Stages of Spiritual Growth – A Series of Reflections
There are many maps of spiritual growth and many steps along the spiritual journey. Any one map will take you into the experience of the wonder you are intended to become. Unlike the assertion from many in various religious traditions there isn’t simple one way up the mountain of personal and spiritual development.
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old,
Seek what they sought.
Matsuo Basho
Some of the maps that I find inviting and encouraging within my own spiritual growth experience include:-
- The Way of the Chakra’s.
- The Way of Love.
- The Way of the Spiral.
- The Way of the Lodge.
- The Way of the Road.
- The Way of the Hero (including the way of the Heroine).
- The Way of the Seer.
- The Way of the Force.
Each of these maps allows you to become aware of the vastness of the potential that lies dormant within you. The benefits of having a map of the spiritual growth process is that
- You know at any time where you are.
- You are given a sense of direction.
- You have a starting point from which to begin.
- You have the confidence that the road has been travelled before.
I will be compiling a Newsletter that will focus on all of the maps above and more. Each of these maps will become a complete reference source for any one who wishes to find a sense of spiritual direction. These maps will allow you to give up following old worn out paradigms that are destructive to oneself and to the collective called humanity. Let me begin by giving you an over view of the main stages of spiritual growth that are understood by the map makers of the spiritual journey.
The stages of spiritual growth are divided into the stage called the personal and the impersonal. You can call these two stages the development of the human and the revelation of the Divine. Each of these stages are represented by a triangle and the work of spiritual growth is to integrate these two triangles into a star. This is the star you are here to be and to shire. The base triangle of the personality involves the integration of the body, emotions and the will. The upper triangle which points downward has to do with the allowing of the purpose, intuition and revelation of the Divine will. What connects the two triangles is the heart. This is the work of bringing Heaven to earth. It is the work of bringing sacred unity into direct awareness within a body living in time and space.
One aspect I return to again and again is that the journey of spiritual growth is, in the words of the modern mystic Eckhart Tolle, through the body and not away from the body. The experience of spiritual growth is the play of energy within the body and the play of sexual energy within the body. For far to long sex has been seen as a sin of the flesh and not the blessing it is intended to be. Much unnecessary suffering is caused by sexual shaming, body shaming and other forms of shaming. Shaming is a killer and kills the spirit within the body. This in the words of the modern mystic Andrew Harvey speaking in the Sounds True recording Radiant Heart, “Has got to stop.”
The stages of spiritual growth I invite you into are stages of body awareness. This is body awareness that takes you into the experience of feeling sexy and feeling alive in a delightful way and into radical self acceptance. This is acceptance of the myriad of feelings that are your way of being able to express your needs and more importantly give you the ability to express your gifts. Whatever map of spiritual growth you choose to follow your life’s direction by it is best to start the journey with your feet on the ground. The way to do this is to begin each day with a very simply body awareness exercise. This allows you to follow the deep spiritual wisdom contained within the words of the poem by Mary Oliver. I personally use this within my own spiritual growth process. This is the spiritual direction that tells you
You only have to allow the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
The problem is that the soft animal of your bod has all too often been taught that it’s free flow is wrong, it is shameful, it is not quite nice or has been demonised by religious teachings’ and hidden under a form of cultural repression. This creates what is called body armour. The body loves attention. It loves conscious attention that is given without judgement. This conscious body awareness exercise teachers you to become a master of subtle energy within the body. Over time you become more sensitive to the subtle energy messages that come from the body. The body becomes the guide to your direction home. You begin to feel more grounded. You have your feet on the ground and you have a sense of your own direction. You become an expert in living your one wild and precious life. Again the poet Mary Oliver helps tremendously here when she writes in the Journey.
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.Mary Oliver
Listen to the inner body. Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. To assist you in this matter I have found a guided meditation that you can use to learn this art of body love and appreciation. This is a free guided meditation that you can download. Gift yourself a step in the right direction. Listen to the voice on the guided meditation that invites you to listen to the only voice that can truly unfold the wonder of who you are. This begins within the softness of the body that has shed the body armour we all use to protect ourselves. Let this softness develop within you and in time you will access the still small voice within. Here is a body awareness meditation that gives you some idea of the process.
Learn to use modern technology in service of spiritual growth. This will allow you to learn this technique in the comfort of your own home and deepen into the comfort of your own soft animal body that knows how to love what it loves. Bookmark this page (Control D) as it is my intention (when I finally resolve the recording issues) to record a mediatation to take you on the first step to higher ground.
