Rachel and Robert Olds spiritual Journey
Rachel and I each became aware of our spiritual lives at a very early age. Before we met later in life, we both followed our Hearts as Artists expressing and practicing Earth Spirituality and Eastern meditation. In 1987, Rachel and I found each other. We realized a powerful connection beyond time. We became a union of two solitudes focusing on Earth's Spirituality and meditation beyond elaborations.
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In 1989, we bought land on the High Prairie of New Mexico and built an adobe house. Our nearest neighbor was 10 miles away. We lived and practiced in a vast expanse with the Earth, plants, reptiles, and animals. We learned and practiced Earth Survival skills. In 1992, we sold our precious home and went on the road studying with Tom Brown and practicing in wilderness areas across the USA. In the winter of 1996, we found references to Dzogchen and Thogal practice, which led us to retreat in 1997 in the mountains of Northern California along the Trinity River.
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We spent nine years in retreat together in the mountains of northern California. For the first five and a half of those years we lived in a simple pit dwelling, which we built in the forest above a Tibetan Buddhist lay monastery. We had no electricity, no running water. Even after moving to a one-room cabin close by later in our retreat, hauling water and hiking steep forest trails continued to shape our lives and our practice. In this context, we received Dzogchen teachings as conveyed through the Tigle Gyachan, Longchen Nyingtik and the Chetzun Nyingtik, Vimilamitra Lineage of Jamyang Khyenste Wangpo and put them into practice.
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Once the visions of Thogal begin to truly mature, the visions themselves become your teacher through direct experience beyond words and doctrine. In January 2000, we received the Thogal teachings and began gazing. We found that we had already stable group of tigles with strands hovering nearby. By the summer of 2001 we were both in the First Vision, The Direct Perception of the Nature of Phenomena. In the proceeding years of our retreat, the visions grew and developed through the Second Vision, The Increase and the Third Vision, The Effulgence experiencing all the Signs and Landmarks for each vision. Early in 2005, the lines of light arose out of the Buddha fields to our Hearts and the Fourth Vision of the Resolution occurred in March of 2005. All phenomena are essentially a mist in the noon day sun yet we experience the world as solid and real. All phenomena is made of Light and you experience this at the end of the third thru the very early part of the Fourth Vision where everything resolves to Primordial Purity or Essence. You return with an experience of Wholeness, a Oneness beyond all the concepts surrounding the word but with a Purpose. Rachel and I both returned from the Fourth Vision with a Purpose to write and clarify the teachings at this time of the 6th Extinction.
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The process through which Thogal transforms your very being is extraordinarily visual, and the visual elements unfold in the way that is beautiful and specific. We are both artists. We had given up our careers before we came to our retreat but we brought to our practice years of experience in the visual arts and a deep appreciation for the nuances and expressive power of color, line, and shape as a language of the heart. We kept sketchbooks of the visions to share with each other some of the wonders of our experience of the luminous visions as they unfolded for us. We were able to sketch in pencil (marking the associated colors) only a small portion of a daily practice of Thogal. As the third Vision grew we found it impossible to reflect what we were experiencing, with only a fragment of the ‘gazing’ experience were sketched. We offered them in our book Luminous Heart of Inner Radiance because we feel there are aspects of the visions that are important and relevant to our times as the 6th extinction continues to grow.
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We came out of retreat in 2006 after completing the path of Thogal, and eventually found ourselves in a retreat of another kind in a remote area in the mountains of Costa Rica where we lived for two years before returning to the 21st century. The correspondence between the vision that is this life and the Thogal visions is particularly evident in the effulgent growth of the cloud forest highlands. Natural life reaches its most complex and thorough expression in the tropical forests.
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Our experience of the living vibrancy of the essence manifesting before our eyes, the vision of this life unfolding moment by moment in the shapes and colors of the tropical forest compelled us to share our realization and drawings at this time when the Earth is in peril due to the increasing scope of human insanity endangering the whole of this wondrous vision of Life.
In 2014, we published our practice manual Primordial Grace and Rachel published Distance Becomes Sky, her channeled book for the future of Earth People.
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A month after publishing her book, Rachel passed on beyond this life. My Heart, my soulmate, left to continue teaching in a new life, one with the Peoples of Earth.
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Since Rachel’s passing, I have continued to follow my personal vision, promoting the essential teachings of Primordial Grace, writing poetry, and teaching. I have also been pursuing a place that I saw in my vision where Earth People may come alive again, practicing in solitude the primordial teachings of our Mother Earth and the Intent of Essence. This part of my vision is coming together on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia as the Earth Refuge.
In these troubled times, where the insanity of man is destroying our beloved Earth Mother, can you see yourself practicing and working to continue the ancients ways of our distant ancestors as a prayer for Earth People to once again live within a wholeness of life with our Mother Earth.
To know more about Rachel and Robert, you can also have a look on their other website : https://www.acircleisdrawn.org/