A Quest To Be Fully Within The Present Moment

This application for the 2017 Parallel Perception Scholarship was submitted by Craig.  If you would like to offer your support for Craig please leave a comment at the end of this blog post.

To write a limited summation of words of how the teachings of the Nagual Lujan Matus have changed my life and describe my heart’s yearning to meet him and learn Lo Ban Pai is like trying to describe the most beautiful star-lit night sky to a blind being… so here we go…

In the beginning of my “awakening” I was called toward organic, biodynamic food/farming. Sometime after steps were taken along that path I encountered the film The Cosmic Giggle. After witnessing the film, I watched it again. I found myself rewinding repeatedly to the scenes where Lujan spoke.

The sound of his voice, the weightlessness of his gestures, the pure gnosis of being, and his laugh! I could not explain as much as I wanted to the calling I felt within. So I used this fancy technology that is embedded within our construct to learn more. Time passed, I purchased each of his books and read them chronologically. The wisdom and lessons bestowed in those magical pages has changed the foundation of my being. It is fascinatingly difficult to put into words the effect that the words of this being I have never met have had upon my life…

As a farm worker on an understaffed production farm, the work days are long and often hectic, the toil of physical exertion can accumulate in the body and mind, and extra money and free time are hard to come by. At times I felt the social construct began to consume me, I used meditation as my sanctuary.

In my quest to be free of the social construct I found and read the books of Carlos Castaneda, unaware of the connection that exists between Lujan and the Nagual Juan Matus, once I realized the connection I had a feeling that I must be coming across these teachings for some reason. Thus began my journey into movement meditation practices, I began learning and practicing qi gong, tai chi, the magical passes and Tensegrity. They have done wonders for me but I feel that Lo Ban Pai is the pinnacle of energy cultivation techniques. All these other methods only deepened my desire to learn the art of Spiral Energetics.

As the years passed my personal meditative practices evolved, I found wonder, awe, mystery, a solace and peace in them and always loathed the struggle of trying to squeeze in these practices in my limited free time; while my heart desires to forget this day-to-day life in the social construct and be completely saturated eternally within this quest to be fully within the present moment at all times, to reach a point of liberation, to tap into this cosmic zero point energy.

At this present moment in writing this essay and reading those submitted by the others; I feel the echoes of my youth… in my youth I was a dark, ignorant and angry child. I was lost in a current of burning rage, self consciousness, and self loathing.

Many years have passed since I awoke to what I was and began to change my ways. But recently I have become increasingly aware of a fact that I have always been half aware of…that through the entirety of my life I avoid eye contact with people. In youth I despised who I was, I felt inferior and unworthy. I avoided the attention of others preferring my own solitude. Even after overcoming these personal issues to this day a part deep within me feels unworthiness in even submitting an essay for this scholarship. I read the stories of all you beautiful people and cannot help but feel that how could “I” be worth any more than you?

From what I came from…from who I was…how could someone like “me” take this opportunity from someone else who is more worthy? For many years I thought I had conquered those feelings of inadequacy but in the effort to write this I feel them arise again…or perhaps they have lingered there all along sliding by in my ignorance. I write this now in order to not let “that thing” that controlled my so strongly in those days do so again. I know “that thing” is still there within me. It does not have the control it once did but the thing is still there. Perhaps that is the reason of my greatest desire to meet Lujan… in order to directly experience someone free from “that same old thing”.

Nevertheless I am ultimately grateful for the knowledge Lujan has made accessible to all of us. I truly believe this is the most important work being done in the world at this point in time. To all those who submit, your stories are beautiful and I know who you are within is beautiful as well. May we all strive to keep walking the Tao and bettering ourselves in order to better all that exists within the cosmos.

Craig
USA