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KARMA TUBE is a collection of inspiring videos. This website brings inspirational stories to light, using the power of video and the internet to multiply acts of kindness, beauty and compassion
SPIRITUAL THEMES IN YOUNG ADULT BOOKS – Many young adult books can provide the spiritual information young adults need to assuage the loneliness of their passage; some of the possibilities are presented here.
THE ENTHEOS ACADEMY – Online teaching that integrates everything you might have wanted to study: from old school philosophy and spirituality to modern day positive psychology, nutrition, creativity, conscious business and general self-development–all the
A Spiritual Awakening Beyond Belief
In developing this personal development and beyond blog, that takes the reader through various maps and stages of spiritual awakening, I experience some highs and some lows. Yesterday was what I call a high day. I worked long hours and had such immense fun. At the end of the day my partner Bee said to me, “Your inner graphic artist has had lots of fun.” The answer was a resolute Yes. I could honestly say
Thank you God for this most amazing day – e.e. Cummings.
I was so thankful for the ability to create images that brightened up my day and I will be using these images, I hope, to brighten up your day. Those who are familiar with the postings on this website/blog will know that I love paintings with neo-classical themes. These are paintings that inspire me and invite within me a transmission of the energy of the symbols contained in such paintings. When I write a course on spiritual awakening I tend to introduce people to the power that is inherent in such art. This is because such art invites, and is intended to invite, your opening up to higher centres of beauty, grace and refined energy.
Yesterday I put together a cover for a book that I intend to write. This book is provisionally entitled, “Beyond the Purpose Driven Life.” The cover of this book will show the beautiful painting opposite that signifies a spiritual awakening. The invitation from this Beyond the Purpose Driven Life book is the living of a life beyond belief. This is both a literal and a transformational experience. Spiritual awakening is not simply a one time event. it is a process and it is a process that has been mapped in order that it can be followed but not simply in a literal way. The great teachers of humanity have mapped this process of spiritual awakening. However, their lower consciousness followers have, for the most part, cemented the map of spiritual awakening in dogma and blocked off the threshold places and portals to transcendence.
A recent statistic tells me that 95% of Americans believe in God. If that question were asked elsewhere I suspect one might not get such a high percentage. The interesting thing for this writer on personal development and beyond is why the question isn’t how many American’s (or others) are knowers of God. Addressing this question purely from a Christian point of view it might be asked in this way
How many seekers will become finders.
In a recent presidential election in Ireland this question “Do you believe in God?” was asked off all seven presidential candidates. Everyone of them affirmed that in fact they did believe in God although it had never been a key aspect of their presidential campaign. Not anyone of the candidates claimed that they were a “Knower of God.” I don’t have an issue about someone who claims that they do not know God. I do take issue with someone who claims that they believe in God as if it where some kind of sound bite in order to win over voters.
In the journey that takes you through stages of spiritual development you can remain a believer for all your life but the beyond aspect of personal development is not something you can believe in. There comes a point when your belief must go in order to know and experience the mystery that is beyond belief. In order to experience the fullness of spiritual awakening one has to cross various thresholds. What was the gift of one stage becomes the resistance to the next stage. At a certain stage your belief actually becomes the resistance to the mystery that is beyond belief.
The history of religion, and especially the dark history of religion, is not the history invited by the masters who have given their names to such religious teachings. Their followers, who are lower consciousness followers, turn the living stream of inspiration into the dead letter of the law. They make the goal of a purpose driven life into the that of missionary work and service to a church. This then becomes the highest aspiration of the spiritual life which from a mystical point of view is also a kind of spiritual death.
The anonymous writer of the classic text The Cloud of Unknowing addressed this issue of belief. The writer choose to remain anonymous because to be a writer of such a transcendent invitation would at the time have meant the person likely be charged with heresy. The question of disbelief is also related. Believers and disbelievers are simply on opposite sides of the same camp. The opposite of belief is not disbelief but knowing. To travel the path of spiritual awakening means that you have to travel your own way. The history of the church is the history of repression and murder of those who entered the Cloud of Unknowing and moved beyond belief into the knowing of the Oneness of Love as direct personal experience.
The modern teacher Jeddu Krishnamurti, who happened to be my teacher, when asked by a journalist who came to interview him, “Do you believe in God?” gave the answer, “Sir, what need is there to believe in God when one knows.” The psychiatrist Carl Jung replied in a similar manner when he was asked if he believed in God. The pastor and founder of Saddleback Church Rick Warren wrote A Purpose Driven Life. The culmination of this book, which has sold in excess of 30 million copies, is that the purpose of life is to give your life in service to the Lord. The highest experience of this service is to become a missionary and promote the teachings of the church.
