Empty the Cave: Awaken the Spark

Empty the Cave:

Awaken the Spark

Howdie Mickoski

Empty the Cave: Awaken the Spark

book 2 of Exit the Cave series

Copyright ©2024 Howdie Mickoski

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-82-94094-02-8

Font: Baskerville Old Face 12pt

Cover Design by V. Ettlin

Cover Photo by: Pexels.com, Horacio Lander

Table of Contents

1 The Core Intent

2 The Good Place: Awakening in the Dream

3 After Death Realms: Awakening From the Dream

4 Emptiness: Awakening From Yourself

5 New Age Deconstruction

6 Origins and Endings

7 The Folly of Oneness

8 Silent Empathetic Detachment

9 Exist to Exit

Additional Material

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all seekers, who wholeheartedly have had the Intent to first see what the Cave is, secondly find if there is a way to Exit, then are committed to act on what they found.

THIS BOOK

Everything in this book, as with all of my books, is my personal opinion coming from 30+ years of experiences and research. This is not medical or psychological advice, just philosophical opinions on how I see reality. I don't have all the answers, and this writing is to allow readers the possibility to think deeply on a variety of subjects, so that you can locate answers within that you feel are honest and truthful for you. I don't want you to agree with my answers, only that you spiral within yourself to locate your own.

I mention several times a calm and stable mind is required to come to material such as this. If you feel that this is not where you currently are, it would be wise to have that as your current focus, then come to this work at a later time.

While with a book like this I could keep re-writing, editing and revising for the next twenty years, there comes a time when you feel it is able to do the job it was intended. Finally, after almost a year of work, I feel the work has reached that state. Any errors that remain in the text are from late additions prior to printing, and not the part of the excellent editing team.

Wishing you all a safe and clear journey.

"The faster they hurry, the slower they go." (E 1)

– Faith Mind Sutra

Chapter 1

THE CORE INTENT

"The whole planet is a fiction, a picture show. Sometimes it can be a rather engrossing picture show, but that doesn’t make it real. We get programmed with all sorts of infatuations and obsessions. Some of them use up years and decades of our lives. Entire lives pass this way, from one petty obsession to another...Yet some come to realize that life is at best a dream, and at worst, a nightmare." (E 2)  (Richard Rose)

Hi Everyone.

So, you want to Exit Plato's Cave/the Matrix? (E 3) It is a very grand quest to take on. However, it might not be what you think it is. Such a quest cannot be defined in words, so nothing in this book can possibly describe it. That is because Exiting the Matrix has nothing to do with you, as it is an Exit of yourself as much as the Cave.

Being someone who chooses to Exit the Cave is a rare and monumental decision. Looking into this type of material usually comes after a life that includes personal trauma, an empathy for the suffering of other beings of the world, anger against all the lies presented, and a deep resolution to attain a state of real Truth and Liberation. As I say often, I do not have all the answers, I just share my opinions on what I have found in my 30+ years of searching as a suggestion for you to explore and come to your own understandings. The good news is that others have Exited the Matrix, so it can be done. The problem is that the pathway is not forward, but 180 degrees in the opposite direction. We do not move forward to a searched for end goal, we actually fall backwards into what we Are. (E 4) The way out is via the way in. The confusion starts because as one has to clearly see that this reality is a trap for one's essence, yet paradoxically, there is no trap, because there is No-thing to be trapped.

This book is the combined progression of two of my previous books, Falling For Truth  and Exit the Cave Book 1. Exit  presented that this reality is a type of AI-based simulated Matrix, created by an evil deity, for the sole purpose of harvesting energy to keep the simulation running. Falling For Truth  was a summary of my eight year test on the solidity of the world that led to seeing it as an illusion, and my fall into a canyon which led me to see that I was also an illusion. A key chapter of each of these books can be found at the following footnote (E 5). And probably like you I have read hundreds of books, yet none I have read can compare to the live and in person experiences and practice done at the home of Korean monk Byung Chul Park, and in the sweat lodges of three Native Medicine Men: Bruce Starlight, Clayton Bunn and Dennis McKay. This book is also a progression of what they shared with me.

