THE FOURTH SACRED TRUTH
TRUTH IS A FEELING
MY STORY - How I became enlightened.
Hi, I do not expect that everyone needs to have these experiences in order to be free. We each have our unique journey of awakening to go upon. It appears to me that our purpose here is to learn and become what we really are. In that learning, there are these core aspects which apply to every human being. These core truths appear in different forms in every spiritual teaching on the planet. This is because there is a technology of consciousness. These truths apply to everyone no matter your state of being. I share this story as a way of communicating how I woke up, and the learning that came with it, through me. You get to decide what resonates with you. Hopefully the core truths will shine through and help you find them for yourself :)
It has been happening for thousands of years. It is really the same old story coming around once again. The faces are new and the situations unique to this life, but the essence is still the same. I am a human being. I am a soul learning how to be alive in this body with the awakened awareness of being everything. For all of life is my mirror. There is truly no other. And yet there remains the experience of the other and the future potentials of new beings trying to remember who they are within this mirror matrix of magic and mysteries. So I seek to share this wisdom that it may serve others and the evolution of consciousness. I see you, the divine essence within all things. I feel as if I may have known that in my core my whole life, but it has taken many years for this reality to become fully known and lived within my life.
I won’t bore you with all of the details as they do not truly serve in this experience. All of these details do make up the whole picture of who I am today and yet they also have all been absorbed into this potential of pure being that is both full of story and completely without any story, all at the same time. This is the point where our true source awareness meets the suffering of our separation. When the two come together we create something that is both timeless and something never before seen. It is this beautiful meeting place where life really gets to live.
I first began to awaken to this higher truth in 1999. I suffered much through my 20’s. I was lost in a world of victimhood, addiction, depression, debt, and sickness. I had my highlights, it wasn’t all tragedy. I had learned love, some freedom, and empowerment, but it was all shrouded in this darkness that always pulled me back down. It was the searching for happiness that drove me towards ecstasy. I just wanted to be happy. I had spent the previous few years really trying to clean up my life and reach for my real dreams, and things were shifting but also getting worse. I was sick all the time and depressed a lot. I ended up sitting on the old wooden floor of this house in madison, Wisconsin where the woman whom I had followed there was supposed to have moved in with me but instead, we had just broke up. After a night of drinking and dope I was sitting there on the floor feeling sorry for myself when I looked up towards the heavens and asked life, “Well what do I do now?”
In a flash of light I had a vision that would forever change the course of my life. I saw this heavenly light shining down from the heavens. I heard the words in my mind.
AND ALL THOSE WHO FOLLOW THEIR HEARTS
SHALL RISE INTO THE GLORY OF THE HEAVENS
I saw the words as I heard them spoke as if they where written on the wall. I saw people with their arms spread open wide and their hearts were lit up like suns shining at dawn. They were rising up in a spiral column around the heavenly light. Their faces showed their love for life as they rose up into the light.
I immediately felt changed. I began to get all of these ideas of things I had dreamt of doing in my life. I felt happy and excited about life again. I began to trust that maybe there was something else to reality. Maybe god was real after all. A vision like that doesn’t just happen to you, it changes your reality. I began to explore what it meant to follow my heart. I had read a book a few years before that had talked about asking your heart questions and feeling the answer in your belly. It said that your heart and body had a wisdom and guidance within it that your mind could not know. So I began learning to follow higher guidance through thinking about doing something, feeling in my heart and belly for an answer then taking action based on the thoughts that felt good. It is such a simple system and it has changing my life in every way possible.
This soon became my primary way of making decisions in life. Everything I did was based on the feeling of alignment within my mind, heart, and body. If it felt good and expansive in my heart and belly I would do it and all sorts of magical synchronistic things would happen. If my belly tightened up when I thought about something, I would find another thought until I felt the expansion again. My life accelerated and changed the more that I followed this inner guidance. All kinds of amazing people, experiences and opportunities began to flow into my life. It was effortless really. I just kept learning to be in this alignment and amazing things happened. I still struggled and resisted often as we all do, but the overall experience was like rising into the glory of the heavens.
After a few years I had travelled, healed my body, made more money than ever, and was now living in this amazing studio in this aspen forest meadow mesa, in one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I was surrounded by mountains and wild flowers and living this dream life. Everything was flowing to me in effortless manifestation. Reality was losing its fixed boundaries. I was sometimes freaking out and scared because I wasn’t really sure what reality was anymore. And at the same time I felt better than I ever had, I had a lot of money and a lot of free time. I was high on life. This is when a woman came in to my life who later became my wife and everything changed again.
