Tag: spirituality

This Matter of Life and Death

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My fascination with near-death experiences stems from the insights they provide into the nature of the soul. Although these reports are primarily anecdotal, they reveal common themes. Two strikingly consistent themes that emerge are the advanced and immortal nature of the soul. It’s the closest we can come to eyewitness accounts of what it means to be a spiritual being.

Physical trauma, surgical complications, disease, and suicide are among the commonest causes of death. Of these, suicide is perhaps the most controversial. Some religions consider it a sin. However, those who survive it and return with a near-death experience, tell a different story. They’re not judged for their action. They are greeted with the same unconditional love all report. And, they are sent back, or choose to come back, to complete their reason for incarnating in the first place.

The impression we are given is that those who do not come back continue their journey in absolute love. Those who do come back are adamant in saying that suicide is not a viable option. Many will actually go into suicide counseling to help others consider alternatives.

Though life can be a struggle, those who have faced death, accompanied by an NDE, often experience a childlike rebirth. They gain a new perspective, shedding many of their self-imposed limitations. Most find a renewed zest for life. Nearly all lose their fear of death, which in turn, eliminates their fear of life itself.

In her New Thought classic, The Game of Life and How To Play It, Florence Scovel Shinn points out that life is not a battle of us against the world, but rather a game of giving and receiving. What we give to the world we receive back―whether that be the dark weight of fear and inhibition or the freedom of joy and empowerment.

This segment of our life that we are living now is our opportunity to discover how to do it well. If we have descended into a rut of the mundane, it may be time to give to the world a new message. It may be that our purpose for incarnating was to prove to ourselves that we could do it successfully. The good news is that the only time we can deal with this matter of life and death, is in each moment. Do that one right, and you’ve got it!

Your Intuitive Compass

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Have you ever said, “I should have listened to myself?” You were faced with a decision. Everything seemed fine, but a nagging feeling lingered that something wasn’t quite right. You pushed the feeling aside, dismissing it as needless worry only to regret it later.

You have also had the opposite experience of saying, “I’m glad I listened to myself!” Again, faced with a decision, others said one thing, but you felt another, and you listened to yourself.

We all grapple with the conflict between head and heart, or, spiritually speaking, intellect and intuition. In her book, Lessons in Truth, Emilie Cady writes, “Intuition and intellect are meant to travel together, intuition always holding the reins to guide intellect.” We are culturally programed to do just the opposite. Facts, not feelings, should be our guiding criteria.

And yet, we want to distinguish between intuition and feelings, especially emotion. We’re familiar with the phrase, blinded by love. We can relate to the disillusioned bride who says of her ex, “I took him for better or for worse, but he was a lot worse than I took him for.”

At its deepest level, intuition is the still small voice of the soul. It’s that inner awareness that understands we desire more because we are more. No decision, however regrettable, will diminish our soul. This understanding empowers us to live free of the fear of making wrong choices. After all, feelings of hesitation can just as easily be driven by the need to protect a weakness rather than evolve a strength.

We come to a fork in the road. We want what is best for ourselves and others. Do we turn right, or do we turn left? First, we affirm that either way will reveal something important to us. If we are protecting some weakness, we will discover it, and if we’re ready, we can correct it. If we are evolving a strength, we will know that as well. The intellect says we must always make the right choice. The intuition, holding the reins to guide the intellect, reminds us that even a wrong choice can lead to deeper understanding.     

Embracing the Divine Masculine

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For Mother’s Day we focused on the Divine Feminine, so it is good that we consider the Divine Masculine this Father’s Day.

As a reminder, with masculine and feminine references to spiritual concepts, we’re not talking about gender. We’re talking about the functions of mind. We associate the intuition with the feminine and the intellect with the masculine aspects of our being. I think of our intuition as the inlet to God and the intellect as the outlet. It is our primary interactive faculty with the material realm.

It’s probably fair to say that most people spend the lion’s share of their time engaged in intellectual activities. By this I don’t mean we’re drawn to doing crossword puzzles or spending our time working out math problems. I mean we devote a great deal of our attention to the world of the senses. When Emilie Cady said the intellect and intuition are meant to travel together, but with the intuition leading the way, she was reminding her reader of the importance of remembering our larger connection with God.