With that, we can begin.

*

Wait, you are now saying there is no trap, asks my editor Anders. But you wrote in your last book all about how this is a trap and a suffering pit of hell.

Correct.

So which is it? A trap or not a trap?

Both. The trap had to be laid out in the previous book to shake people from their normal seeing of reality, but now I have to circle back and present a much wider range of information.

Anders, my editor with Falling For Truth, has returned to work on this project. He chose not to edit the first Exit the Cave, so I had to find another editor for that book, and she did a great job. But after reading the first Exit, Anders decided to return and help. I can see he is confused because even though this book is the second book of the Cave series, it is a very different book from the first one.

"Firstly, I no longer refer to this realm as only a 'suffering pit of hell,' it is, but that concept is too limiting to describe this nuthouse. I am now referring to the Matrix as a 'giant pit of distortion and insanity' of which the suffering/pain part is the most noticeable. But as I mention in my chapter on The Good Place, actually it is the smaller distortions and manipulations that are more entrapping."

Multiple small distortions would be harder to track, and would feel overwhelming to figure out.

I nod. That is why a key antidote to this realm is clarity and sanity (to overcome distortion). Secondly, the whole realm is a paradox. The biggest problem to Exiting the Matrix is not the archons, the Fallen Creator (E 6), the government, or what you need to fix about yourself. The problem is the projection of you, with all of its hopes, fears, wants, beliefs, and struggles. That is why it is claimed that you already have the key to unlock the prison of the Matrix. One needs to see the totality of the trap of the archons and the loosh energy harvesting, but if one also does not see through the illusion of the self, then the understandings of the Cave will do little. The doorway Home is through the realization of Emptiness. Yet that realization alone is not enough, or every Zen or Advaita master will Exit the Cave (likely they will not). Nor may a great traditional Medicine Person automatically be able to Exit the Cave, no matter how strong their abilities within it. That is because the Matrix must be equally seen, in all of its sick and insane complexity, yet also realized not to even exist. Both sides of the paradox must be seen through, and then one's Awareness finds the midpoint between them where one resides in a type of still, yet calm, tension.

So in a place of what you wrote about as between-ness?

Exactly. One resides in the gap of everything and nothing, walks without walking, and moves while in stillness. One knows when it is time for action, and when it is time to stop.

*

"The only way to deal with an unfree world

 is to become so absolutely free

that your very existence is an act of rebellion." (E 7)

- Albert Camus

The majority of people think this is a beautiful reality, or at least could be with just a few changes. Young children are conditioned to think that they should be grateful to their Creator for such a wonderful place for them to live.  The masses ignore that this world is insane and generating suffering for everything within it on a staggering level. The last few years since 2020 should have revealed that. The majority are in denial about all of this because of worldly pushed beliefs like; God is love, or Earth is a school of learning. These ideas seem to override any examination of how things really are. Others might admit that while there is much suffering in the current reality, God will soon restore the paradise, and all we have to do is help him by being more loving. The Golden Age is coming they might say, or soon we will ascend to the greater world, but in each of these ideas are hoped for happy places in the future, not the examination of things as they are now. Examining the influence and manifestations of demonic beings (archons) tend not to be on most people's spiritual to-do list.

When someone has come to see that the world is insane (not loving), rather than re-examining the core belief (God is Love), a new belief is created that God needs our help to fix it (and themselves) back to the original perfection. What can be called self-help and the New Age Movement are ideas promising to find ways to fix things to make everything happy and wonderful. Few seem to consider that for all the billions of people who have tried to fix reality, and the perhaps trillions of prayers throughout history sent to God, reality never gets fixed. As time goes on, the world only seems to get worse.

Things start to make sense when this reality is realized to be constructed from the start to be insane, to create the maximum amount of distortion, misdirection, and suffering, all the while packaged in a beautiful presentation. Yes, this realm contains beauty and joy. This too is part of the grand deception. Love and hate will trap you equally. What is beyond both?

