A Personal Experience With Avatar
by Richard Bishop
According to the Hindu religion the word "Avatar" is defined as a deity who voluntarily assumes
physical form to participate in creation. Pretty heady stuff. The Avatar Course is a series of techniques created by Harry Palmer, the most unassuming and humorous writer about higher conscious ness I've ever encountered. He is very refreshing-no talk of astral bodies, joining with the Divine, salvation, or call to leave the world behind. Harry has discovered key aspects about the mechanics of consciousness and teaches them in a course that, in his words, allows you to "create the reality you prefer."
I'd read his stuff for years , and it always had a real solid feel to it. So I finally took the course.
My experience began on a horse farm is Clarksburg, Maryland, situated on a rise with a backdrop of distant mountains. It belonged to one of my fellow students in our small class of five. Our teachers, called Avatar Masters, Ron and Linda, took us through simple introductory exercises. The pace was relaxed, except for my own impatience to get into "the good stuff."
We learned about the mechanics of consciousness conceptually, and then walked the grounds to exercise our newfound knowledge experientially. For instance, we learned, and experienced, how our beliefs can create our experiences - like it or not. Unpleasant experiences are often the result of old beliefs that made sense at the time (possibly when we were very young) but that do not serve us now. We learned how to create new beliefs and free ourselves from old beliefs that might work against what we want. This, by the way, is why affirmations alone often don't work; under lying them are the old beliefs.
By day three, I had a nice little list of things I wanted to create in my life and was working on them when I hit a snag. Some deeper stuff, real deep, was hanging in and not budging. I wanted to be a. better father and husband, and I was creating "I enjoy my family" But something was lurking. Ron, my Avatar Master, spotted it and in a gentle way, pointed it out.
What? No, no way. I didn't want anything to do with that. But, after protesting, I worked with it any way. Resistance roared out. This stuff I was dealing with did not fit my idea of who I was or the kind of life I wanted. But I kept at it. I stomped my feet. I cried. I laughed. I marveled at all the things that came pouring out. This went on, I tell you truly, for at least an hour. It seemed then, almost like a whisper, that it had no power anymore - its energy was gone, expressed, finished. And very sweetly and simply, with a glow on my face that I could feel, I said, "I enjoy my family." I felt very quiet inside.
... one need not analyze and understand every thread
of a tangle to undo the knots.
Ron suggested I take a walk. It was midafternoon. I strode to the top of a small hill, experiencing all that was around me, and then, like
a volcano erupting, I let out a shout of joy. A roar that began not in my throat, but from the very bottom of my feet and gained strength by the second as it rose through my body.
I climbed the fence and jumped into the horse pasture and began to dance. Slowly first, a foot here, an arm outstretched there. And music began-inside me. A song began to sing itself through me-a jazzy tune that turned back on itself and repeated endlessly. I was blissing out! I was all over the pasture now, dancing and singing. The horses were staring at me, watchful, somewhat dubious. The dogs were barking their heads off. I just kept dancing and singing. I don't know how long it went on; it was timeless. A mammoth weight had dissolved. A weight I had been carrying around for a very long time. What were its psycho logical contents and mythic roots? I have no idea. It was gone. That's all that mattered. And that is the beauty of Avatar-one need not analyze and understand every thread of a tangle to undo the knots.
That night, I came home to my family a different man.
Richard Bishop is an Avatar Master from Granite, Maryland and he can be reached at 410-461-8067 or realization@mindspring.com
· Volume XIV Issue 2