My reason for beginning to write Beyond the Purpose Driven Life is to invite those who come to this so called high point of religious experience and find it turns to nothing, as it must. My intention is that the full mystery of revelation be lived, not as a system of belief in words, but as direct experience of knowing what it is to live within the Word. The Word as experience has nothing to do with words. Words are only pointers to that experience that is beyond words and certainly beyond belief.
This intended book Beyond the Purpose Driven Life might not sell thirty million or more copies. There will the those, however, who come to a point in their lives that is called a crisis of faith, or to place the experience in more secular terms, to a point that is called an existential crisis. Within such an experience people often feel they have nowhere to turn. I hope to invite them into knowing that such a crisis of faith, or existential crisis, while challenging in all kinds of ways, is an opportunity for spiritual awakening into an experience beyond belief.
I am allowing my inner graphic artist to create a book cover for this proposed work. It has on the front cover a painting representing the call to spiritual awakening. It has within the picture on the front cover a number of angels. This is an artistic representation of the direct knowing of energies beyond material form. These are energies, subtle energies that are creative and loving. If you have a fixed belief system then you might see this experiencing of subtle energy as some form of threat to that belief system. Spiritual awakening is a process of expansion. It is a process of many deaths and rebirths into life. Each time something dies there is the re-birthing into the new. The death of belief allows for the arising of that which is beyond belief.
Let me say here that I am not in the business of taking away someone else’s belief system. That would be a form of arrogance and a subtle form of violence. I will say this, however, I am in the business of inviting revelation beyond belief. The purpose driven life does not end in the service of the missionary church. Metaphorically speaking, this isn’t even half way through the spiritual awakening process. The purpose driven life doesn’t end except when you become at one with the Alpha and Omega and know that God has no beginning or end. Love has always been and ever will be. The process of spiritual awakening beyond belief is a process of forever becoming that cannot be reduced to words and certainly cannot to be followed in a literal sense.
There are lines from The Purpose Driven Life that I love. I started reading it with enthusiasm. Further into the reading it simply became disappointing. The invitation to a purpose driven life needs to be available from the higher centres beyond the personal sense of self. This is not some experience codified in a religious text. It has to be lived directly. In living it directly it is then known but this knowing is beyond the intellect. I wanted The Purpose Driven Life to be the invitation from mainstream Christianity that my heart often longs for but is rarely nourished by. Even though it has been read by over 30 million people and rising it will disappoint anyone who feels the call within them of the mystic heart.
There is a fuller invitation to spiritual awakening within the book by Jim Marion called Putting on the Mind of Christ: The Inner Work of Christian Spirituality
I have many more ideas for books, eBooks, guided meditations and courses that I intend to share with you in various ways. I am presently focused on writing 7 Ways to a Wonderful Life eBook which I will turn into a Kindle format and eventfully publish on Amazon. This eBook 7 Ways to Wonderful Life is an extension of the writings featured on this website and in the weekly newsletter Personal Development and Beyond which is available for free. You can sign up to receive this free newsletter that takes you through various maps of spiritual awakening at the top of this post. Or simply use the form I have provided here.
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Levels of Consciousness – Buying a Stairway to Heaven
Levels of consciousness are like a kind of stairway to Heaven. In any stairway there are gaps in between the stairs. These are the places of the unknown that one has to cross without certainty that the next step is in fact awaiting you to place your trust in it (or your foot on it). The stairs that I invite you to place your trust in are those placeless places called levels of consciousness or stages of spiritual growth. In every stage of spiritual growth there is one thing that should be expected and this is resistance to the growth that we wish to have and the wish to stay with that which is known. You have to take a step into the unknown. Here is a poem that share’s with you the fear and the resistance that one can well expect to experience on the journey through various levels of consciousness.
Come to the edge.”
We can’t. We’re afraid.”
Come to the edge.”
We can’t. We will fall!”
Come to the edge.”
And they came.
And he pushed them.
And they flew.Come to the edge
by Guillaume Apollinaire
Many of us during our lifetime will come close to the edge. This coming to the edge is a kind of reaching beyond the ego and the known self. It isn’t simply the movement of ideas around a limited self created identity called the ego but is the willingness to enter the heart. This willingness to enter the heart is an invitation that arises from beyond the personality and that then becomes the alignment of the personal will with the will of the Divine. This experience from beyond the personality is the practical application of the line from the Lord’s prayer that asks,
Thy will be done of earth as it is in Heaven.
