Descend Then Transcend.
Turning Points and Transformations: Descend then Transcend
“DESCEND THEN TRANSCEND”
Announcer: You are listening to Divine Realization Radio. Where you will discover the reality and essence of your presence. With programs brought to you by Project New Humanity Communications.
Announcer: You are listening to Turning Points and Transformations with your host, Bryan Rice. Will today be the day that you have your breakthrough in consciousness? It is time to be uplifted.
Bryan: Hello, this is Bryan Rice, you were just listening to “Revolution of Tears”. One of my songs from the album “Fractured and Delivered”. This episode is a rebroadcast from 2012 episode.
Bryan: Hello. I’m welcoming you in to the program and, wishing you a Happy New Year, the most happiest of New Year’s and prosperous New Year’s. We’re hoping that, that you had a blessed Christmas season and things have calmed down. Calmed down and settled down now. And you can root yourself into those New Year’s resolutions. So I’m Bryan Rice from the Order of the Friends of Jeshua. That’s o, f, j. and I’m here today with today’s episode. It is called “Descend, Then Transcend.” That’s “Descend, Then Transcend.”
Bryan: Now, At first, listen. You might wonder why the two are juxtaposed together. Well, there’s a big reason for that, a journey through consciousness (from) out of subconsciousness and unconsciousness to conscious awareness and presence. Peace and total awareness starts with work in the subconscious, starts with work in what we are unaware of. Starts with shadow work. All individuation work in the words of Carl Jung begins with working with and acknowledging things that you have repressed down into the subterranean abyss, the shadow. . . and the shadow actually leads you to gold in Jungian terms.
Bryan: Shadow has much to reveal to you about your true nature and also what you are not. So when we go down, when we mean descend, what we mean is going down into the places that we’re less inclined to go. It means taking a trip, a journey down into the ocean of the unconscious, to the subconscious, and whether you’re speaking in yogic terminology or in spiritual terms, universal, spiritual terms or Jungian terms or even or even mythical terms. We’re all talking about the same thing. We have to acknowledge what is dark. We have to bring light to the darkness. We have to be our own inner guru and bring things that are in the darkness into the light. That is the role of the inner teacher. Whether you call it the Holy Spirit, the Indwelling Life, the Divine Indwelling Presence. It’s all the same thing.
Bryan: We are a source of illumination within and without. We are light bearers and we’re gifted with born with the light presence your light from the light continuum, from the truth-reality continuum, and
Turning Points and Transformations: Descend then Transcend
we receive throughout our lives at different points, different turning points – different stages in the evolutionary process we receive illumination and light transmissions, gifts from the divine for us too, in our neurology and our biology to make gains in awareness, gains in consciousness to progress. We live in a world, we live in a humanity based upon progress. I’m a progressive Christian, myself, progressive, Christian, Progressive Catholic, priest, not Roman, but I acknowledge that movement of progressive spirituality is always a movement towards that awareness towards expansiveness, toward superconsciousness and many of the traditions in yoga speak of superconsciousness. Swami Kriyananda speaks a great deal about it. Paramahansa Yogananda spoke a great deal about it. Great living masters, like Paramahansa Yogananda, who lived in the 20th century and his direct disciple, Swami Kriyananda, they speak of this and you can do that work. Do the work of moving from subconsciousness to superconsciousness or intuitive, intuitive awareness by reading the book, “Awaken to Superconsciousness”, but we’re going to talk about philosophy of Kundalini Yoga and how that is a model for transcendence, but it doesn’t dismiss, the role Chakras or the lower energy centers in the process of coming to one’s awareness or coming to one’s bliss. Bliss is reciprocal. It depends upon a foundation. A strong foundation rooted in the here and now.
Bryan: Any promise of bliss outside of the present moment is mere fancy. Any promise of illumination outside of present moment awareness is not mere illumination but it’s a mere fragment of it. We need to be rooted in the here and now totally in the here and now. Totally present, totally aware, totally conscious, and how do we do that? As we said at the beginning, we have to go down, we have to do depth work, which is soul work. That’s what Father Richard Rohr would talk about, the Catholic Friar, and he’s spoken a great deal of that and as men’s work, men’s spirituality has taught, we have to do spirit work which is the transcending work or the ascension work, but we also have to do the descending work which is the soul work. Depth work. That’s where we get the words depth psychology from. Carl Jung speaks of it because I mentioned before and Carl Jung had a lot to do and a lot to say about mythology and how mythologies come to be in the journey out of the unconscious, out of the unconscious into the conscious world. Coming to know the self, the true self, that sense of I that is not separated from the universal. That sense of I that is vast. It’s big, it’s large, it’s expansive.
