but there’s something in everybody that knows. And it’s not just intellectual knowing, it’s like an unfolding of knowing. And I think being in touch with that unfolding of knowing there is the answer, not in how we fix the world that we knew, it’s in how we unfold into a world that we don’t know by not leaving core values of life.
The core values are important, but they’re also emerging into a new version. So that’s why I think that in this uncertainty, in the calling, in the deeper inner connectedness to life, there’s some sprouting happening, and that sprouting is essential, which means it’s creative, which means it brings forth new forms. And that hibernation or that incubation is a skill at this time. I mean, it’s a skill that many mystics practiced over thousands of years, but at the moment it’s like a collective mystical moment. More and more people incubate that inner emergence.
So the world that we see right now, the more unified world is not just this world with more unification. It’s a changing, bigger, new world that we don’t know that is more unified, but on the way we becoming someone new. Well, let’s let that rest a little bit and also see that like the beauty in this. There’s something very hopeful and the deep inner connection to sprouting amongst sprouts in our hearts.