At a certain level of consciousness – the mythic level of consciousness – Heaven is still seen as somewhere that is beyond the physicality of the earth. Heaven is not a place beyond the earth. It is an experience of deep interiority. Heaven is the highest level of consciousness available to a human being within this time and space dimension. This is called Christ consciousness and it does not imply that in order to enter such a level of consciousness that you need to be a Christian.
It does mean that you are willing to practice being faithful to that Universal knowing that is within you and which wishes to express through you. When I use the word faith in this blog post or in any other article I am not writing about faith in a set of written words authorized by some outside religious hierarchy. The way in which I use the word faith here is faith in a process that is the process of the movement of Creation through you. This process is forever creating anew. This creative process is skewed to go ever higher. It knows creating because this is what it is and what it does. It doesn’t do this mechanically but holistically. It doesn’t learn creation through knowledge about something but is the knowing of wholeness.
You are not apart from this knowing. You are in fact the knower within. This has been called the still small voice within. Most of your life you have been taught to trust in other people rather than trust the encounter with the still small voice within. The problem with the modern mind is that it is geared via cultural indoctrination to achieve instant results that can then be repeated. The cultivation of the knower within isn’t a time based phenomena. This knowing arises from the dimension of the timeless. This is a dimension outside time and space. While it is instantaneous your ability to receive that instantaneous transmission tends to be distorted by your ego desires. No one other than yourself can invite the knower within. It is a radical invitation because it invites you to claim your true power that is in alignment with Creation as that power designed you to be. It means your being willing to go to the edge and fly.
This knowing within is radical in the sense that you begin to trust it more than any outside authority. It is radical in that sense that it gives you an assurance and self confidence that is not dependant on outside circumstances. it becomes central to the one wild and precious life that you are here to live. The modern mind is a grasping mind. It wants and is expected to be in a continual state of wanting. This is a form of addiction. Rather than being in alignment with Creation it is in polar opposition to Creation. The result is that we as a collective destroy the planet because that satisfies the heart and gives joy in living is not acquired by getting more things. It is revealed through living in the dimension of no thing and no time.
The knower within, the still small voice within, the silent witness within is not outside in the world but is within the deep interiority of who you are and is who you are. It is the One who knows you by heart and knows your true heart’s desires. It knows fulfilment through you and you know fulfilment through it. In following the still small voice within you are following your bliss. The greatest spiritual teaching that is paradoxical is the practice of some form of stillness. This is the practice that is invited through meditation and prayer. Prayer here means contemplative prayer and not prayer that is a list of demands. This follows one of the greatest spiritual growth invitations ever given.
Be still and Know that I AM God.
The invitation to be the knower within goes against most everything you have been taught. If you spend time during your day simply engaged with cultivating the still small voice within most people will ask your if you are OK or ask what is wrong or ask what it is you are doing. The answer one might give is
I’m learning how to be.
To enter stillness and to cultivate the willingness to be available to the knower within runs counter to the energetic of this Western culture which is becoming the world culture. However, this movement has never been part of mainstream culture and in all likelihood might never be. The ability to come to the edge and fly is the real secret. It is the secret of silent interiority that knows what is needed in each moment. If you follow the culture of instant results or are impatient (as I am) then you are going to be challenged in developing this trust that this process demands. This demand isn’t some form of punishment. it is demanding rescues it opposes not only what is individual learning within you but the collective idea that the only way to advance anything in life is to do do do and do. This attitude has now gotten us as a collective into deep do-do.
The knower within marries the two sides of the brain. You open up that frequency of the brain that receives the knower and out of this knowing you are the action. This is the experience that I refer to as Love in action. This tends to be action that moves from a sense of calm. The result is known not as a list of stepped actions but as a free flow of action within the moment. This feels invigorating because there is no sense of resistance. The will of Love is being done through matter. Your will ,and the will of the stillness that knows how to create, are in full alignment. The process is peaceful and fulfilling. There is now a real sense of gratitude rather than a sense of achievement.
The Knower within is often represented by the dynamic of the Divine Feminine. She knows in ways that the masculine knowledge does not know. One is not better than the other. Each is needed. The knower within is the one who with a word can get what they came for because their power is not in words but in the Word.