Bryan: And so when considering the whole journey that we are to go on, especially when we start a spiritual journey, we might have an initial experience of enlightenment or illumination or light transmission. . . but it always involves going deeper and it always involves following a progression into a period called the dark night of the soul. A test for the ego.
Bryan: In Kundalini Yoga, we call that Shakti Pod. Shaktipat in other
Turning Points and Transformations: Descend then Transcend
traditions means a blessing or a diksha or an initiation from a guru to disciple raising up one’s Kundalini into cosmic consciousness. But when we speak of it in that term and in the context of Kundalini Yoga, we call it the test of the ego – the dark night of the soul and we’ve all been there, especially those of us on the spiritual journey. It’s a necessary period of dryness or seeming separation from light. We might not feel the same sense of exaltation that we felt at the beginning of the journey. At the beginning of the illumination process. And what we have to do is we have to endure. We have to hang on and cling to the cloak of God, to the God Consciousness, the unified field of love, the unified field of all of constant and consistent awareness.
Bryan: How do we remain aware during the dark period when we need to really shine light upon some of the dark areas or the unconscious, the subconscious areas of our lives? Well, it takes endurance. It takes fortitude, it takes courage, takes courage to do depth of work, and we say depth work, we go down in the energetic anatomy down into the centers of the root of the sacral of the manipura or the navel into the lower triangle as it’s called Kundalini Yoga. The lower triangle contains seeds of the very seeds of enlightenment, a foundation. Roots under which we can build and grow our tree of consciousness, our tree of life.
Bryan: A tree needs strong roots to grow tall, grow high, to grow outward in expansion, and the same as so with our spiritual nature, with our spiritual journey or spiritual unfolding in having a meditative practice, prayerful practice such as centering prayer or contemplation. Our good efforts to keep us moving in a direction of progress, of transcendence.
Bryan: So what do we mean by going down into the subterranean? Well we hear of in the book of Revelation, an abyss, a watery abyss and a beast rising up from it. And mine, and many other people’s interpretation is beast is not the antichrist that’s going to come somewhere in the future, but it’s a metaphysical, an esoteric symbol of that very nature that we have to come to grips with, to kill, metaphorically kill or to individuate into our being. We have to recognize the beastial part of ourself, the instinctive part of ourself. We can’t ignore that we have instincts. We can’t ignore that we have an animal nature that we have very much in common with animals. Our brains are an evolutionary masterpiece, and our brains, contain the whole history of evolution in it. Now you can believe in evolution and still be a spiritual person. You can believe in evolution and still be religious person if you want to use that word, and I’m not encouraging you to become or to be or to say that you are religious.
Bryan: It connotes many things for many people, sometimes negative. We’re in an era of new thought and we use different words. It’s a
Turning Points and Transformations: Descend then Transcend
paradigm shift. We’re now in the Aquarian age. We’re not in the Piscean age anymore. So doing depth work. Going down. That’s kind of essence of the Paschal mystery as spoken of in Christianity, specifically in the Roman Catholic world, we have to go down into the tomb, into the darkness, into the earth. Then we can be resurrected. Then we can transcend or ascend. The pattern was set in place, by the Christ or by the person, Jeshua with the Christed nature. Speaking of Jesus, the only sign he said he would give to his people, was the sign of Jonah. . . and if you know the story of Jonah, it was Jonah was swallowed by a big whale and spit up later. Jeshua was talking about going down into the earth and then raising up as human consciousness to divine consciousness, raising up, rising out of the depths, rising out at the abyss, rising from the tomb. When we hit blocks on our journey, when we run into walls. . . These things are not just obstacles, but hurdles to clear. We have to learn how to move through them to break through these blockages to the awareness of Love’s Presence.
