Enlightenment 2012: Kalki and the Golden Age
By Kiara Windrider

There is nothing like being on a journey towards a far land, not knowing the way, not sure the destination exists, somehow knowing I am destined to arrive to God, yet aware also that the self that finally arrives is equally destined to disappear. What can I say about this journey, except to affirm that it only begins after it is over? What can I say about the self, except to know that I only understand myself when it is gone? What can I say about discovering God, except to marvel at all the continually changing infinitely beautiful expressions of God’s face, which is also my own face?

Ever since I can remember I have been fascinated by stories of holy men and women in the mountaintops and forests of India living in enlightened states of divine union. I looked to them with admiration and some envy, recognizing the longing deep in my heart to achieve a similar state of enlightenment, yet convinced I did not have the discipline nor stamina required to spend years in a cave hidden away from the world seeking this most precious of all pearls.

Over the years I gave up hope. I would never be a Buddha or a Christ or a Ramana Maharshi, for those were the only images I had of what an enlightened person looked like. Yet the longing in my heart remained, and I tortured myself with the yearning to break free from the limitations I perceived within my own experience of self, all the while knowing that this was an impossible dream. I was not an avatar; I was nobody special… so then why didn’t this longing in my heart just go away?

I can see now that my journey is not different from anyone’s journey, for underneath all our separate illusions of reality, there is essentially one soul, one mind, one consciousness – and the one longing to realize this truth within ourselves. As I share this journey of awakening, you will perhaps see that it is your journey as well. And more than that, it is also the journey of the vast unified consciousness that is the collective consciousness of this planet.

As the boy became a man, the early passion of boyhood became tempered by the persistent demands of daily existence. Still, the big questions continued, Who am I? Where did I come from? Where is humanity headed? How can I help? These questions were often painful because I didn’t really like the answers I was given. What kind of answers made sense in a world where outer reality seemed to be dominated by greed, hunger, manipulation, destruction, and suffering?

The questions began to feel too big to carry around in a world that demanded immediate responses to immediate needs. For many years I had embarked on a passionate quest for enlightenment, but even this felt a little hollow to me now. How could I feel good about entering into some kind of personal nirvana while billions of earthlings were hell-bent on extinction? How could I justify spending years in a solitary cave when the voices of human need were so loud all around me? Besides, I had been told that only about a thousand people had achieved this state since the dawn of history, so given what I knew of myself, I doubted that I would be the next.

I would escape into fantasies of what this enlightenment would be like, not just as a personal experience but as a global awakening, but I always managed to find my way back to ‘reality’, a word I didn’t particularly like, because it had nothing to do with what felt real, yet was something I had to learn to deal with if I were to be of any use on Earth. I became active in environmental and peace concerns. I began researching alternative, earth-friendly technologies. I also picked up a graduate degree in transpersonal psychology, received my MFT license in California, and began practicing as a psychotherapist, along with various systems of bodywork and energy healing.

During the nineties, I worked for some years at an alternative healing center known as the Pocket Ranch Institute. It was founded by Barbara Findeisen and Tony Madrid, whose dream was to provide a safe place for people to go through spiritual awakening. Affiliated with the Spiritual Emergency Network, we had various programs for people to release emotional traumas from the past, manage kundalini crisis, and to reconnect with their higher selves. It was situated in 3000 acres of forested wilderness, amidst flowing streams and sacred oaks, in land that had been held sacred as a place of spiritual visioning for hundreds of years past. It was a unique program, and I loved working there and seeing people go through such beautiful awakenings. Still, it was a far cry from enlightenment.

I lived in Mount Shasta in California during this time, considered by many to be one of the most powerful vortexes of sacred energy on the planet. I spent a lot of time up in the alpine meadows, communing with the spirits of the mountain, and of the ascended masters whose presence is so tangible there. It was a beautiful time, and broadened my vision of what our planetary journey was all about. I also spent time in Hawaii, playing with dolphins and whales in their ocean world, allowing them to teach me about oneness.