Imagine standing in the open, front door of your home. You are facing inside the house where you live. To your back, a vast world opens up. If you spend all your time inside the house, your life will get smaller and smaller. Your view of the world is that which you see through the windows. It’s important to get outside and retain your connection to the larger world. Doing so inspires new ideas and a greater appreciation for your home.

The intellect allows us to translate spiritual inspiration into books, music, cinema, art, acts of love, and reminders to others that we’re thinking of them. It is our ability to give form to intuitive feelings that have no form and would not otherwise be conveyed. For me, writing on spiritual subjects is a therapeutic exercise of capturing, as in a literary photograph, insights that I can hang on the walls of my house; reminders that on the other side of that front door there is a very large world.

The intellect without the intuition can become a house with the drapes drawn and the doors shut. The intellect can also throw open the doors and pull back the curtains to let in that intuitive light of God ready to illuminate our world.

The Spirit-Soul Connection

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Spirit and soul are words we use to describe spiritual abstractions. Both are very real, but we do not experience them through the five senses. We know them intuitively. Jesus defined God as spirit, comparing it to the wind whose effects we see, while the wind itself is invisible. He said we must worship God in spirit, which I understand as the meditative practice of stilling the intellect and opening intuitively to our spiritual source.

Spirit is universal life, love, power, and intelligence. Soul is an individualization of this universal energy, but capable of interfacing with the material world. Our consciousness is the idea-forming mechanism that enables us to interact with the world. The body, existing within time and space, is the center of most people’s identity. Our spiritual essence, our soul, is not bound or defined by time and space, but our consciousness is. When a person momentarily steps from their body, as in a near-death experience, they instantly rise out of the body-based consciousness and experience the vastness of their soul and their oneness with universal Spirit.

A metaphor I find helpful is that of the sponge in the ocean. Think of the ocean water within the sponge as the soul of the sponge. When the sponge refers to itself as “I”, it is referring to this volume of water rather than the physical sponge. Imagine squeezing out the water and tossing the sponge onto the beach. The water you squeezed out remains in the ocean and keeps its individual identity. But now it lacks a body. It is a point of consciousness fully aware of itself and its oneness with the sustaining source, the ocean. If it wishes to be seen and felt in the visible world, it must take on another sponge body.

The “I” that we are is not the body. We have a body. If we were to step out of the body, we would continue to use this personal pronoun. Describing our experience to another, we would say, “I went through a tunnel.” “I communicated with deceased relatives.” “I found myself in the middle of a beautiful meadow.” This “I” is the soul. The all-sustaining life force in which we live is Spirit, Source, God, or whatever name we wish to give it.

Embracing the Divine Feminine

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Much of our thinking about God is influenced by the masculine, Judeo-Christian image. Attempts are made to counter this with the notion of God as Father/Mother. While this is an appropriate exercise in stretching our thinking, we do best to think of God as one power expressing as masculine and feminine energies. We might think of it as a magnet. Two poles, one negative and one positive, make the magnet what it is.

When we think of our own mind, we understand we have intellectual and intuitive faculties. The intellect is the fact-processing aspect that helps us do our shopping and balance our checkbook. We use it to navigate the world of external appearances. The intuitive side opens to our spiritual source. The practice of meditation is the releasing of the dominating intellect and opening to intuitively received spiritual impulses.

If you observe the workings of your own mind, you will notice how the intellect keeps an audio/video program running all the time. We’re thinking about the past, anticipating the future, making shopping choices, wondering how long we’ll have to wait in line at the grocery store, or trying to remember where we laid our car keys. To embrace the divine feminine is to bring this mental movie to a halt and settle into a receptive state of being. We turn from external concerns, and we open to the subtle energy of spirit that is the living source of our being. Our habit of chasing the intellectual movie lines makes being still and listening a challenge. With practice, however, we can learn to relax and pick up on intuitive promptings that will surely come.

What is the value of doing this? It lifts us out of the incessant chatter of the surface mind and reveals a much broader state of being. The broader our horizons, the more relaxed and creative we become. We’re more receptive to the presence of God as our guiding, healing, prospering source.