Bryan: Part of the work, in the metaphysical anatomy in the Chakras, in the metaphysical energetic anatomy is to work through blockages, to allow spirit to rise, and there’s a science behind it that involves our life force and our eliminative energy called Apana, our life force, called Prana. Apana becomes heated. A spark is created in our naval point and that spark that is heated. . . that psychic heat descends down to the root Chakra and awakens the Kundalini in one. “He who raises his Kundalini fast approaches Christhood”, said Paramahansa Yogananda. Our goal in life is to live an enlightened life, to live a blissful life, to be happy, to be healthy, to be holy. That’s it. That’s the essence. That’s the formula. How do we get there? We have to clear the subconscious. We have to remove the garbage. Take out the trash as Yogi Bhajan would talk about and spoken about in his teachings. Maybe that’s one reason Kundalini Yoga isn’t as popular as it could be because it involves doing subconscious work in comparison to Hatha Yoga.
Bryan: Now it’s more acceptable for people like myself to be doing Kundalini Yoga or work with Kundalini energy on the progressive paths of spirituality. The more inclusive paths of spirituality. We don’t see one path being exclusive of another. Yoga is not a religion. Kundalini Yoga is not a religion. It’s not a system of a cult of the occult. It’s a system of excellence. A system that brings about the caliber of human being, the identity that makes an impact in this world. It’s a technology. A sacred one.
Bryan: If you’re familiar with the program Rebirthing by Yogi Bhajan, you know that we need to remove the clutter from the mind. Much of that clutter is the overflow of the subconscious. There’s many things in many exercises and sets called kriyas that help us to deal with the subconscious debris and we’re going to continue to have to deal with it our whole entire lives until we’re free of our Karma, but we are
Turning Points and Transformations: Descend then Transcend
always, shoving things down into the depths. We’ve repressed many things. It might be in an experience or a situation where it’s not the wisest thing to express rage, so we repress it and it festers and it grows down in the depths, deep down within, and we’re going to have to deal with it sooner or later. Most likely sooner.
Bryan: We can’t ignore the dark. There would be no light without darkness. It’s a necessary opposite, it’s a necessary polarity. Even in worldviews, in our paradigm of non-duality, of oneness, we still have to recognize that we live in maya or that we live in a world opposites. That seems to be founded upon duality, so that means there are things such as opposites, such as light and dark, hot and cold, good and bad, good and evil. And I liked the writings of Swami Kriyananda from the Kriya Yoga lineage. He talks a lot about with “lila”, but Paramahansa Yogananda, his guru, talked about, which is this divine play, cosmic drama. The drama was only interesting when you have a hero and also a villain.
Bryan: The villain helps to elucidate the positive characteristics of the hero. You don’t have drama. You don’t have an interesting concept without a nemesis, without a shadow. Where is in our own lives, our nemesis. It’s not usually an external people, although people can come to us and be seemingly villain like I mean this is the meaning of love your enemies and like in the saying that says, keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. Reason for that is it takes many, many times revealed to you. Your dark side. Because you come to project onto this figure where these figures, or these people or these situations. They enabled us to grow. They enable us to see past ultimately the blocks in awareness to keep us in unconsciousness.
Bryan: It’s why it’s good to marry, to have someone to be with in your life. They play the role of the revealer. They reveal things to you that come from the shadow, the density of the shadow. Without person to mirror that to you, it’s very easy to live in denial or disassociation of your dark qualities are dark aspects, but having someone there to mirror those things to you or to point out things to you that are less than loving helps us to grow.
Bryan: Everything contains its opposite. A paradox is a vision of opposites. Two seeming contradictory truths. Life is a paradox. Work on the spiritual journey is a paradox. Saying that we have to descend then transcend is a paradox. They seem contradictory. Why go down to only go to rise up? Why can’t we just rise up? With a pattern that the Christ, the person of Jeshua who is the light beer, a light bearer, one among many such such such such others as the Buddha, Krishna, both avatars divine incarnations.
