Spirit Secrets

Updated on November 20, 2011: Added Chapter 3 - Establishing Our Inner Circle

Introduction

I have come full circle - Inspired in adolescence, disillusioned in youth - I have been an aspirant and a warrior... I've heard  secrets whispered in board rooms and meditation halls. I've engaged in battle with demons of spirit and flesh. I've been betrayed by those closest to me - Spirit injured but not broken, I persevered.

Eventually one comes to understand that secrets kept are not worth knowing, Truth - neither found or sought. The Journey simply IS... 


Side tracked by the sideshows on the Journey, I have returned from whence I came, to my inspired adolescence. With no time for anger or vengeance, I stand with a journey before me and the mystery that engulfs it.


What follows is what has been reveled on this unfolding and ongoing Journey.  

Chapter One: The Journey IS

The human spirit comprises of many unique and complementary elements;  masculine, feminine, fire, water, air, earth - all integrated to exist and manifest within the Universe in which we exist. 

The human soul, however, exists as a singularity. It exists in a single instance in time/space. It is animated by a unique and many faceted Spirit which draws from and resonates with external elements within our surrounding environment and universe. 

In a healthy and balanced existence, our inner Spirit elements resonate in harmony with external environment and gain sustenance and power from them.

When aspects of spirit become silenced or distracted, the spirit becomes unbalanced and fragmented.  The soul feels unprotected and out of balance. It goes into a slumber and seeks out external spirit elements to stabilize, control or even replace the fragmented Spirit in order to regain its awakened state.  


The intrusion of foreign spirit elements create further turmoil within the Soul as it does not satisfy or sufficiently replace the missing Spirit fragment. This fragmentation of Spirit is the source of addictions, mental imbalance, compulsions and pretty much all that ails humanity. It creates lost souls - souls entrapped in a futile effort to gain balance through taking on external and disassociated spirit elements. These souls suffer from a thirst that can never be quenched.

Humanity, since ancient times, naturally adopted rituals and spiritual practices that unite the spirit and fulfill the soul, fostering an inner state that is in harmony with Creation. Ancient communities performed rituals and practices that unified the collective spirit. Many of these traditions exist today, but are diluted by humanity's innate  sense of inadequacy and overpowering external forces that reinforce this inadequacy. 

Retrieving ones Spirit Fragments and regaining harmony within the Soul is easily achieved. It requires, however, that one discard all thoughts of spiritual inadequacy. It requires that one embrace an un-ending and Infinite Journey and expect nothing.  It is a state in which one feels the infinite and unconditional love that seems to exist everywhere. Its achieved simply by embracing ones humanity. It requires one to make every moment, every breath a sacred gift.

While Saints and Sages claim achieving their elusive nirvana requires lifetimes of suffering and sacrifice, they in fact distract Humanity from its Journey. This is because there is nothing to achieve, there is only the Journey that unfolds before us.

Chapter Two: Good Fences - Good Neighbors

We are created whole at birth. Our soul exists as a singular instance in time and space. It mirrors the singularity in which Creator manifested our universe. It is Zero divided by the un-manifest potential, Infinity - which is the infinite source that sustains Creation. As such, the soul connects to the infinite. 

Our spirit, which animates us, exists with all the essentials to establish and maintain our soul/singularity in this existence. Spirit establishes the boundaries of our soul. Without this boundary, we would cease to exist.

As life pulsates through our very being, so does it pulsate around us. Humanity imposes itself upon us. From the moment of birth the process of defining our boundaries begins. Life is a process where we choose either to seek external forces that resonate with our spirit within, or allow external spirit elements into our inner circle to influence, tamper with, or even replace the Spirit that our soul chose to align with at the moment of our birth. 

While all life is connected to the same Creator/Source, our Soul is a singularity, an individuality. Before it experiences its own individual Journey. This Journey is both unique to our Soul, yet infinite and therefore part of the collective experience or Journey.

Key to this life’s Journey is to establish and define the boundaries of our existence as a position of strength. We learn to interact with God’s Creation and in doing so, gain knowledge, strength and experiences that ultimately become part of the universal experience. When the boundaries of our Soul/Spirit are weak or compromised, we become something other than unique selves.

The universe around us is teaming with life. It is natural for our boundaries to be challenged. All disease, be it Physical, psychological or spiritual is a result of some foreign element violating our boundaries. 

The Journey that lays before us, requires that we establish a firm boundary that protects our being. This enables us to experience the Journey and gain strength from our interactions with the Universe. When boundaries are violated, dysfunction and disease are manifested. 

Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall”,  ends with the phrase “Good fences make good neighbors”. This poem plainly and innocently describes the “Dance Of Life”. In this dance, our boundaries and the boundaries of others are defined, maintained and challenged as we interact with our "neighbors". Our Journey is interrupted when the boundaries of our Spirit/Soul are not in tact, and when we interfere with the boundaries of others, we interrupt their Journey.

To embark on this Infinite Journey we must not only establish the “fences” that encompass our Soul, but must also respect the “fences” of others if we are to interact on the path that lays ahead of us. 

Chapter 3: Establishing Our Inner Circle

My oldest child was born to a mother who lived in a disturbed psychological and spiritual state. Her own personal boundaries were severely compromised at an early age resulting in the development of a disorder clinically referred to as a Borderline Personality Disorder. The “borderline” that the clinical psychologists refer to is the fine line between normalcy and schizophrenia, however, the name is fitting as the source of this disorder comes from the tampering of our physical, mental and spiritual boundaries in our early childhood. The moment our first child was born, in true “borderline” character, his mother refused to hold him. The nurse, confused by this behavior, handed my 3 minute old son to me and left us alone to go ponder the disturbing event that had just happened. 

What should have been a traumatic and uncomfortable moment for me and my son was instantly transformed into a timeless state of magic. My son, now minutes old, opened his eyes and looked into mine. Still connected to the primal singularity of creation out of which he came, I stared into an infinite expanse. I took him to the window and we looked out on the world together. I experienced, for a moment, his experience of the world. I experienced a world from the point of a soul, that was very clear about the boundaries of his existence - where his existence ended, and where the outside world began. It was a wondrous moment that transcended time. In that moment I had the privilege of experiencing the world from a newborn's perspective.  Much to his mother's dismay,  even as a newborn infant, he would cry in her arms and cease to cry when handed to me. His instincts would prove prophetic as her abusive behavior towards him and his little brother escalated, culminating  in a series of events that nearly took their young lives from them at the hand of their own mother.

This experience taught me the power that we are born into this world with. I learned that, at the moment of birth,  we are more inherently aware of our physical, mental, and spiritual boundaries then at any other time of our existence. Our soul, which exists as a singularity or singular point in Time/Space, is powerfully aware, uncluttered by self consciousness or any sense of limitation. The world we experience is wide open to opportunities. We are born intuitively aware of our existence or “Is-Ness”. Every moment we experience and learn from stimulus on all levels of the Creation that we exist in and that exists in us!

In this state we are able to rapidly advance on all levels . We learn and grow from external stimulus. We learn to trust and embrace familiar protective forces, mother, father, family, home, and in that trusted environment we are able to embark on our life’s journey through direct experience. 

Injuries and mistakes incurred along the way become important lessons that enable us to expand our experiences safely the next time we are confronted with similar circumstances. 

Creator and creation provide us with this “Inner Circle” the moment we are born. Humanity has survived due to this powerful force that naturally engulfs us. In an ideal world, a child’s inner circle begins with it’s physicality, psychological and spiritual boundaries of experience. It extends to its maternal and paternal influences. As a child grows, it learns how to trust and extend its circle to include its tribe/community - every step expanding awareness into the infinite expanse of the universal experience. 

All this, however is based on the very foundation that we learn at birth. At birth we are the most cognizant of our singularity - our singular existence in space and time.  We inherently know our boundaries, where we begin and where the outside world exists in reference to us. We are inherently “wired” to learn external forces that resonate with our spirit and strengthen us, and those forces that harm or weaken us. 

This is all well and good, but for the constant assault put upon us at birth to tear down our personal “inner circle” boundaries, and question our inner voice. The day we are born, the world that we are born in attacks the integrity of our Inner Circle. We are told that we were born in Sin - that we are vulnerable, damaged and in need of purification ceremonies and guidance. Our natural and inherent ability to learn from an protected but expanding Inner Circle, is replaced with an imposed structure of indoctrination intended to make us subservient to a social structure that insists that we are worthless fodder who must succumb to Kings, Gurus and Gods to be purified. We are taught to pursue access elusive goal, nirvana, heaven through subservience to a higher master. In other words,  are indoctrinated from the day we are born to born with a slave mentality. In this process our inner circle, which is powerful at the moment of birth,  is torn down and replaced by a higher authority - government, church, guru, etc..