"As long as you think there's a solution,

you're part of the problem." (E 8)

- George Carlin

A key understanding moving forward with this book is that this world will never get any better or improve. I will repeat that. This is a world of suffering that will never get any better or improve. The belief the realm will improve is one of its greatest tricks. If what I present about this world is true, then would not reality be doing exactly what it was designed to do? Moreover, that any attempt to fix it would be futile? Like trying to force a video game about cars to become a video game about golf. It is just not designed to be something different.

Granted, at the core of what we are there is a tremendous power, a power greater than the Matrix. If accessed, this power that can generate some major transformations, miracles even. However, if that power is projected outward to fix the Matrix to what we want it to be, the energy becomes dispersed and lost. There seems to be great change possible when one stops projecting energy out to fix or save the world, turning it instead back towards oneself, which can then lead to transformation (for oneself, a small group of people, or a local environment). It is the small transformations that have great value. Thus you save the world by saving yourself. I repeat: you save the world by saving your Self.

When West Virginia teacher Richard Rose (E 9) was asked at a lecture in the 1970s why he was not out helping people or saving the world, he replied coldly, There is no world, there are no people. You have to come to see that. Then he went on to take the next question, while the previous questioner sat in stunned silence for the rest of the talk. (E 10) That of course does not mean that even though Rose saw through the falseness of this realm and the people in it that he was not being helpful. Perhaps he just set his bar to the correct limit for his energy not to be wasted. He provided help, but only where it could really be of use. He also clearly stated that if one did gain the power to move mountains, you would leave them where they currently are, because they are exactly where they are supposed to be.

*

"Do not seek the footsteps of the wise,

seek what they sought." (E 11)

- Matsuo Basho

A few days ago, I did a bit of an Internet search to see what results I would get on the topic of Exiting the Matrix. I was not surprised to see that all of the results were related to living differently in the material world, things such as: being more in tune with nature, getting rid of your TV and smartphone, having less fear, or perhaps fixing the government or financial system. Many of the results also related ideas such as: raising your vibration, loving more, being your best, and taking authority over your actions. Always something related to how the human form can become more comfortable in the material world, or that if a worldly problem gets fixed, everyone could live happily ever after. The catch is that these suggestions all focus on the idea of what's in it for me?

Seeing beyond these hopes was clearly written many years ago by Gary Harmon's lecture notes from a visit to Rose, "If you accept that all is an illusion without including yourself in that illusion, you have made the classic spiritual mistake. (E 12) It took the fall in the canyon for me to see through this error. The realization was that the physical-mental thing that I always thought I was is as false as all the rest of reality. However, the canyon experience revealed something that was much more real than I ever thought, And that Realness is what I had always been. It was just that the Howdie thing got in my way and got me to forget" what I really was.

Standard reality is a deception played on the Ultimate Viewer to believe that it is what it perceives. The trap ends when one sees that what they are is No-thing. Since only some-thing can be trapped or contained, this realization begins to unravel the Matrix. Yet this No-thing is not nothing. That error has been made by many nihilists over the years. No-thing and some-thing are opposite sides of the same coin. One cannot understand this using the normal mind, only from a realization from beyond the regular mind. An important point I can make in this first chapter, as presented by my friend Norio Kushi is: "Only that which is Real and True can Exit the Matrix, all that is false never leaves it." False is changing while the Real is still. Thus we seek out that which is unchanging and not able to be trapped.

Many have the hope that Exiting the Matrix will mean the end of their suffering. However, Exiting has nothing to do with the material you. The body-mind thing that you know is not asleep, it is a projection from a much deeper reality. It is this deeper reality, what Gnostics called a Divine Spark, which has been put in a coma and needs to awaken.  Joe or Martina are characters in a stage play, actors in a movie and do not awaken. There is something that is behind them, and Awareness, which you might say borrows the actor. That is what needs to wake up.

In the movie The Matrix, Neo Anderson played by Keanu Reeves, is not asleep. Neo is a projection of the more real Neo, the one in the pod bubble. The movie is symbolizing awakening when the Neo in the bubble breaks all of the wires and cables that have him attached to and projecting the simulation. Ok, actually that is not awakening either; because the Neo in the bubble was also tricked (he never tested his new reality to see if the world of the hovercraft was as fake as the previous one). (E 13) Nevertheless you get the general idea.