Embracing your divine feminine is opening yourself to the wholeness that you are. Bless the wonderful tool that is the masculine intellect and give thanks for the broader vision that is made known by embracing the divine feminine that is your intuitive side.  

From Belief to Knowing

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Imagine a bowl of water on the table. Your friend tells you the water is ice cold, and you believe it. Then, you decide to check it for yourself. You put your hand in the water and discover it is very warm. With this simple illustration, you have transitioned from belief to knowing.

When we read the statement of faith of any religious organization, we are reading a list of beliefs that have been worked out by the forefathers. The Apostle’s Creed, for example, starts with, “I believe …” and it lists a series of statements the believer is expected to accept as true. What happens when a person decides to question these beliefs and actually put their hand in the water? They will, in that instant, begin rewriting their own statement, shifting from I believe to I know.

Evelyn Underhill, in her classic work, Mysticism, highlights the mystic’s defining characteristic as experiencing “… a conscious relation with the Absolute.” They do not merely believe in God; they put their hand in the water. They know God as a living presence.

In many cases, such people find themselves at odds with religious powers. Madame Guyon, the very popular, seventh-century French mystic and writer, was for seven years imprisoned by the Church for her experiential approach to God. Read her book, A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, and you will think it rolled off the Unity press.

Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic whose writings remain widely quoted by today’s New Thought community, was condemned as a heretic by the Church, and his writings banned. He and others like him dared to share not their beliefs, but their direct knowledge of the nature of God.

We’re also told that Jesus “… taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Matthew 7:29). He had the nerve to put his hand in the bowl of water.  

Because most of us were introduced to spiritual matters through established belief systems, we may feel a little uncomfortable putting our own hand in the bowl. We may feel even more uncomfortable saying what we’ve discovered. But if our spiritual journey is to mean anything, then we must be willing to transition from belief to knowing.

Exploring the Mystery of Spiritual Rebirth

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Using a term like rebirth, we may be tempted to think of reincarnation. Reincarnation is the same soul being born into a new body. Rebirth is the same soul awakening to a deeper experience within the same body. We see Spring rebirth in a tree that went dormant for the winter. It’s the same tree with new life.

While I believe reincarnation has a place, the thing we are most interested in is spiritual rebirth. Like the tree, we want to learn how to experience a current situation in a new way. This, I think, was the essence of Jesus’ ministry. He was trying to help people cope with the challenges of daily living by teaching them to experience them from a higher perspective.

We’ve all been in situations that we did not like because we felt negative, like they would never end. Then, the time came when we could see light at the end of the tunnel. At that moment, the challenge did not seem so big, and we may have even wondered why we made such a mountain of it.

The human experience itself can sometimes feel like an insurmountable burden. But what if we suddenly realized our time here is really just a flash in the pan? What if we knew this was but one of our many incarnations? This flash of insight is a kind of spiritual rebirth. It is a glimpse into a larger context that puts our present experience in a healthier place. Such insight is empowering, a great source for a second wind.  

Spiritual rebirth is not about changing the world; it’s about changing the way we experience the world. Affirming our true, limitless spiritual nature lifts our vision to broader vistas. Just as the countless challenges we have encountered in the past have faded from our memory, so that challenge that plagues us today will be as nothing tomorrow. We do not ignore that which is ours to do, but we do it from the strength of knowing this too shall pass. Spiritual rebirth occurs the moment we open our eyes to the truth of who and what we are as spiritual beings.

The Map Is Not The Territory

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Think of a religious symbol as part of a map used to help you navigate through life.

A few weeks ago, I told of how Myrtle Fillmore imagined Jesus in an empty chair offering her guidance through her healing journey. It did not matter that this Jesus was imaginary. To her, he represented a focal point for healing energy that proved to be helpful to her.

Any critical thinker would recognize this Jesus as a figment of her imagination. To simply pass it off as an irrelevant fantasy, however, would be to ignore the millions of people who found inspiration and guidance in Myrtle’s visualizing technique and healing.

