The Two Sides of Spirituality

In this podcast, I talk about two sides of spirituality, truth and love.  The truth side is knowledge beyond mind and one way of expressing this truth is that I accept everything as it is, as I perceive it, both the good and bad, light and dark.  The love side is that enlightenment is possible, my essence is pure love, and I live my life in pursuit of an ideal.  A miracle occurs when we allow these seemingly paradoxical sides to co-exist in our being.  I will further explore these two sides of spirituality as well as talk about how living this paradox shapes us on the spiritual path

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The Mystery of Religion, Part 1

"Love is perfect because it exists above duality."

This is definitely going to be a multi-part post, because this topic is fairly large and touches on many of the things that I have posted about previously.  In a way, I feel that my approach to the "mystery" that ties together various religions does also tie together many ideas I have put forth in my writings (although based off of and inspired by many spiritual teachers).  That is my draw to writing about spirituality in the first place; it is writing about the ideal.  We can never fully express an ideal, because it is ineffable.  But we can approach it from various angles.  Each approach offers a glimpse of the ideal for a brief moment.  And it is the assimilation of these glimpses that begins to paint a vignette of the ideal that helps solidify our faith.

I cannot help but notice that religions all can be expressed in terms of us being reunited with God or the Ideal.  The ideal is a state of perfection, that I simplify as a state of love.  However, the idea of God is esoteric at best and it is difficult for us to conceptualize this Deity.  We may lack the motivation for performing certain acts now for a future payoff.  All of these things: God, heaven and other spiritual concepts have a vaporous quality to them because it is difficult to imagine them (or how they apply) in the here and now.

With a slight tweak to religion, however, we can experience a paradigm shift where spiritual teachings take on a whole new meaning.  Since we are waves on the ocean of God, we are also a part of God.  I invite you to look at a return to God as a return to your whole Self.  Looked at in this context, things start to make more sense for me.  And this is not to devalue religion at all but simply to offer another view of it.

If pursuing God is also pursuing a whole, complete me, then what do I have to lose?  I am actually investing in myself through pursuing God as I am really pursuing my Self.  This also brings up a paradox, which I do believe is the unseen's main device for spiritual truth.  All of nature is an outward manifestation of our inward reality.  When spiritual teachers say "the kingdom of heaven is inside you", they really do mean that the entire cosmos is also in your Spirit.  Our human bodies are containers for a limitless space that exists within.  The physical world is a model of what lies within us.  So, yes, countless galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets and suns exist within us.  In fact, our soul spans infinite depths.

That is also why I believe that the entire spiritual world also exists within our Spirit.  God and the angels reside within us as well as demons.  However, this is to realize that angels and demons are not the same.  There is no opposite for God and no opposite for love and, therefor, no opposite for angels either.  Any dark force is actually tied to the temporal existence of this world and exists on a different, lower plane than ultimate truth and love, which is the highest plane.  This is also why, if you stay in the present moment and embody love, that we do not have to fear anything.  I have gone into this previously a bit but will touch on my belief that the shadow that exists in individual and collective unconscious is the psychological component of dark forces.

This next idea opens up pandora's box because it is paradoxical in its very nature, but, if we choose to look at things from one plane alone, that is the physical plane, religious ideas can be theorized about in the following manner.  This is also a nice exercise to do when you are reading any religious writing.  Read it from the perspective that God is your Higher Self.  In other words, God is a restored, whole You that lies within the perfection of love.  You see, love does not reside in the intellect where we can say this is wrong or this is right but is seated in the emotions and extends into the spiritual realm.   That is the perfection that we are talking about.  Love is perfect because it exists above duality.  Read anything that talks about dark forces or spirits from the perspective that these lie in your shadow.

If we continue with this idea, angels, then, also reside within you as different parts of your personality, different loving qualities that offer guidance to you.  This theory begins to break down a bit when we get to shared spiritual experiences, where spirits are manifest for many people.  I believe this is because the spirits come through our senses, in other words, manipulate our senses so that we can perceive them even in a group setting.  So, belief is absolutely necessary when talking about the spirit world.  If you do not believe, you block even your perception of such things.  The paradox of this is I do think there is some cross-over where physical reality is changed through a spiritual dimension but that does not change the core of this idea much.