She invited me to come to a 10 day meditation retreat that she was headed to. I had never had any formal meditation training but I had been practicing stilling my mind and finding peace. It was part of how I had healed my body. For I had discovered that the way I was thinking was making me sick. As I had learned to follow higher guidance I had also learned to control my mind. It is all related. I was sort of interested in the meditation retreat but the flyer she gave me said things like, are you stressed out, suffering, and depressed. Learning this meditation can help heal your life. I already felt healed. I had overcome all of these things already, why would I need to go sit and be still and silent for 10 days when I live such an amazing life. I get to do pretty much everything I want to do and life is amazing. But something about it kept calling me, and when I finally asked higher guidance, I could feel the alignment saying that I should go to this retreat. And so I went.
It was only a few days into the retreat when my life changed. We had been focusing on our breath and then focusing on the smallest point on the tip of our nose. Feeling for the slightest bit of breath passing by our nostril. We spent hours every day sitting in silent meditation and never looking at or speaking to others. I was sort of going crazy and wanted to leave many times. But I kept coming back and sitting there and doing what was asked. I finally gave up completely. I totally surrendered to everything. I stopped trying to sit up straight. I was all stooped over. I forgot about everything else and I fell completely into the focus on this point under my nose. I was totally surrendered and totally focused at the same time.
Suddenly, it seemed like I fell through the awareness of that point and this energy rose out of my belly and surrounded my whole body. I felt this energy surround me and it became what I am. I became this field of energy in awareness of self surrounding my body. I was this field of awareness, sort of like floating, and my body was within it. I felt a great joy in this freedom. It was very simple and subtle and yet I was very expansive and free. I could feel this energy on the top of my head. I thought it felt like the hand of God was resting on my head. There was this intense energy of peace and bliss radiating down within my body. If I would focus on my head I would be filled with this light, and I still do to this day. I went outside after the session. I walked over to this fence laughing and feeling more wonderful that perhaps I ever had. I looked up into the early morning starry night with a crescent moon hanging in the sky wondering, what had just happened to me. I didn’t really know, but I was just so happy and content to be alive.
From this moment on I could feel the energy of everything. Life became alive in a new whole new light to me. I was moving in this higher self alignment and feeling the flow and movement with all of life. Life took on a whole new spiritual dimension in every way. I explored many different spiritual traditions, rituals, dances, chanting, and having fun with life. The syncronicities and manifestations unfolding in everything I did. I learned about the power of mind and creation. I learned about the beauty of the soul and how to really love. I learned about the joys of makings things, growing food, and being connected to the earth. I really felt one with all of life, and life continued to be amazing and beautiful in so many ways for many years. But for some reason it was not enough. I’m not really sure what happened. Over time I began to feel a longing for something else. This longing turned into a darkness and I slowly fell into a hole.
It was in this darkness that I learned the true power of what we really are. In the light, I had learned to fall in love with life for all of the amazing things and experiences that I could have. In the darkness I learned how to be that love even when I could not have all of those things. This is when I found the true power of the heart. I had lost all of the joy and love for life. I still knew who I had become and what was possible in life but I could not feel it anymore. I could not create it. Life seemed not to be flowing within me anymore. I had lost something. I would literally wake up some days feeling how much I hated life, everyone, and everything. It was this longing for all that I had loved the kept me going though the darkness.
Finally, I stood outside as I watched our father the sun set over the mountains in the town I grew up in. I felt into the longing for everything I loved. I asked for everything I loved and for the divine essence herself to come be within me. I asked her to come live inside my heart and to never leave. I visualized everything I loved and longed for and brought it all into my heart. In that moment I felt something, like the love of God, or the true divine essence, come into my heart and my heart exploded in an ecstasy of divine love. My heart literally had an orgasm of spiritual reunion. My heart center was vibrating and radiating this love within me. I could feel the love of the divine flowing in me once again. I had found the heart of love. When I would focus my awareness within the heart center it would become activated with this higher vibrational love. There is a tangible heart essence that awakens when we focus our full awareness there.
It was in that moment that I began to truly walk the earth as a spiritual human being. My mind was enlightened to the truth of what we are. My heart was awakened to the love of the divine essence flowing within us. The awareness of both of these centers became the focus of my life. I became aware that this inner alignment of higher guidance was more than just a tool for getting what I want. It had become the tool for being what I am. I began to discover the true power of living the alignment of wisdom and love within the body. When we bring mind and heart together a third energy of cocreation arrives within us. I began to discover how keeping my awareness centered within the heart transformed my own consciousness and the world around me. I found that if I was suffering or out of alignment in any way, I could focus into the heart and this love would expand and heal the energy of my field. I would feel whole again and the suffering would be gone. It became the key to everything.
