In my essay Spiritual Realism: Part IV –The Core Philosophy 1, I presented a first take on the elements of the Core Philosophy. In this essay, I’m going to explore more deeply within that Core Philosophy, elaborate it, and try using it.
But first, I have to calm down a bit from my amazement at the implications of the Core Philosophy of Spiritual Realism. I can’t get over the fact that when we are in touch with our Higher Selves, with our Souls, reaching through into waking reality, we are in touch with a manifestation of the Creator.
The Creator comes through a hierarchy of spiritual forces and morphic fields all the way down to our very own Souls. Just like the Gurus I connected with in the 1970s said, our Souls are Divine. They are pieces of God, made of the substance of God
The Creator reaches down through these forces and fields to, eventually, manifest through our Souls. I still am amazed that we now, actually, connect with the Creator when we connect with our Souls reaching through into wakefulness as our Higher Selves – which are the entities that experience and act in our (everyday) world.
Unfortunately, most of us don’t operate within recognition of this reality. It takes some work to reach this perspective, but the work is definitely worth it. And even when we are in touch with this reality, we typically only experience the Creator as manifest through us rather than anything like the full-blown glory of the Creator as such.
Summarizing Our Situation
From the perspective of the Creator, we live in a very tiny and very difficult part of this Universe in this Creation. As Souls, we come to this very difficult place to acquire a physical vehicle and learn how to use it and how to manifest through it the love and the goodness and the truth and the beauty of the Creator, which is our birthright as little manifestations of the Creator. That’s our first and most basic job.
To do that we need to, on the one hand, fully engage with our physical vehicle using our physical senses, and, on the other hand, reconnect with the Creator in our incarnate state using our spiritual senses. And then our job is to discover and live out the best possible version of our lives in our incarnations, manifesting love as powerfully as we can.
Our second job is to understand the situation and the trajectory of our species here on Earth with its alternative possible futures and act to do our best to help manifest the optimal future. To do this requires accessing a spiritual craft on the one hand and an economic, social, cultural, and political craft on the other hand and also coming to understand how they interact with each other.
Accessing these crafts enables us to contribute to the Planetary Transformation through which our little species grows up out of our self- destructive adolescence and becomes a fully adult species made up of all of us humans finally manifesting love for ourselves, love for each other, and love for the Earth.
My next set of essays will explore these two crafts from the perspective of the emerging Philosophy of Spiritual Realism. But first, let’s deepen our understanding of the Core Philosophy.
Exploring the Different Worlds
In the Epistemology of Spiritual Realism, I proposed the formulation that we humans inhabit what amounts to 5 different Worlds – a Physical World, an Emotional World, a Mental World, a Spiritual World, and a Divine World. Let’s take a deeper look at these Worlds and their relationships.
We can begin with the recognition that our Souls/Higher Selves have the capability to manifest a binocular experience of the slower-than-the-speed-of-light Physical World of our physical senses and the faster-than-the-speed-of-light Spiritual World through our spiritual senses.
In response to these experiences, our Souls/Higher Selves can initiate physical actions and spiritual actions. And our Souls/Higher Selves operate from a Divine World, which is beyond the Physical and the Spiritual, as the receiver of all our experiences and the initiator of all our actions.
The Emotional World and the Mental World are interfaces between the Physical and the Spiritual. In the Emotional World we create mirrors composed of feelings that enable us to react to what happens to us and what we do in the Physical World and in the Spiritual World.
According to various esoteric disciplines (particularly the Fourth Way of Gurdjieff and Ouspenski), the key to health in the Emotional World is to genuinely produce positive emotions and genuinely avoid negative emotions.
In the Mental World we use our Mental Capabilities to create conceptual mirrors, in words and images (symbols) that enable us to describe, make sense out of, and take action in relation to the Physical World, the Emotional World, and the Spiritual World.
The roles of our thinking minds, operating in the Mental World, are to be the cockpits for our Souls/Selves to use in guiding experience and action in the Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Worlds. It’s the realm of language and communication.
It’s the realm in which we are exploring this Philosophy of Spiritual Realism right now and the realm in which all philosophies of life and religious faiths are expressed. It’s the realm that serves as the repository for all of our information and our theoretical knowledge and our practical knowledge. It’s the realm of artistic expression.
All too often, as we grow up, our awareness shrinks down to be a voice talking to us and others telling us how to make sense out of what is happening and how to act. We pretty much become voices embedded in our physical bodies, experiencing and reflecting and acting along a narrow band of the symbolic world of language – just that voice in our minds interacting with our physical senses.