There are many layers of deception in this reality, much like the Russian Nesting Dolls (one doll, inside another doll, inside of another doll). Every time you think you have figured something out, you open that layer only to find another layer/doll within. This is symbolized in Zen by the metaphor of the world being described as a turtle on the back of another turtle, and so on to infinity. To reach an Ultimate Answer, one has to work backwards through every one of these layered dolls/turtles. Seeing through any layer is important, but unless one sees that they must eventually move past their current layer of study, they will become stuck there. This goes for any layer, no matter how important we think that it is. There is another Nesting Doll waiting for examination.

To work on this pathway one must fully define the Self (that which actually perceives), and you cannot do that after death in the astral realm. You have to do it now. As Christ responded, The dead know nothing, (E 14) or we could say they know no more there than they do here. The Near Death Experience is a trick presented by the archons to get people to believe that they can do all of their work after they die. The power to see through all the distortions is available now, not after one's death.

In my books and talks I have presented this world as a type of simulation. I want to suggest that it is not the correct word to give an idea as to what this Matrix is. A simulation is defined from Webster as, the imitative representation of the functioning of one system or process, or models to test problems and possible results, or the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. And while our world can seem like it is one giant experiment, and might be, the word simulation can be a bit confining for one's examination of reality. A better word is simulacra, which can be defined as copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original. (E 15) This word is similar to how ancient texts refer to this realm, often as a copy, or mirror of a world beyond this one. What is interesting is that the definition suggests that there can be many simulacras in operation, and that it is possible that the original may no longer exist. To make a photo copy of a document is simply a copy of the original. To make the copy, but then destroy the original, would in fact make the copy the original. Thus this reality can be described as something that looks like a simulation, but may have no real function from the standpoint of learning or testing anything perhaps only exists as an inverted and distorted copy that is running perhaps only for the purpose of  continuing to run.

We do have to pay attention to this physical reality, as it is providing clues as to who the projector is of this realm. One should not ignore their physical form, instead following an idea in which Richard Rose termed getting your house in order (which I will get to in an upcoming chapter). There is also value in what I may refer to as Schopenhauer ideology, gaining an empathy for the suffering of others and finding ways to reduce that suffering (be they persons, animals, plants, or yourself). Yet these ideas of maintaining order and reducing suffering have nothing to do with Exiting the Matrix/Cave. These are the foundational starting points for the long journey to define Self.

*

As for what exactly is trapped, one of the earliest terms for this True part of us was found in certain Gnostic gospels (such as the Apocryphon of John and Gospel of Judas) which described people as having the goddess Sophia (wisdom) within. Over time, Sophia came to be known by the term Divine Spark. (E 16) It indicates that from the start, the Gnostics symbolized the Spark in feminine terms.

The words used to make up the term Divine Spark provide some indications of what this True component may be. Divine has three definitions which indicate either of or like God, very pleasing and delightful, or to prophesize. Combing them it could be described as an all-wise stillness. Spark tends to be defined as that which can start a fire, or a small flash of light. The Spark reference is meant to infer Fire. It is my opinion that it was not several individual Divine Sparks that entered from the Pleroma (original Totality outside of the Matrix), but was a single Divine Fire. That original Fire is what, after being deceived, became fragmented into many Divine Sparks. Each Spark gained its own individualized presence and awareness.

This is the first great seeing. There are only two things within the Matrix, one is True (a fire not from the Matrix); the other is false (water, which is the reflective projection of the entire Matrix and everything within it). This leads to there being two different types of oneness, which I will present in chapter 7. This is the reason that the Cathars claimed that John could not be a legitimate baptizer, as he did so with water. Only Christ could be legitimate because he baptized with fire. A water baptism focuses on reincarnation back into the Matrix, symbolized by the metaphor of the drop of water returning to the ocean. This water idea is also referenced in the myth of Narcissus, who becomes trapped by looking at his own reflection in the water. Water is a symbol for the cycle of reincarnation, and the image he falls in love with (himself) is a metaphor of how we project out a false reality and then become mesmerized by the hologram we create. In other words, the human form we observe in a mirror and on top of still water are tricks to get us to believe that the projection is what we are. (E 17) Once fragmented from the Fire, each of these Sparks was tricked to project the astral and material experience of the Matrix. It is the Creator of the Matrix that these water metaphors in early creation myths are pointing towards.

