Saying For Today: Hence, the spirit, as a spark of the one Flame of Love, we are and become.
*Brian Wilcox. 'Serene Surfaces'.
What is vital for us now to understand, no time to delay, especially as we are aware of the crisis facing us with climate control, polarizing politics, monopolization economically by large corporations, and the decline of traditional social structures, is that we are being pulled by Spirit toward Spirit. We cannot turn back to recapture the past, only in the newness of the present can we create together the future we long for ourselves, future generations, Earth, and Spirit. That future already lives within our heart. Evolution has shifted from matter and mind, to relocate us beyond matter and mind. The present global suffering is telling us that we have created these problems due to our collective consciousness, and this consciousness creates divisiveness and entitlement, for it is a self-consciousness, meaning personal and tribal, the tribal being a collective ego-consciousness. We cannot solve the problems facing us where are; they can be transcended by our transcending. This entails that our relationships must move beyond the consciousness where we have been relating and into the unitive consciousness. This will transform how we see relationships and the kind of sharing we seek with others. Love itself will be viewed differently, as though recreated in our minds. All of our relationships must serve the evolution of consciousness, of God, so we can transcend into the spirit of Spirit and live together in harmony, not merely toleration, and in unity with Earth as a living being in which we belong and find home. The revolution we need is not first a social revolution, but an inner revolution, whereby we may create socially sustainable systems of equality and justice for all ~ yes, all. Only love can bring about this social redemption, but a love transcending the self-centered and tribal-conservative 'love' of our past and present. This love loves from before and beyond body and mind, self and group. Here, we appreciate the words of Kahlil Gibran, in The Prophet...
Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Yes, we can discover this love only by becoming this love. May we do so. Yes. This writing is devoted to this spirit of Harmony.
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With each step toward Spirit, we are becoming that we are.
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He was walking alone, a young black boy in the small housing community. I had entered it and was now cycling out, leaving its cul de sac.
This was unfamiliar territory. I had never been in Virginia, and had come to meet a woman after we had expressed mutual interest. I had driven 24 hours from south Florida nonstop to this unfamiliar place.
This small community I was in, out on the bicycle, was a continuation of the new terrain and people. I was cycling, with no sense of where I was, just trying to make sure I could get the mileage in for the day before returning to the nearby hotel.
Though Virginia was unfamiliar and this housing community too, he, the young black youth, was not unfamiliar, though I had never seen him before. I have no recall, now some 7 years since, of him seeing me. I recall the moment vividly and the feeling registered in the body of a recognition, a knowing: not a knowing of, a knowing directly, without objectification of this youth as other. This recognition was not of the mind, such as when persons say, "I think I’ve seen her before" or inquire, "Haven't I seen you before?" I knew I had never seen this boy, knowing him had to be deeper than, or before, the body and mind. I spontaneously knew, intimately knew him. I eternally knew him.
After a brief time of looking upon this youth walking slowly, bookcase in arm, I rode on. Such recognition and gratitude for it remains alive and a reminder, a teaching, of what I had studied and believed to be true, more true, one could say, than true. Such recognitions live outside time-space, for they arise from outside time-space.
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This makes no sense. How can we recognize someone we’ve never seen before?
True, how can we recognize, or re-cognize, someone, anything, we have not first previously cognized? The heart and mind recognize differently, they are two totally different modes of knowing, for they arise from different consciousness worlds. This relates to our discussion yesterday, which we said we would return to. You requested more insight on this.
I could not recognize him in the body realm, I had never seen that body before ~ I am avoiding using the word stage, as stage theory tends to give an implication of fixed, bounded states. The body is the coarsest realm of emergence, or evolution, the life of matter. Body is simply the shape of matter: so, Buddha says, "Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness." And in Christianity, we have the teaching of the Word becoming flesh, spirit becoming a body. The early Church Father, Athanasius, spoke, "God became man (human), that man (humans) may become God."
Often a previous realm is provided before body, that of matter. Matter, the domain of physics, is energy. Energy in form is body, be it the body of a piece of furniture, the body of a rock, your body. Spirit manifests ~ using location, but recall the limitations of spacial-temporal linguistics ~ in down (matter), lowest, to up, toward highest (spirit, Spirit), beginning with energy.
As to intimacy, at the body realm, a person located there in consciousness will experience intimacy in two ways. First, interaction body-with-body, so objective in nature. Second, interaction emotions-with-emotions, still objective, though more subjective, in quality.
Why emotions located here?
Emotion is a bodily experience, related to the nervous system and brain. Feeling, arising from soul, that is registered by the body but its location is in the heart. Heart is a way of speaking of our innermost core, our essence, and can be used as a metaphor for soul.
What of persons saying they are seeking a soulmate?