We wind up losing consciousness of the other aspects of our existence. Often we lose touch with the kinesthetic and emotional aspects of our reality and with our spiritual senses of energy awareness, inner hearing, and inner seeing. And we aren’t in contact with who it is that is doing the experiencing, reflecting, and acting.
However, we can go in the other direction also, allowing our awareness to expand out from the narrow mental to include the emotional and the physical and the spiritual. When we do that, the worlds interpenetrate and the faster, finer vibrations of the spiritual can come to overlay the mental and the emotional and the physical. This is the coupled state that Professor Tiller talks about.
In the simplest level of the coupled state, our Souls/Selves use our spiritual senses in the form of energy awareness overlaying the other dimensions to experience and act with deeper wisdom and greater power. My Aikido teacher, Robert Nadeau, led us down this path.
We can even become conscious of the process of our Souls/Higher Selves receiving experiences from the spiritual and the mental and the emotional and the physical and initiating the actions into these coupled domains. This is the realization at the heart of the teachings of Ramana Maharshi.
OK, so what are we up to along these different dimensions? How should we go about using these maps?
The Missions of Our Souls
As I presented in the Axiology of Spiritual Realism, our Souls have a three part mission here on Earth where we find ourselves: 1) to wake up as Souls while our bodies are awake, acquiring Higher Selves with the ability to experience and act consciously and effectively through our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual vehicles; 2) to join with the other members of our teams of cooperating Souls to help humanity get its act together to manifest the Planetary Transformation here on Earth; and 3) to learn how to be Co-Creators with each other and with the Creator so as to be able, ultimately, to return to the Creator and join together in Co-Creating new kinds of Creations.
To accomplish the missions of our Souls, we need to:
- Become conscious and connect with our Souls and form our Higher Selves.
- Form integrated, strong physical/emotional/mental vehicles with healthy psychologies in which we have identified our self-fragments and turned them into personas for our Souls/Higher Selves to use.
- Form integrated, strong spiritual vehicles that have gotten beyond the lower psychic realms, with their sometimes unfortunate spiritual forces, to the realms of spiritual health in deep resonance with the Creator and in touch with the Divine Plan(s).
- Identify the life lessons our Souls incarnated to learn in this lifetime and do our best to live our best lives to learn our lessons.
- Acquire the craft of economic, social, cultural, political, and ecological understanding and action to put to use in ways that contribute to the Planetary Transformation.
- Find our team of cooperating Souls who have incarnated together with us to accomplish some particular aspects of the Planetary Transformation, take concerted action, and learn how to be Co-Creators together with the Creator and our teams.
- Continually learn from our accomplishments and adapt and correct through successive approximation as we progress, moving closer and closer to the accomplishment of our best lives.
Eventually, through this process, it becomes possible to shift our psychic centers of gravity to our Souls and to experience our bodies, emotions, minds, and spirits as our Souls having these experiences. At that point we have truly attained Higher Selves.
I remain pretty blown away by the reality that we all are pieces of the Creator. Our Souls – through which we experience and act – are pieces of God. This is true of everyone. We are each different aspects of the Immanent Creator working together (or not, in the case of those Souls who have fallen into sin, away from the deep resonance with the Creator) to accomplish the Transcendent Creator’s Plan(s) and manifest the profound love of the Immanent Creator.
All of us Souls have the freedom to follow the Divine Plans, even to innovate and embellish on these Plans, but we also have the freedom to say no to them and deviate from them. In this context the Christian concept of sin can make some sense.
It is important to note that the psychic level of the Spiritual Dimension, operating at the slower vibration rates just above the speed-of-light, contains many forces that are out of harmony with the Creator and do not wish us humans well. They can be seen as fallen angels or morphic fields that are disconnected, uncoupled from the celestial hierarchy.
In the Christian context, they are led by Satan, Lucifer, the Devil, and they are seeking to tempt and coerce us into a kind of sin, which is experience and action that fully deviates from our best lives and that is out of harmony with the Creator, the celestial hierarchy, and the Divine Plan(s). They have exercised their freedom to break away from the Creator and to try to manifest realities that they govern in opposition to the Divine Resonance and the Divine Plan(s).
However, such is the power and the creativity of the Creator that even when we and the psychic forces around us sin in this way, those actions wind up getting woven into the ultimate outcome of the Universe that is ultimately in harmony with Creator.