Google Maps has opened a new understanding of this realization by providing us with a two-dimensional map and an accompanying three-dimensional street view. We can zoom in and instantly see the difference between the map and the territory.  

What has become clear to me is that it was not my study of the teachings of Jesus that led to a mystical experience. Like most people, I began with the map of Christian doctrine that I was taught was synonymous with the territory. It was an actual mystical experience that led to my understanding of Jesus as a mystic. The experience, not the symbolism, is the territory.

In my own spiritual quest, I have utilized five different maps. The first is 1) mainstream Christianity, the second is 2) metaphysical Christianity, the third is 3) Christian mysticism, the fourth is 4) critical scholarship, the fifth is 5) near-death research. I put them in present tense because they all continue to play a role in my study.

I have drawn important insights from each of these “maps” knowing that beneath each one is the “territory” of experience that is most meaningful. In our continued quest for spiritual understanding, we’ll each have our different maps, but we should always keep in mind, the map is not the territory.

The Perfection Trap

YouTube: The Perfection Trap: Five Ways to Get Out

When Jesus said we should be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect, we may think he was setting a pretty high bar. Sometimes just being good is a tough job. Being perfect? Living through one day without making a single mistake may be asking a bit much.

While we should all strive to be the best we can be, there are some areas where we strive for perfection, at least conceptually, that we would do well to revisit. I’ve listed five.

1. Spiritual Perfection: The trap is the belief that we are supposed to reach a place where no more growth is possible, we’re at the top. We do not reach spiritual perfection; we realize that we are already spiritually perfect.

2. Earth is a school: This is a common model held by many. The trap here is the possibility of feeling like you are perpetually stuck in the fifth grade. The way to avoid this trap is to release this model.

3. The condition of your body reflects the condition of your soul. The trap is believing that if your body is aging or ill, your soul is flunking its tests.

4. Your thinking can impact the health of your soul. The trap is the belief that your thinking is powerful enough to alter the nature of your soul. Thinking affects the quality of your experience, but it has no impact whatsoever on the makeup of your soul.

5. Your spiritual imperfection interferes with your relationship to God. The trap is the belief that God responds to your states of consciousness like a human being would. Nothing you think, say, or do can change your relationship of oneness with God.

These, of course, are not hard and fast rules, but it never hurts to take a fresh look at the basic ideas that guide our spiritual thinking. We may have latched onto ideas that made sense in our early, exploratory years, but no longer do. Earth as a school was a big one for me. Laboratory might be a more stimulating metaphor. The point is, we want to make the most of our life in the body. Finding ways to free ourselves from false or limiting beliefs will go a long way in this direction.

The Gift of Life

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The energy that we call life is a mystery. When materially based science attempts to trace life to its origins, they look to the fossil record. The earliest life forms were apparently single celled creatures that inhabited the oceans. Through billions of years, more complex forms developed. What is not known is how the energy of life began animating these biological forms. Science says, it just happened.

However things started, this living energy is, as John says, the light of each one of us. I believe this life that is our essence predates all organisms, that it has no beginning and no end. As I think about this, I’m struck with a sense of awe that this eternal gift is given to me, as me, the same realization Jesus may have had when he said, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).

When we describe a person as being full of life, we are usually referring to their enthusiasm for living. If we feel a lack of enthusiasm, it may be good to contemplate this ageless energy that we are. It’s easy to bottle it up in restricting perceptions, affirmations of being too old and too tired. The life that we are does not age and it does not wear out. Yes, the organism does both of these things, but we are not the organism. Before Abraham was, we were too. That thought alone is energizing.

If this sounds farfetched, consider that science tells us our body is about 60% water, and that water is one of the oldest substances on earth. So, 60% of the physical body could actually be billions of years old. Can we not imagine our life energy having even more resilience than water?

Though this kind of thinking can be fun, we really don’t need to get this exotic to recognize and affirm the creative life force of God enlivens our mind, energizes our body, and constantly creates new opportunities for greater expression through every facet of our existence. The gift of life will never wane. It is as alive now as ever. God is life and you and I are expressions of God. Keep this thought on the front burner of your thinking and watch it stir up creatively new possibilities.