The Divine Fire links outside to the Pleroma, thus a baptism of fire would be the method of return of the individual Spark to the greater Fire. Water soothes and comforts, fire burns. Water is the comfort all seek, fire is the Truth that few do. Information of the Divine Spark found its way into many ancient myths such as Prometheus, fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty (especially the old Norse tale of Sigrdrifumal), and even with the idea referred to as the Holy Grail.  When the realization that the Spark is Sleeping Beauty, and we (as a form) must become like the prince of the story and awaken her, which is what spiritual work is attempting to do.

The metaphor of a Spark also indicates light. This is another misconception that has been transferred over to the spiritual path. The Cathars claimed that to end the reincarnation cycle, one had to generate a body of light. This is taken to mean that someone has to become holy and perfect so that they will shine beauty to the world. A number of gurus have learned this trick and made millions from it by claiming this radiance is enlightenment. However, there is far more meaning to the word enlightenment, which to me relates to the connection of the Spark back to the Divine Fire. It has nothing to do with being holy but of being whole-y.

Those I know who have experienced a connection with their Divine Spark refer to the experience as a heat within their chest that creates no sweating. And the heat is safe, calming and clear. They knew it was the more real deeper them, as opposed to what they had thought themselves to be previously. That warmth is the first sign the coma is being broken. This is not the same as a kundalini release, which can share certain similarities, but will often feel much more intense. Kundalini is another link to the Matrix, and thus mimics the feeling of connecting with the Spark. The Spark is not intense, overwhelming or linked to any new powers, but is a warm, clear, knowing of what we have always been. Some might ask if this is similar to the feeling of opening the heart. The answer is yes. There is a connection between the two. What is called an open heart, tends to be felt as a warmth in the chest, but this warmth tends to be directed outwards towards the world of objects (or to a deity). (E 18) With an open heart if one would just turn their attention of Awareness back upon themselves, they would see their True Self, which is a pathway towards the Divine Spark. Yet the outer world of objects and experiences and wishes are very tantalizing and it takes great work to make that 180-degree turn to put the focus on Self and not out there.

*

Anders has been just somewhat casually looking out my window at the mountains across the fjord. The section on the Divine Spark has got to him somewhat, and he has been thinking it over. He turns to ask me clearly, So this Divine Spark. I don't think I have ever felt it. But others have?

Oh yes, about half of the people I was with on an intensive recently had an experience of it.

Is there something wrong with me because I have not felt it?

No. Only there must be certain walls that are up for you. The Matrix walls are not built to keep you in, but to keep the Divine Spark out. Or better said, keep Sleeping Beauty asleep. When the interior belief walls go down, it happens. Simple as that. The work is to remove the walls, not find the Spark. The walls have to open for that to occur.

Anders takes a moment contemplating the depth that I revealed in the previous paragraphs. As for the water reference that you make. What is wrong with water?

Nothing is wrong with water. I like water. It is good to swim in, to drink, to wash with, to sit beside. I enjoy streams and lakes and rivers and oceans and even swimming pools. Normally water in myths and tales tends to be claimed to symbolize ideas such as meditation, reflective thought, even femininity. Yet, there seems to be another symbolic message that appears in certain older myths water is used as a different symbol. In those since water is reflective (thus a projection screen) it can be used as a symbol for the projected Matrix. Fire however, seems to just appear from nothing. Water is always here, but fire has to be ignited. There is a bunch of twigs and then a spark from somewhere ignites the twigs, and the fire appears.

What of Christian baptism?

"The Western Christian culture has taken the baptism of water to be the key to just about