Gradually, I started putting various pieces together that seemed to point to a world of new possibilities. I studied various calendar systems and prophecies from around the world, I researched little-known scientific findings that pointed to huge shifts in consciousness coming our way, I found myself inspired by future visions that people were having all over the world, and even found myself ‘channeling’ aspects of myself from other timelines, all of which pointed towards a collective shift that awaited humanity in the near future. I wrote a book about all this, ‘Doorway to Eternity: A Guide to Planetary Ascension’, which immediately won a number of awards, and glowing commendation from a number of people who were beginning to come to the same conclusions.

What was missing, however, was a plan. It was all very well to say that this is where humanity was headed, and even to feel the truth of this on a very deep level. Still, I felt somewhat schizophrenic sometimes when I would read about another round of terrorism in yet another corner of the Earth, whether state-sponsored or otherwise, or hear about another tribe of indigenous people displaced as their forest was destroyed so that yet another corporate entity could profit from the blood of the living Earth. Where was the point of convergence between my deeply felt inner visions and these deeply fractured outer realities?

In early 2002 I met a woman who later became my wife. Her name was Grace. Shortly after we met she had a vision where an ancient being appeared to her in the guise of an Indian woman draped completely in plain white cotton. She revealed herself to be Mother India, and showed her a vast landscape that lay dry and barren under a waterless sky, with deep cracks several inches wide. Only a few people wandered in the distance. “My children are dying”, she said. “They need food, they need water, they need people who care. People must begin to care”. Grace remained in that waking vision for an entire day, deeply feeling the pain, parched with heat and thirst, and throwing up repeatedly. She became vast. She was Mother India, and felt her body had become the land. She felt like she was vomiting up earthquakes for India so they wouldn’t have to be experienced by the land physically.

Inexplicably, after 22 years of having lived in the US, I too began feeling a strong urge to return to the land of my birth, India. As I spoke about this with a trusted friend, Barry, he had the premonition that I would meet somebody who could guide me into the highest states of enlightenment, something we had both been seeking for a long time. I deeply resonated with his statement, and felt the truth of it as a deep upwelling of joy throughout my body.

Neither of us knew why or where, but both Grace and I knew we had to go. The call was becoming too strong to ignore. We packed up our bags, put everything into storage, and were on a plane to India by late September.

We traveled through many ashrams, met many yogis and gurus. We became attracted to the works of Sri Aurobindo, a freedom fighter, mystic, and highly accomplished yogi who had lived much of his life in deep contemplation in Pondicherry, India. Joined in this work later by a Frenchwoman, Mirra Alfassa, who eventually came to be known as the Mother, his great task was to anchor into the collective consciousness of humanity what he referred to as the ‘supramental force’, a force that he claimed would most surely awaken humanity into her true evolutionary destiny as a supramental species, as far beyond the current human species as humanity is beyond the apes.

Grace and I spent much time in Auroville, the city of human unity founded by the Mother after the death of Sri Aurobindo. We connected deeply with the spirit of these two visionaries, and had some powerful glimpses of the supramental realms, which they had promised would soon be manifested in the mass consciousness of the Earth. We spent a lot of time meditating in the Matrimandir, a golden sphere in the center of Auroville, which represented a vehicle for the descent of this supramental force.

One day, as we were meditating in the early dawn, Grace had a visitation from a beautiful, tall, male being, smeared in ash, greenish-gray in color, bare-chested, hair up in a topknot, and then down in dreadlocks. He had garlands of beads around his neck. There was an aura of powerful benevolence about him. He extended his hand to her, holding out what appeared to be a long, luminous oval swirling with a soft green and pink opalescence. She heard the words “cosmic egg”. He was so real she could touch him. She didn’t know who he was, but as she described him to me I realized that this was Shiva. The image remained in her consciousness for weeks, and seemed to be a guiding force as we journeyed along.