The Merkaba is the term Drunvalo Melchizedek uses to describe a 20-foot disk-shaped personal energy field that can be created by following the meditation instructions found in his book, Flower of Life Volume II.

According to Drunvalo, these instructions were revealed to him by a series of angels- translucent beings who communicated with him verbally and through pure thought, and held classes with him, challenging him to figure out certain aspects of their teachings by himself, many of them involving 3D versions of what are known as platonic solids.

This means the Merkaba isn't inherently angelic- it's just your own energy field, trained to charge itself according to a specific and clear set of instructions. It's your energy, shaped by thought, just like any other regularly practiced visualization. It's not some kind of initiation by a force outside of you- it's you, transmuted by knowledge and practice, just like with any other spiritual practice you could be using for your development.

However, Drunvalo's descriptions make it very credible, from my viewpoint, that they were directly taught to Drunvalo by highly evolved benevolent nonphysical entities, which he calls angels, just like he says they are. Therefore, the "angelic origin" of the teachings can give you a good idea of the effects the teachings may have on you.

And that's exactly how it was for me- practicing the teachings and generating my merkaba made me feel wonderfully light-hearted and strongly present. They also had some rather nasty side effects that, to the defense of the material, are perfectly normal when you rapidly charge your energy field to a previously unknown height of frequency: I got issues. Or, more precisely, my issues came to the surface rapidly causing a curious mixture of otherwordly elation and very egotistical and authoritarian nasty moods. Perhaps this state of consciousness sounds familiar to those who have some experience with most angelic teachings or seminars, or were hanging around esoteric shops a lot for a while. It's really, really wonderful- but also somehow too otherwordly to be all that practical- in my personal experience. I am guessing the angels think that all they need to do to give us a hand is raise our energy, and everything will be fine- presumably because they are very friendly but also a little bit too far off the human experience to read the fine print. In other words, yes, their teachings absolutely raise energy- but they give no tools to deal with the consequences of that energy rise.

I have abandoned practicing the Drunvalo teachings in favor of Huna, a traditional earthbound set of teachings, that keeps intact and parallels that basic overall structure of Drunvalo's angelic meditation instruction, but also contains a huge amount of common sense tools in order to deal with everyday life on earth. Also, Drunvalo's stuff is extremely fine tuned- all the way down to specific counts of breaths- and is geared at a rather rubbery goal of "surviving the three nights of darkness within earth's rise into the fifth dimension"- which I fully believe has happened just as prescribed- however I haven't the faintest what it actually means or when it occurred. This was a prophecy for the 2012 events, and there were no visible 3 nights of darkness, and I wasn't wearing my Merkaba, yet here I am. So the whole apocalyptic aspects of the teachings are completely lost on me, and seem to be stretching the boundaries of there relevance to us everyday humans quite a bit. I'd rather know more about how to eat pizza and stay lean, thank you very much, because the dang universe is going to keep evolving no matter what I do, so it's just none of my business, and I've got enough highly enjoyable spiritual life distractions on YouTube as it is.

I don't mean to know the teachings at all- I believe they are good, sincere, and of the highest quality- but they may or may not align with your own personal goals, and they certainly do not advocate any kind of individualism in goals- they just tell you to do the meditation in order to ascend and that's that.

Here is a small table of Drunvalo's teachings and the equivalent Huna concept. The main difference is that the former is extremely specific (and brittle) in how to do them, and geared at the fixed goal of ascention, while the latter are very simple, leave it to you to fill out the details, and especially leave it to you to mess around with energy until you get an idea what your own purpose in life might be, no hand-holding included.

Mer-Ka-Ba teaching: Visualize an upwards tetrahedron while inhaling, a downwards one while exhaling, and let the base of the downwards one pull all your negative energy into the earth center between breaths. Repeat six times for six different hand positions.

Equivalent huna teaching: Visualize a large black-colored energy field that hovers over you and forcefully attracts and absorbs all negative energy.

Mer-Ka-Ba teaching: Visualize energy coming upwards from the point of the lower tetrahedron and downwards from the point of the upper, meeting at the navel, and merging to a ball of light, which gets larger inhaling and brighter exhaling within 6 breaths, and turns yellow at the second.

Equivalent huna teaching: Surround yourself with light. Imagine light from the stars, from earth, from all the plants in the world, from the zero point field, or whatever represents unlimited power to you, surrounding, interpenetrating, flowing through you, raining down on you as droplets, soaking you, shining on you as light, in any color that represents the effect you want to you, for any length of time that is appropriate to the situation at hand, with our without deep breathing. One common way is to have energy from the stars and the center of the earth meet at the navel and expand while inhaling and intensify while exhaling. It's common- but whatever works whill do.

Mer-Ka-Ba teaching: Drag the meeting point for the ball of light upwards towards the chest.

Equivalent huna teaching: Discouraged- huna recommends to keep the center at the navel and that's that, lest an overreliance on emotion degenerate into sentimentality and diminish effectiveness. In a way, this may be about keeping the energy just low enough as to remain functional in the world, in order to avoid disconnect too much from common human experience and losing the ability to deal with it property. My experience exactly.

Mer-Ka-Ba teaching: Breathe out forcefully, and explode the ball of light outwardly.

Equivalent huna teaching: Use any supporting physical gesture and impressive looking energy fireworks to increase energy.

Mer-Ka-Ba teaching: Spin an emotional and mental set of double tetrahedrons into opposing directions- 1/3 of light speed, to be precise, while doing the forceful breath. Repeat 3 times up to 90% light speed. At the third time, imagine the 21 foot energy disk bursting outwards. Pronto! Mer-Ka-Ba.

Equivalent huna teaching: Imagine anything specific, dynamic and impressive to increase energy flow- for example all the energy of the stars beaming down on you, yourself zipping around in a container of light, or simply imagine a large energetic donut that is filled with positive energy, moving in whatever way that energy most would like to and is best for you, purely on inspiration.

I hope I was able to show the difference- and I am assuming many other law of attraction teachings like Seth and Abe and Bashar are also more along the lines of Huna than of the angelic ones, because we just don't care so much about the specifics, or in getting all the details right- we just practice them at a simple, dumb level that is easy to do and is plenty good enough for where we are- instead of making a hypercharge attempt at something that we won't be able to follow through with anyway for lack of worldly goals and worldly perfection.

I hope I was able to shed some light with this highly personal, opinionated interpretation of my experiences with both angelic and more wordly energetic schools of thought.