There are many more implications of looking at spiritual matters through this lens, which is the physical manifestation of these realities through humans.  To summarize, there is much value in considering restoring our full humanity as achieving unity with God.  This makes spiritual matters practical.  This is not the only plane on which we can consider truth, but a valuable one and one that is often suppressed because it is considered "heretical" by some religions.

One Truth

There is but one truth in life. That we are all one. There is one reality, one consciousness and one breath that gives us all life. This force and power is the power of Love.

Many times I want to make spirituality complex and add theories and explanations of why such and such happens.  It really all comes down to one basic truth that I often lose sight of.  That is the truth that Love is all there is.

All of the world is made out of this Love-essence.  It is like we are fashioned out of clay and then spend our lives questioning "Does clay exist?"  There is but one truth in life. That we are all one. There is one reality, one consciousness and one breath that gives us all life. This force and power is the power of Love.

In addition to all being made out of the same building block, we also participate in a shared reality.  That is the reality that binds us all together.  And we have one consciousness yet think we are separate.  The same breath that gives me life, gives you life as well.

My ego thinks that if I admit I am but a wave on a vast sea of consciousness, that my ego will die.  The reality is that my ego will die after my physical incarnation anyways.  The bigger reality is that I am not my ego.  What I am is much bigger than my ego but a spirit, part of the Great Spirit.  This is why all religions speak of sacrifice; it is ego sacrifice that they always are referring to.  If I sacrifice my ego now, that is association with my physical incarnation, I have nothing to lose.

The beauty of living a life according to my spiritual nature is that true happiness emerges.  I am living my life by that one power, the power of Love.  I embody that power and allow it to work through me.  What enfolds are dreams greater than what I could have imagined with my ego-mind, as love manifests itself in my life in a concrete way.

Basic Spiritual Truths

"We are like actors and actresses at a dress rehearsal, trying on different costumes and playing different roles."

There are few truths in this life that we were meant to understand.  Yet, they are so beyond our understanding that they are stumbling blocks for us.  Many speak of these same truths in different ways.  It is when we fully understand them and start living them that our perspective changes.  That is when enlightenment begins.  For some, it may be a gradual process of awakening, yet, for others, it may happen in a sudden moment of insight.

The first truth is that we are Spirit.  We are made up of energy and exist independently of our physical body.  Our spirit is eternal and indestructible.  It is this Spirit that links us all as we all share this same spirit.  We are One with all that is, with each other, with our planet and the physical world.

The second truth is that the spiritual world is Reality and our physical existence is the dream.  We are like actors and actresses at a dress rehearsal, trying on different costumes and playing different roles.  Life is meant to be lived playfully and not with attachment to our role in the play.  If our consciousness is energy and is the one force behind our living body, does it not make sense that this consciousness is the paradigm from which all other realities must be considered?

It is when our priority changes from the physical to the spiritual that we start to wake up.  It only takes 51% of your consciousness to consider your Spirit more real than your body for the shift to occur.  Do we not see that everything good in life comes from that which we cannot see... happiness, love, joy, peace?

The third truth is that we were meant to live by our feelings and intuition, rather than the mind.  If we are Spirit, then we were meant to live by the tool that was given to us to navigate the spiritual world which is our feelings.  Our mind is to be used as a tool as well, when needed, realizing that our mind ties us down to physical reality whereas our feelings help us to rise above the physical plane.  When we start living this reality, it is like learning how to breathe underwater.  We find out we have spiritual lungs that we are not used to using.  At first it seems foreign, yet, the more practice we get, the more we see that a life lived according to intuition is like living life for the first time.

What helps on this path is when we see that the physical reality does bend around living a life by the Spirit.  Events, situations, and people miraculously start entering your life in such a coordinated way that you know that there is One mind behind it.  That is when you see the true power that comes from the spiritual realm.  Your spiritual quest has a very immediate reward with access to this power as you live a life according to your spiritual nature.