The Creator is a little bit like a farmer planting a crop in the living soil of a universal field and encouraging that crop to grow in a certain way, but each plant has a certain degree of freedom to follow the plan or not and weeds and insects and diseases as well as beneficial insects and microorganisms can enter the scene and affect the soil and the plants and the field. However, the farmer keeps tending the field to encourage it to grow according to the plan. Even if a particular crop completely fails, the farmer learns from the experience and changes the conditions of the soil and the field and the type of crop and tries for a successful harvest again.
Reflections on Time
OK, to be able to complete this essay, I think I have to formulate and share my current take on time within the context of the Philosophy of Spiritual Realism
The space/time continuum, which can also be thought of as a realm of alternate universes, is a domain of potentiality. Every possible moment exists there. When our Souls incarnate, we join a wave of actualization sailing through the space/time continuum of potentiality.
On a moment-by-moment basis, our Souls ride the waves of actualization, transforming the potentialities of the future into actualizing moments in the present, which are then added to the streams of actualization that are our pasts.
There is a hierarchy of moments of potentiality from the quanta of energy up the evolutionary chain to cells, plants, animals, and human beings and on to solar systems, galaxies, super clusters, and universes. I
You may object that the space/time continuum is way too complicated. How could this be happening with all the different potentialities that weave together to form each unified moment of human experience? The answer is that unification out of diversity is the way of everything in the Universe. Each of us humans unifies billions of cells who operate together living their little lives in the context of our larger lives. Spiritual Realism just gives us one kind of understanding of how the unification in fact takes place at some of the next levels of reality.
Waves of actualization (i.e., waves of shared presents) wash through this space/time field of potentiality manifesting a pattern of actualities in each moment and leaving a trail of completed actualities in the past.
Successive waves of shared presents/actualizations carve their way through the space/time field of potentiality. Souls incarnate to acquire bodies and to ride a particular wave of present reality for the course of that lifetime. The wave a Soul rides offers a best life, a variety of successful lives (allowing for the Soul to learn the lesson[s] of that life), and a variety of unsuccessful lives (in which the Soul does not learn the lesson[s] of that life).
As Souls, prior to incarnation, we experience the cloud of possibilities that we will enter when we incarnate, the wave of actualization that will move through that cloud of possibilities, and the threads of actualizations, riding that wave of actualization, that constitute our whole optimal lives.
For most of the life of the human species, our tribes carried the knowledge of our optimal lives, and we learned their stories through initiation rites. Versions of this process continued in the initiations of the various mysteries. And stepped down versions of this process continued through the teachings and rituals of the Great Religions. However, for many of us now, we have to do our own remembering and our own formulating of the story of our optimal lives.
Each present moment of our existence we choose, either explicitly or implicitly, to live our best story or to deviate from it. When we deviate from it, we shift the cloud of future possibilities going forward and our best story (but now perhaps less good than before) shifts, based on our choices that have taken place in our pasts.
When a Soul completes an unsuccessful life, it has to return and ride a similar wave of actualization across the field of the space/time continuum of potentiality to try again. When a Soul completes a successful life, it graduates to ride the next, more advanced, wave through a different space/time field in the curriculum laid out for it by the Creator.
Souls don’t just go through this process as individual Souls. Souls exist in communities of Souls who go through a similar process to the one individual Souls go through. The communities extend out to include the whole of humanity, which is riding a wave, with the possibility of graduating at the end of the lifetime of the species.
Right now, we are at a critical moment in the life of humanity when we need to grow up as a species, attain Planetary Consciousness, and constitute a species way of life that benefits everyone.
In the end, the Creator sends our Souls to the school called humanity on Earth for us to learn how to be Co-Creators. We have a set of lives that we live to learn the full range of lessons that incarnation has to teach us. Each life is a lesson. We come into each incarnation with a life story that is the best life we can live in that incarnation.
Living our best lives is what teaches us the lessons of those lives. We can deviate from our best lives by some percentage and still learn the lessons of those lives and graduate to the next ones. However, if we deviate too far, we don’t learn the lessons of those lives and have to repeat them.
May we find the right ways to learn our life lessons together and find the right ways to get our jobs as individuals and our job as a species done so that we can actually manifest the world that exists right now as a potentiality for us in our future.
(Aspects of this understanding of time and the missions of our Souls track pretty closely to what William Butler Yeats presents in A Vision and to Michael Newton’s The Journey of Souls.)
