Spent some time in the Deep South. Couldn’t help but be impressed by the preponderance of churches, congregations, assemblies, and conversations that ended in “bless you.”
Driving along, taking it all in, we were 30 miles from our next adventure, a week long immersion in out-of-body experience, for us the ultimate spiritual experience.
Something in the human being cries out for spiritual experience. On this one I’m quite certain Freud had it wrong. Spirituality is more than just a by-product, a sublimation of frustrated sexuality. We are spirit as well as animal beings. We are more than our physical bodies!
We are indeed beings whose animal self will die. Like some of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico accomplished, our species will find ways to extend our animal life for perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years, but eventually it will end.
Of course we covet life in the body. Why else would we find ourselves on this planet, land of opportunity? And that opportunity is the completion of a dream; beginning, middle, and end. Beyond that is more and more dreams, adventures without end. The great challenge is to complete the current dream and leap forward with awareness.
Were we but animals we would follow nature’s program as animals show us to do in their very orderly preparation for death. But our spirit self becomes so attached to the peoples and things of this world that it struggles mercilessly not to let go of this amazing life in time and space, to allow our dreams to unfold in new ways.
We are the active side of God, we are the seeds of possibility, living, feeling, failing, succeeding, developing and sensing in new ways the realization of infinite possibilities. All those possibilities are equal; success is as real a dream as failure, no judgment.
Our spiritual instinct gets caught in attachment to the physical. Our challenge in this life is to open up to our full spiritual nature. We are soul beings who travel endlessly in infinity, exploring love in all its possibilities. To reach this experience we must get beyond the veil of love existing only in the form of physical attachment in this life.
We are prompted by our spirit throughout our lives to awaken to this fuller truth, and this is the greatest challenge in this life. Pain and death are part of the loving path. They must be experienced, they must be mastered before the veil fully lifts.
Along the way are experiences of life and love beyond the body. It happens every night in dreaming. Hold the intent gently to explore that realm with consciousness as you go off to sleep. Repeat it every night. Eventually the door will open.
And then you won’t need to believe, you will know.
Sweet dreams,
Chuck