My journey has been this ongoing deepening into the Self and a losing or a forgetting of this Self. Over the years I transformed and changed many old aspects of myself but there was still these core parts of myself that I would get lost in that were not this true Self. The ego is very slippery and slides right into prominence when we are not looking. Even with these awakenings I had experienced, I was still suffering. There were times when I could not shake these old energy patterns. I often could feel the sadness and suffering of others and the collective and would get stuck within these darker patterns. I began to see that even with an awakened consciousness we can still live within limited realities. I would get stuck in them. Many of them were ones I knew from my conditioning. I learned how to clear these limiting frequencies out of my field when I learned about the scale of consciousness. I had asked the universe how this could be and once again it answered.
A friend arrived in my life to share the wisdom of it with me. He showed me how there are all of these states of consciousness and how we can experience reality through any of them as the limited ego self. When we are not fully embodied and expanded in Self we can slip into the limited self and experience these lower realities even though our consciousness itself is a higher frequency. The more that we clear these old frequencies out of our field, the higher our consciousness rises up this scale, into the heights of ecstasy and divine union.
I discovered that if I focused on activating the energy in my heart with this feeling of devotion and then brought my awareness up to my crown to feel the light and then felt my way down to the base of my spine and feet in a sweeping motion up and down through my field, I could clear away these negative energies and emotions. I call it running the rings. These rings of pure awareness running through my field bring me back into this state of wholeness and oneness. It unifies the energy of my being into a single expression of self. I would do this for a while and then I would just relax and focus on centering on the heart and after a while, like many months of this, I began to sink into a deeper experience of Self. I would focus on the top of my head and on my roots at the same time. Feeling this heart center in the middle and this flowing of light energy pulsing up and down from my head to the base of my spine and my feet. The more I was able to relax and stay focused on the top of the head and my feet while centering in the heart, the more empowered this column of light within me became until slowly I would merge with that light. I would dissolve into this pure essence of self. I call this the open source, for it is the gateway into the pure open source essence of life. At first this was a beautiful peaceful blissful place to just rest, but I soon began to see that it was also a very powerful tool of cocreation.
It is quite an amazing thing to be able to change your state of consciousness from whatever suffering you might be experiencing into the pure bliss of consciousness. We also live life here in the physical world and need to get up and do things with this life. So, I started playing with this experience and what you can do with this power of the open source. I had this land near where I lived. It was these old fields near the river in town. A tech corporation owned it all and kept everyone out with these big barb wire fences. I loved this place. There are these open meadows with cottonwoods, lakes, beautiful mountain views, and the river running by. I would sit by the fence looking out over this land and began to develop a prayer:
This land is open and free to all beings forever
I would run the rings of energy through my field and enter the open source while thinking this thought. I sat at sunset for a few days over a couple of weeks offering this prayer while visualizing and embodying this as a living reality in the open source. I had told my wife about the land and my prayer for it. She came home two weeks later with a newspaper in her hand and said you are not going to believe this. She handed me the newspaper and on the cover was a photo of the land with the words; MAGICAL OPEN SPACE. In a surprise decision the City had bought 150 acres and was to make it a nature park open space which would be open to the public. The fences came down and the land is now free to all beings forever. This is such a beautiful expression of the true power of love and embodied prayer. How could we all change the world with this power not over life but with life.
The other experience that changed how I view this potential happened in this vision I received while sitting in a sweat lodge ceremony. I saw myself running through open fields of the prairie. I ran up into the dakotas until I came to a village. The people there welcomed me with loving arms and brought me into their ceremonial circle. They walked me up onto this pile of wood and tied me up to the stake. I felt no fear but only love. They lit the pile on fire and began chanting and dancing all around me. I felt the heat rising from my feet below as the fire began to consume me. I could feel the love in my heart and the love of all those beautiful souls singing and dancing around me. I felt no fear in my mind as I was consumed by this holy fire. There was only love. Everything that was not true burned away in this holy fire. I was consumed by the light and filled the essence of love that is our core. I came out of this vision and realized the gift in its essence. This open source that I had learned to access was the portal into our true nature. The light of love that we open above us and the fire that opens within when we connect this light to the physical consumes all of the darkness and fills us with the light of love. It is in essence, the crucifixion that awakens the light of the christ (the awakened heart of divine love) within us, thus returning our consciousness to the heart of love.