By the time we become adults, our inherent sense of “Is-Ness” has been so compromised - our personal inner circle boundaries are so shattered, that we exist completely exposed to physical, mental and spiritual assaults from the world around us. We respond to this exposure in many ways. We can shut down into a shell that prevents us from experiencing the wonderment of the world and live an uninspired and paranoid life. Alternatively some of us seek solace and security by completely surrendering our selves to enslavement to a causes bigger than ourselves be it political, religious, intellectual or spiritual. This is not to say that being protective of ones self or participating in bigger causes in the world are bad, but taking these behaviors to extreme levels, more often than not are a result of a reaction to feeing disconnected to our soul/singularity. 

The process of recovering from this disconnect involves re-establishing our existence in Time and Space. Connecting oneself in Time is simple if only one can embrace the thought that linear time exists only due to our minds inability to fathom the quantum aspect of reality - e.g. that all time and every possible outcome exists concurrently.  

With this thought, one has access to all the wisdom at this very moment that one would have in every possible quantum outcome in the future. Beyond that, one is inter-connected to all the wisdom of their ancestors and decedents in this very instant.  As a newborn, we are connected to this timeless reality. In our adult life, we are subsequently taught to immediately forget this. The only step required to regain what was lost, however, is to re-institute that thought. With this thought, there is no Master to serve. Mastery exists for us to embrace with every instant. We must only embrace our humanity for what it is Now!

With that said, the next important step to re-establishing one’s Inner Circle is to connect with one’s physical location in Space. We are children of the Heavens and Earth. Embracing our consciousness as it exists in relation to Heaven and Earth is the same as embracing the singularity form which all Creation pours from. We are a mirror of that miraculous singularity.

Our Shaman ancestors created ceremonies that establish an Inner Circle or Medicine Wheel.  The symbol for such as Circle is formed around a cross, which symbolizes our presence in the fabric of Ether or Space/Time. At the intersection of this cross, at it's center is our singularity, our singular existence at the intersection of Time and Space. 

Medicine Wheel: Intersection of 
Time and Space

It can be said that this Medicine Wheel exists within our physical body. It exists at the intersection of the yogic Chakra system, which extends along the base of the spine, and the horizontal chakra system that extends from finger tip to finger tip. 

The intersection of these are at what is traditionally referred to in the yogic tradition as the Heart Chakra. In practically every spiritual and religious system, the center, heart chakra is deemed as the seat of the soul. It symbolically if not physically represents our singularity, our central point of existence where we manifest our Creation and exist in Creation as a small mirror of Creation itself.

The Inner Medicine Wheel:
Intersecting at the Heart Chakra

The Journey which we embarked up on at birth, to experience this Creation and Co-Create within it, resumes the instant we embrace our Heart Center, our Soul/Singularity. With that embrace, we can again, re-establish the boundaries of our existence. We can proceed to experience the world as a coherent being, in sync with Creation and Creator. 

This is not a process that requires years of practice to master. It is a thought that occurs in an instant. The moment we embrace it, we establish our inner Medicine Wheel, our Inner Circle and resume the Journey that we were lured away from as we handed our power over to external influences. With this thought, we learn to be compassionate to ourselves. We embrace every moment and experience, every success and mistake, as experiences and adventures on an Infinite Journey.

The most challenging aspect of this instantaneous transformation that we have available to us, is embracing our imperfections and humanity. We’ve been taught to doubt ourselves. We’ve learned to re-live our past mistakes in our heads to reinforce our inner sense of inadequacy.  This is the most challenging force that we confront at every moment on our Infinite Journey.  It assaults our Inner Circle every moment. Embracing our IS-Ness is the only means to addressing this assault upon our Inner Circle.  This requires our embracing our Humanity with all our imperfections. This requires that we become observers and not be re-traumatized by our past errors. 

As we establish our IS-Ness, our Inner Circle as an ongoing process, we can begin to heal form the hurt and trauma inflicted upon us by our torn boundaries. This healing process is ongoing. Many hucksters would have us believe that if we serve them our pain will subside and we will achieve perfection. The fact is, just as when one exercises, muscles are torn down and regenerate to be stronger, our experience in the world causes injury. The resulting healing or re-generation restores us to be stronger than before.

When we re-establish our Inner Circle, Embrace our Is-Ness or Humanity and the Infinite Journey that we have embarked upon, we resume our ability to re-generate from our wounds and exist in an ever expanding awareness of the Creation we live in. There is no beginning, and no end. There is no goal or mastery. All there “IS”, is our existence at this very instant on our Infinite Journey, along with all the possibilities that have been and will be!

TO BE CONTINUED...

Chapter 4: Our Inner Spirit Elements

Chapter 5: Seeking Protection and Guidance

Chapter 6: Embracing Humanity

Chapter 7: The Infinite Journey