A “flawed” human being

You are not a “flawed” human being.

There are no flawed human beings because there are no perfect human beings.

We are simply apertures having greater or lesser capacity to accommodate a boundless movement of being that is life itself — and whose purpose is only more life.

So everything you think, every action you take, every feeling you have, is a thread of this movement toward greater life & greater wholeness.

Consider that.

Impermanence

I’m not sure that the teachings on “impermanence” are understood rightly.

Seems like a lot of people fear impermanence and undertake spiritual practice to escape loss, and try to become numb so that they won’t grieve.

But that’s not the way.

Impermanence is really the fluidity and the aliveness of life itself.

It’s not loss, it’s possibility.

And forget those ego-sops about “something-better awaiting you.” That’s just another kind of egoic goal-orientation that takes us out of our inherent connection to Being. Enter into the light, fluid aliveness of the indeterminacy and let it call-forth from you the person and qualities asked by the moment.

So the task before us is not to become indifferent, but to enter-into the fluidity and find the support that’s inherent in being instead of creating structure to manage change.

Because it’s not the thing that you are afraid to lose, but the aliveness to which you are connected by the thing. And that aliveness pervades the whole of space and yourself; an authentic practice reconnects you to your essence-nature in which your aliveness is self-subsisting. It is just what shows-up &emdash; “just there, like the moon in the window” — when we stop doing all the things that hold us separate from our own deep substance.

 

Exclude Nothing

Exclude nothing.

That is the true teaching.

All this spiritual exercise is to become free,
which is to align ourselves with wholeness
and let ourselves be unfolded by the inherent wisdom and goodness
that is “just there, like the moon in the window.” (rumi)

On the way, there is a lot of
“remedial humaning”
to train the ego
so that it becomes
a vehicle of light
instead of a compost-bucket
on the banquet-table
of this delicious life.

Reject not the compost bucket; it has its place.
Neither walk through life with one foot in it.

Advocacy

If someone has not really processed their own trauma, their actions in advocacy for an abused individual (or marginalized group) can be as egoically self-serving — and potentially as damaging to the one advocated-for — as the actions of the accused or oppressor.

Uniqueness

The more “unique” you are, the more separate you are — and the more inherently-frustrating will be the pursuit of being-truly-seen through your uniqueness, because it’s based in what’s-missing instead of what’s-whole.

“Not From Here”

I was That Kid (I think every grade-school has one) standing at the far end of the playfield at recess waiting for the Flying Saucer People to come take him home.

All of us are Not From Here; all of us have a vague sense that there is a place where we were totally accepted, totally cherished, and totally Home. We brought that with us into our human incarnation from a condition of Divine Unity/Divine Intimacy in “pre-eternity.”

In some of us, notably those “on-the-spectrum,” that “memory” or impression has stayed closer to the surface, and that can be VERY difficult — not just feeling alienated from this life but in how the mind tries to make sense of something it can’t really make sense of except in symbolic terms, according to the imprinting we have received in life. That symbolism is not necessarily in true alignment with the deeper truth and it can cause great suffering if misinterpreted.

AND all of us can find our way back in this lifetime, while still living a full human life. That’s the function of spiritual practice.

In a sane culture, there would be elders & shamans to take such a soul under their wing and guide and nurture its extraordinary gifts. In this society, we’re flying blind, not understanding how these things work and often either pathologizing the person or uncritically accepting everything the mind generates.

So it is harder, in some ways. We have few exemplars or real mentors. On the other hand, there is more scope (through this culture’s hyper-individuality, to actualize ourselves in unusual ways & oddly-enough, often the same disconnection from those around us that brings so much pain.

Boxes

The structure of consciousness is like “Chinese boxes,” smaller ones inside larger ones, in regress, for several levels of decreasing density and increasing dimension & life force. Each next-larger box contains all the boxes smaller than itself.

In addition, the smallest box of consciousness is the most dense. This is the body and the somatic correlates of the personality, the stuff we call “character structure.” “Mind” is less dense than, and contains the physical body and psychosoma. “Collective mind” contains all individuated minds and also permeates all of them, right down into the psychosoma — and acts upon them.

Each next-larger box also completely permeates all the smaller, denser boxes, and acts upon them, influencing how they express, but beyond the level of Mind, these realms are wholly impersonal, formless, and boundless, beyond time/space, and basically not affected by anything happening at the denser levels even though totally interpenetrating and existentiating/precipitating them.

All of us exist in and AS all of the boxes all the time; we’re just mostly unconscious of the larger ones because the smaller ones are very, very dense. So when an authentic breakthrough in awareness is made to a larger box, it’s not dissociative, because that level contains all the denser levels within it, including the body, as part of its totality. You’re not “going anywhere” that is separate from here.