In this open source all things become possible. As we change our state of consciousness within and then focus that power on the world around us, things change in accordance with the degree to which we change. Now I don’t pretend to have the power to change everything about reality, and yet perhaps we do. It seems to me that the more that this understanding of our potential is made available in the world we will discover even more the power that we all have. The other amazing gift of the open source is that it enables us to access information from a higher consciousness. It is a way of channeling and accessing higher consciousness information based on our capacity to merge with this higher self and to cognize the information into physical expression. Most of the time this channelled information does not come through so clearly in the form of actual words but is more like sensations or inner knowingness and we must transfer this to language. What comes through then is not always perfect but is a way to access information beyond what our mind can directly know.
I believe this is the capacity that all geniuses have used to bring forth new ideas, music, art, and wisdom which enables humanity to evolve into greater capacities.
In this final stage of my journey of enlightenment I was trying to find ways to share this information and to help others awaken to this higher self potential. It is not easy to present this kind of information and I often found myself becoming ego versions of myself as I attempted to market and organize thoughts into a simple way to present these ideas. Finally one day I decided to ask for help from the divine. I looked out at life and said; can you please just send me a simple way to help raise the vibration of the planet? I said the prayer, rather flippantly really, and let it go.
A few nights later I was sleeping with my family near this lake high up in the Colorado rockies, when I was awakened in the middle of the night. I sat up and felt the presence of the divine, like two angels were hovering over me in the night sky. I think of them as Divine Mother and Father. They felt close and seemed like they filled up most of the sky. I felt them and in my mind I heard the words:
THE FOUR SACRED TRUTHS
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
YOU ARE ALWAYS CHOOSING HOW YOU FEEL IN EACH MOMENT
THERE IS NOTHING BUT LOVE
I sat there absorbing what I had heard and feeling the awe of this encounter. Then I thought, well, what is the fourth one? Immediately I felt my heart come alive with the radiant love of the divine that I had come to know so well. It expanded in my heart like a radiant sun. Then I felt the light of the divine presence, like the hand of God resting on my head, come pouring down my head and through my whole body. My entire being lit up with this luminous love light of the one. I am still humbled by this love. It comes over me when I align with truth within myself. When I invoke this presence within me through reverence, devotion, and the inner awareness of this potential within ourselves. When I ask to feel this love it comes. When I focus on my crown and my roots and feel the love in my heart, it comes.When I align the energy of mind, heart, and body within this presence of light energy flows and radiates as what I am.
This enlightened mind and awakened heart in unison with each other opens this flow of energy within us and we return to this open source state of empowerment and love. It comes like a pillar of light flowing within our core that consumes all that is not in truth. Walking in the world as an anchor of this love is the core practice and essence of my existence now. Keeping awareness centered within the Heart keeps us in the power of our soul. This keeps us in the open source flow of cocreation with all of life. This is where real wisdom, power and love come together and live through us.
Being in our body is amazing. I love to create beautiful things, play music and sing, make love, have wonderful food and conversations, and to help others to awaken to this higher reality. The old saying is so true:
Before enlightenment chop wood carry water
After enlightenment chop wood carry water
We are still human, and have the needs of being human to attend to. But now we live in the world knowing and being this divine essence that we are. We know that we are the source of our experience in reality. We know the power of what we think, feel, and do effects everything in life. It is now a matter of staying in tune with this higher self alignment of energy and intention. In the process of being what we are, we help others to awaken to this higher light. We are all one consciousness. As I sink ever more deeply into the ocean of the open source essence of reality, I feel this to be truer than ever. I am here as a beacon of divine love. I am a spiritual essence. I am a human being. I am the ecstatic union of the two. I am living on the cutting edge of consciousness as we expand forward into the unlimited potentials of what we can be together.
I believe in the heart of love living within you, everyone, and everything in life, for I know it is all one. I believe that we have only begun to discover the real power and beauty of this reality and what we can all do as we join together in this awakened awareness of Self. Everyone empowered. Everyone matters. Everything honored and respected for its true essence and value to life. We are all in this together. The love that we feel in our hearts is real. The divine essence of God is real. They are the same thing. They are what we are.
I wish for nothing less than for all beings to know this truth of Self. I dream that we can transform all of the darkness of reality with this power of love that flows within us. I believe we can create a world that we truly love. A world that works for all beings. A reality that allows this spiritual essence to be seen and known as the core of our existence in everything we do. Living from this reverence for all of life, what amazing things shall we do together.
I offer the wisdom of these for sacred truths and these other teachings to you and to all of life in the hopes that it will serve you in reconnecting with this truth within yourself.
I love and honor all of you.
May all beings be happy and free
Aho Mitakuye Oyasin
Guru D - Dustin e Brunson