That is faddish language. It has become a cliché and seems to have arisen from depth psychology. What these persons mean is a bodily-emotional relationship, the ideal body for him or her providing a joining of good feeling, meaning pleasing emotion. It is childish, thoughtless language; yet, it reflects indirectly that there are true soulmates, but only in soul, not body. Most persons would not be able to tolerate a soulmate, though they long for one. The ego cannot tolerate someone living in the soul realm, it challenges the ego too much. Likewise, only soul can recognize soul. If the hoped for soulmate shows up, one would likely see him or her to be unlike what was expected to show up. Now, as to soulmate, since it has been so misused and become so faddish, let us cast it aside and remove it from our vocabulary.
Persons are truly seeking a soulmate without knowing what they most deeply seek. The soul and the body, or ego self, are saying too different things. So, oddly, they are seeking what they are not seeking. The soul longs for someone to share soul with, or better, soul to commune and enjoy soul, in self-communion, while the mind is interpreting this in the body realm and mostly, if not fully, in terms of pleasure ~ someone who fantastically pleases me is the sense. In the 90s "soul" became popular in the book market, but, again, soul was a psychological term.
How does a soul relationship occur?
Once, a dear woman said she was looking for a man whom she would have an "effortless connection" with. I commended her. You cannot get a soulmate, be it a friend or lover. And, if you receive one, there will be a sense of effortlessness in the connection, not that one is doing nothing, but there is no struggle. So, if one is struggling to form a relationship, that is likely a sign that it is not going to be a soulful connection. That day in Virginia, that arose spontaneously; I was not trying to know the youth, I knew him. Such easeful connection, even if only one is aware of it, arises spontaneously, not resultant of trying to create the connection. Connection that is, does not have to be created to be.
Still, and this is subtle, so listen closely. The soul connection arises with ease, no struggle. Yet, this can engender struggle to accept. This is for two reasons. One, fear of such deep intimacy is located in us, partly for we have all known betrayal and past hurt in relationships ~ if exceptions to this there are, few ~. This fear resides in the body, in memory. Also, for many of us, to have such intimacy is unfamiliar, and the unknown of it creates anxiety. The person in soul recognizes these residues from the past, fear of being hurt again and anxiety about the unknown, and can work with this in varied ways, including in Silence and sharing honestly with someone whom he or she trusts to listen compassionately. Likewise, in the soulful relationship, the connection provides the environment for those involved to work together in healing that below the realm of soul.
Seems most persons are at the level of body?
Yes. Most relationships function as body-emotion relationships. The problem is when persons located in this realm are truly seeking a deeper experience and cannot receive it, for they are not prepared for it. Or, they may receive it, but cannot sustain it, for only soul and spirit can sustain soul.
Someone in the body consciousness can experience soul?
Yes. Soul is always present, for all the realms are potentials within Spirit, Spirit unfolds them all and enfolds them all. Here persons can have profound experiences, say of soul, but it passes quickly. It is one thing to visit somewhere, another to live there. This is a reason psychedelic drugs might engender profound soul experiences, but the person returns downward to his or her body-emotion self ~ I speak here, however, not certain such experiences are of soul, they may be simply mental distortions, more like odd dreams as the drug affects the mind realm. The same can happen in religious and spiritual experiences. You can go off to a meditation retreat and come away drugged with a soul high, only to find yourself plummeting back down into the domain of self-experience that is your norm. If someone at the body realm experiences intimacy beyond it, the intimacy will dissolve, or move down into the consciousness of body. I use "dissolve" or "move down" to speak of experience, for it can feel like dissolving or like descending back downward the ladder of evolution of consciousness. Yet, even here, though the boundaries are limited to body, we can use the word intimacy if we choose ~ usually I do not use intimacy for this realm ~, but with understanding it is a surface matter, very immature indeed for persons only to engage in intimacy located as body with emotion.
As for as the coming down from the soulful, or spiritual, high, I once heard a joke about a man who attended all the revivals in a church. During a revival meeting, he, as always, went to kneel at the altar. He was heard praying, "O Lord! fill me with your spirit!" A fellow-member, who had heard this many times over the years, prayed out loud, "O Lord! don't do it, he's got a leak!" Hence, surely, persons can have profound experiences in religious gatherings, but are they lasting beyond when the meeting ends and they walk out the door to go home to watch the game on television or to a local restaurant? Persons can have, I believe, spiritual experience through sex, but what after the sex? The quality of an experience is best tested by the affects after the experience, not by the experience itself, no matter how amazing it may appear to be.
And what of mind, soul, and spirit?
Mind is the mental manifestation of Spirit. Mind is the capacity of thought and thinking. When persons are both or all located in mind, their intimacy will take on more an intellectual, or thoughtful, quality than those located in body-emotion. The relationship will be able to think through matters, when others in body-emotion will have a more reactive, rather than responsive, sharing. This for body is more aligned with instinct, including survival. This tendency often obstructs the flow of selfless loving, turning awareness back onto self, rather than the relationship itself.
