The Bond of Power is the connection to the Heart and the insight/intelligence that is our Source. One can describe the Bond of Power in religious terms—and I wish I could—but the religious language points to the past and the Way of the Bible. The path is already laid out and all you have to do is follow it, conform to it and obey it, and if you don’t you are at fault and get what you deserve. This is not the Bond of Power to the Heart but to the Church. The other false Bond of Power is to the Culture. Culture and Church both usurp the power and bond you to its institution.

In order to discover you true Power you have to go abasing the stream of both Culture and Church. That is not easy because we are programed to bond with out culture from birth. Humans are a social being, and our DNA is to bond with the mother and then the world view of our culture. What role model do we have that is outside of Culture and church?

This was the power of Swami Muktananda. He was outside of both Culture and Church. Like the obelisk in Space Odyssey: 2001, Muktananda had no reference to the known world when you were in his presence.

Now at the age of 80 I find that my life with Muktananda—as brief and rather insignificant as it was—was not just a past life but an integral part of my life now. I remember my “spiritual experiences” in my life as being more real than any mere memory. Memory is not alive, but when you break through memory, when you break through one world view and self that is in this world view, you encounter that which is beyond the world of appearances, and you know that this world is just a film and a veil, like a dream. These touch stones are powerful encounters with the Source of one’s being, that is the source of all Being, you and me.

Living here in Blackstone VA, where my “spiritual” adventures just doesn’t compute on the local reality map—and are even suspect, as if I were possessed by the Devil or certainly not worthy of interest—I am quite alone. Yet I persist. Perhaps, this has been just what I needed to bring my practice to a place where it is not dependent upon outside validation. I live in this world I have chosen, yet I am not of this world.

There is an awareness that is awake that knows this world is both real and not real at the same time. I don’t reject the world nor do I totally identify with it. The place where I live is a magical point of creativity. The world is potential. Reality is not set. Reality is dynamic but it is up to me to choose it, to this choiceness awareness, this razor’s edge where I am both being and not being. Both born and unborn.

As I recall Swami Muktananda and the Bond of Power he created for me, he is not some Guru in my past. Muktananda is this present moment. His name means freedom. Freedom is that living point where the past meets the present, where the known meets the unknown, where who your are meets your potential, which is unknown. Potential means unknown. Source means unknown. To Access Source means you have to surrender, to give up the known, to give up who your are and the world view that supports who your are. Surrender means to die. To say; I’m ready to die.

We all have to do this on the physical level. Both my father and uncle told me when they were 93 that they wanted to die. And shortly they did. But on the heart level, on the spiritual level, we must read that point, that recognition that we have to let go in order to make the passage to the next stage of our potential. We have to move from the mind/Culture/Church to the Heart and our Freedom Potential.

What is that freedom but our mind that no longer depends or takes refuge in what is known, which is our world view and Culture. This feels like madness. To be insane is to give up all tethers to the known world. That is exactly what the Unknown feels like. Who will I be if I let go? I don’t know.