But the sensate, felt-identity inherent to the larger levels also perceives the denser levels as being much more constrained, containing much-less life force, and basically just less fundamental because of their more-transitory nature.

The feeling of opening awareness to the formless levels is often, “YES, this who I truly am, and who I have always really been!” It is intrinsically, profoundly meaningful — not as a reaction-against or an avoidance-of our messy humanity, but just by itself. It feels like the “coming home” that we’ve always longed-for but was somehow always unreachable or ‘way-too-brief.

There’s a feeling of limitless freedom and of deep, deep peace, often with a soft, melting gratitude and compassion for how the insults and wounds of human life let to this moment, how the contents of the different boxes were orchestrated in the soul’s symphony.

Transits like this have to happen many times, in different sectors of the personality, for the breakthroughs to become integrated into life and the felt-identity. Once is not enough, but once is often enough that one can’t-not-know what happened — and enough to totally upset the applecart of one’s life.

The revelation of one’s deeper identity as being inherently pure, sinless, and fundamentally untouched by the events of “the story” can be deeply and profoundly healing. At a certain point, the fear of death dissipates because one knows, beyond the shadow of doubt, that something more deeply-real about oneself persists after the body can no longer hold the soul in connection with physicality. This also marks the healing of the “abandonment wound” because one is never more than a breath or two from enfoldment in a boundlessly-cherishing and wholly trustworthy Presence.

And these repeated transits exert a gradually erosive effect on the character armor through both the shift in felt-identity and on the subtle energy underpinning it. The shift in felt-identity to the larger spheres of one’s being also give the trust-in-the-process and the place on which to “stand” from which to make the necessary deep dives into one’s personal hell and meet its demons.

And yeah, when most people “meditate” or do mantra, they aren’t doing this. That’s partly from ineffective teaching/mentoring (including not having a teacher), and there ARE a lot people of trying to escape themselves instead of completing themselves, of doing a self-hypnosis technique and calling it “meditation,” or just making entertaining pictures in their heads. Many are deeply wounded and do need a body-centric psychotherapy to release enough of the noise and chaos in the nervous-system so that they can do truly transformational spiritual practice that includes grounding and integration.

There’s also a distinction to be made between the established, tested ancient traditions and the New Age nonsense having its antecedent in early 20th-Century Western occultism. The ancient traditions have time-tested practices and trained teachers who know how exactly how the practices work, whereas the New Age stuff has little real substance and the teachers are mostly self-appointed.

The problem I see with many accidentally-enlightened teachers is that they are each creating their approach on-the-fly, and making mistakes that they would not be making had they been mentored by — and accountable to — elders in a developed and tested tradition that has already encountered pretty-much all the problems and developed solutions for them. They are teaching what they know from what worked for them, and missing the mark with students who are not like them.

Priority

Some people just don’t have the capacity — or the courage born of necessity — to do the deep dive into their personal darkness and let the encounter transform them in unforeseen/uncontrollable ways.

So they remain at the surface of their experience, maybe engaging performative spiritual or psychological work, but never letting it shatter them in the way that frees them from their egoic homeostasis.

And that freedom only comes with shattering.

I honestly do not know what the active factor is — except that there are just some people who need truth more than they desire comfort or reassurance.

“Twin Flames”

The notion of Twin Flames is all over the psychic/occult landscape, the idea that there is somehow one soul manifesting in two bodies. There are hours of videos devoted to the idea, and why a Twin “runs” and how they can be brought back.

But the notion is founded on a limited premise: That the two are somehow meant to be together. And that’s not necessarily the case.

If there really IS such a thing, if the two of you are one soul in two bodies, you are never truly separate in the first place. Not in the reality of the Soul.

Twin Flames meet in physicality to catalyze certain things in each other, and when that purpose is fulfilled, you separate so that the process can complete and your egos not become dependent on each other and arrest the process.

The resonance between the two of you is deeply compelling, but it’s so that you come to know more-fully who you really are and to complete yourself, not that you are destined to be together in bliss and complete each other in co-dependence.

How you deal with being alone and waiting is a great recipe for your growth or for your suffering, and regardless of some psychic reader telling you that your Twin’s relationship with someone-else is somehow wrong, your Twin has their own work to do that is being catalyzed by that relationship — and free will is a thing and there is no guarantee that your personalities will be compatible if your Twin exits that relationship.

And interference in the free will of another human being through psychic power is spiritually unlawful, so don’t even think about trying to use the “Law of Attraction” or some-such to get your Twin back. If you’re even tempted to use it, it is all-the-more necessary for your Twin to have “run,” so that you can grow up.

So attend to the work of completing yourself within yourself, of developing an authentic autonomy so that you have a happiness that truly belongs to you.