Soul refers to the domain of union, or communion, with Spirit. This is the spiritual marriage. Here, one can have a true soulful connection. Here, body, emotion, and intellectualization is taken up into awe, reverence, worship, and devotion. Here, we have a pure form, also, of religious devotion, a sharing of heart-fellowship with Spirit, or the Divine. This same quality of religious devotion, of worship, of awe and reverence, will be shared by persons in soulful intimacy. However, this does not mean a person will be of a religion or even identify as spiritual in any formal sense.
Spirit includes all lower rungs on the consciousness ladder, and all moves toward Spirit, witnesses to the all-pervading presence of Spirit, for Spirit is Source. Spirit can be called God, Consciousness, Awareness, the Divine, Love, the Good, True, and Beautiful, the One, the Supreme, the Absolute, Truth, the Real, Reality, Creator, ... Spirit, being One, makes possible soul, soul being communion with One in the oneness of One. Hence, the spirit, as a spark of the one Flame of Love, we are and become.
Can persons have spiritual intimacy, beyond soul?
Soul-with-soul connections, since soul is really Spirit manifesting in particularity, the particularities of Spirit making possible the communion in diversity, are having spiritual intimacy. In having spiritual intimacy, that intimacy will enfold in itself the lower aspects of the Whole, and these will be enhanced due to being located in their rightful place. So, for example, sexual copulation is enhanced by Spirit, not diminished in any way, when the bodies of two are rightly manifesting consciously Spirit. Then, sex becomes a conscious sacrament, a rite of Love. As you can see, hopefully, soul speaks of the diversity of Spirit in communion, while Spirit refers to the Oneness prior to diversification and communion. So, in soul, there is, one could say, one foot in soul, or communion, one in Spirit, or Oneness.
To conclude, today, I share a story, one of my favorites. A man is out walking and comes upon an abbot and monks apparently building a chapel. The man approaches the abbot, saying, "Father, what a wonderful thing to do, to build a chapel here!" The abbot replies, "Sir, we’re not building this chapel, we’re tearing it down." Said the befuddled man, "Why tear down a chapel?!' "So," the abbot clarifies, "we can see the Sun rise in the morning."
See, at each realm of consciousness, there is a death and resurrection, potentially many phases of dying to the old and being born to the new even within one of the domains. In a sense, the old quality of consciousness, or embrace, has to die into a larger one. If Reality is like to the Sun, as metaphor, experience is enhanced of that only by the death of the lesser of it. Sometimes, the term "embrace" has been used of this evolution ~ the more open my arms are, the more they can hold within them, the more open the heart, the more it includes.
As we are born into a higher consciousness, the death of the lower occurs, and the embrace of the Absolute expands through us. This does not negate the lower realms, only that Spirit pulls them up higher. Body consciousness does not die, in the sense of cease, only die into a larger embrace. So, in soul, body-and-mind find a larger embrace, united with soul.
In the image of the story, the chapel of consciousness has to be torn down again and again, with each death being a birth to seeing more of the Sun. This is why "God", in a relative sense, is subjective ~ God-relative is as one is prepared to see God-absolute. In that sense, we speak of many different relative gods, using the one word God.
This Light is able to manifest, then, more and more, as we are drawn more and more into the Light by the Light. Remember Athanasius, above, "God became human, that the human may become God." How one can become God and not be God, not in totality, this is a matter only known when one passes through the paradoxes of Truth to the Truth. This means, too, he or she sees the other as God when in spiritual intimacy. The bodies, minds, and souls are in communion, but there is only one Presence loving through the presences. We, see, this in Eastern paths that bow and place the hands in a prayerful posture; in bringing the two hands together into one, this speaks of oneness, and the whole gesture with bowing too affirms recognition of the Sacred in the other, the same Sacred that is within oneself.
Buddhists recognize this spiritual realm, but do not personify it as a god or God as in other religious and spiritual paths. Yet, Spirit is Spirit, however seen by anyone, or whether theistic or nontheistic language is used to speak of this.
Could not this lead to the ending of relationships?
Yes. In the service of Truth, relationships can begin, they can end. In that same service, we will choose not to enter certain relationships, for we know it cannot serve the good of the Whole and, likewise, it will be a violation of our essence. When we violate our essence in being with another or others, we violate his or her or their essence too. We must realize that in the service of Truth, loyalty is redefined for us. "Hello" and "Goodbye" equally belong in Life. In the realms you learn these lessons, and a wise guide can help much also.
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You were my lesson I had to learn I was your fortress, you had to burn Pain is a warning that something's wrong I pray to God that it won't be long Do ya wanna go higher?
*The theme of "Lotus of the Heart" is 'Living in Love beyond Beliefs.' This work is presented by Brian K. Wilcox, of Maine, USA. You can order Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, through major online booksellers.