Bryan: All avatars have something individually unique to reveal to the world about the God consciousness, the universal God field, universal God awareness . . . And what Jeshua Jesus revealed through his
Turning Points and Transformations: Descend then Transcend
personhood and divine Self. What he said, is we are immortal. We can’t die. That we have to go down into the tomb. The life process is a cycle of continually dying to the false self. That grain of wheat that must die in order for us rise above into the heights of awareness, the heights of consciousness, the bliss nectar of total awareness of superconscious, bliss… intuition, explosive insight. We gain insight from doing depth work. We gain insights from paying attention, not in an unbalanced way, but acknowledging the darkness within us, acknowledging that we have weeds growing in us next to our wheat of consciousness, aware of presence. The parable of the weeds and wheat really means when Jeshua Jesus said that we should let the weeds grow along with the wheat, otherwise we’ll pull out the wheat with the weeds is because many times our darkness, the qualities that we tend to repress or the qualities of that inhibit us or else the very qualities that enable us to evolve. Life is a process of involution and evolution as Tau Malachi of the Sophian Gnostic tradition, would speak about. It’s a back and forth process.
Bryan: Our angels are demons are demons are angels. It’s another way of saying, the same thing, a blessing or curse or curses . . .things that seem to hold us down or hold us back are the very things that can help us rise up. And transcend means to rise above. How do we begin this work? It’s more than we can cover in the show, but if anything, if I can instill for you the idea that this process of clearing the subconscious, it’s like finding gold in a gold rush. . . because when we recognize these patterns, these pain patterns, things that have limited us, we can begin to grow and to blossom, to flourish. Many times in depth psychology the shadow is said to reveal gold to you… that by recognizing the shadow you are enabled to expand ever more. At this point, I want to point out that it’s all God. EVERYTHING. Even the dark encounters or you might say, God is not darkness, but what I am saying is that all things come from God. God has no opposite. You know, all things are used to return to God. Even the image of the lake of fire comes from God. It’s a purifying fire, not something to damn you to hell for all eternity. . . a purifying fire. Though I reject the idea that there is a place exactly in the likeness of purgatory, I do accept the idea that we all have to go through a purging process until we can return to God consciousness. We have to burn our Karma.
Bryan: We have to reap what we sow. Sometimes it involved suffering and a lot of people don’t like to hear that. We don’t have to suffer, but we do because of our choices that we make, what we do and what we choose, what we think, what we act out. Well, we always have a choice. I’m not saying you shouldn’t live down in the depths or live through subconsciousness. Live in subconsciousness or unconsciousness, no, just recognize it. Recognize it for what it is. It’s something that’s there to help you grow, to help you evolve, to help you become more loving. . . . So we have to do the depth work. Without it we’re shallow people or hollow. But we really, in essence, carry around,
Turning Points and Transformations: Descend then Transcend
great density around with us and our personhood. When we don’t do our depth work, it’s already a dense experience being in the human body. It’s only exacerbated when we choose to live in unawareness, so what do we do. . . Again, it takes courage. There’s ways that we can deal with that shadow. . . things such as active imagination. We can dialogue with it, give a voice to a certain quality, give it an anthropomorphic quality to it treated it as a personage in dialogue with that, your value, your consciousness to shine through and shed light on what is being revealed. Give a voice to your darkness. It’s called shadow work. Folks. It’s not fun, but it’s necessary,
Bryan: So, if something is rising up within you that you don’t like, that you’re doing a meditative practice and that you realize you feel like you’re in a bad mood. It’s your subconscious clearing. It’s definitely a phenomenon that many people have experienced in the spiritual journey. That’s why it’s good to have a companion on the journey to share these things with because you start by releasing a lot of debris. Then you begin to think, oh my gosh, am I these things? Am I these qualities? But you’re not, you need someone to show you that you’re beyond that. You’re more expansive that you’re more aware. I want to thank you for joining me today. I wish you many blessings. Come back and join us next week on Turning Points and Transformations. Have a prosperous, happy, healthy, holy New Year. Peace. Joy to you.
Bryan: I’m going to send you off with one of my songs. “Free.” On the album “Fractured and Delivered.” All songs and meditations, or affirmations can be found at bryanrice.org to both listen to and to buy. There is a store on my site. Thank you. May the divine bless you, uplift you and keep you. Aum. Shanti. Peace. Amen.
Announcer: You have been listening to Turning Points and Transformations with Bryan Rice. We hope you have enjoyed your program today. Together, let us help build the new humanity and seek to become one with the Divine Presence of all there is.
Inferno of the Real 