There’s a lady who’s sure that all that glitters is gold and she’s buying a stairway to heaven. She is following signs on the wall and sometimes words have two meanings. Words always have two meanings. One time she will learn that you cannot buy a stairway to Heaven because it is already who you are and that you could never pay anywhere enough for the view that you get from the top. Does that not make you wonder?
And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul.
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold.
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last.
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll.
And she’s buying the stairway to heaven.
If you cross the gaps that are the various levels of consciousness then it won’t make you wonder anymore. You will know and be that wonder. If it is the real stairway to Heaven then you will come back down to earth to lead the rest of us. That is the real grace of climbing a stairway to Heaven.
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World Religion Day–Remembering the Real Invitation from Religion
Today is World Religion Day. This World Religion day is held on the 3rd Sunday of the month of January. In the Western World this celebration of religion becomes more and more irrelevant in many peoples lives. There are those who go further. The late Christopher Hitchens said of religion that
Organised religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive towards children.
Professional atheist Richard Dawkins says of religion that it is
the great excuse to evade the need to think” and that God is nothing more than an ”imaginary friend”.
I happen to agree with much of what the late Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are saying. The God they write about is a God that, if not already dead for many people in the West, is in the process of dying and if I might add my own view, “Thank God for that.” This God who is dead and dying is the God referred to by Jim Marion writing in Putting on the Mind of Christ as the Mythic God. The Mythic God is the God responsible for all those violent, irrational, intolerant actions and is the imaginary friend referred to by Richard Dawkins.
This is the projected God of the human mind that many still long to be rescued by from this vale of tears. This is the God who we are advised sent down his only Son to save we sinners from the setup that happened in some far away place in some far away time. This God has been dying for a long time and has been replaced by the God of rational consciousness. Whether or not the late Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins know it or not this is the level of consciousness from which they take their world view. This is the level of consciousness that the average adult in the Western world now takes as being their primary world view. It is a step up from the old world view of the imaginary friend called the Mythic God.
The highest reaches of religious experience, however, do not stop at the rational level of consciousness. There are at least four more stages of spiritual development above that. It is this rational level of consciousness that in a very real sense is the madness that is destroying the planet. We as individuals and as a collective now need to look to move beyond our worship of the power of the rational and logical linear mind. This rational level of consciousness believes in the power of science, the power of thought and the power of the mind.
Caroline Myss says of this rational level of consciousness that it is how we legitimise our destruction of everything and anything that does not have this rational and reasoning ability. The modern mystic Eckhart Tolle goes so far as to call the rational level of consciousness as it presently manifests in this world as a form of insanity. On this World religion day I invite you to remember that there is a way of knowing beyond the logical linear mind. This is the beginning of a journey into real union with the Divine which is not a projection of the human mind but a revelation of Love at the very heart of existence.
Religion can be seen, and is seen, from different levels of consciousness. All wisdom teachings are the attempt to put into words an experience that is beyond words. The problem has been that there have been those who have claimed to know the experience when all that they know is the words. This is the history of organised religion and its associated conflicts and oppressions. The violence inherent in organised religion arises because those in authority to the imaginary friend only know the words of a written script and not a living experience of the transcendental.
To understand religion one needs at least to have some understanding, even if it is only in an intellectual way, the broad outline of the stages of spiritual development that is part of the spiritual journey. At the heart of all religious teaching is the experience of non-dual consciousness. At the lower levels of consciousness this unity is attained through control and fear. At the higher levels it is not so much an experience as it is a revelation beyond experience. It is a revelation that is directly known.
Logic and the rational mind cannot encompass this experience because logic and the linear mind function within the world of opposites and not in the realm of sacred unity. This sacred unity is what is to be celebrated on World Religion Day and not the religion of the mythic God who is a projected imaginary friend and has been the cause of untold violence throughout history. All in the name of God and all in the name of an imaginary friend.
Real religion is not about scripture as words but the Love and compassion that arises from the direct knowing of who one is.
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Losing you Religion as a Way through a Crisis of Faith
As a writer on stages of personal and spiritual development I feel for those people who are pulled into a crisis of faith. I have been through my own crisis of faith during my own spiritual journey. Now I am comfortable simply sitting before a window of morning light “losing my religion.” I feel fine about this. The religion I has was a comfort at the time but it required me to be who I was not. All the better then that I am losing it. I have a deep love for religious teachings. I love the words from the Bible, The Upanishads, The Bhagavad-Gita, the Dhammapada and many other beautiful books of love. All these words are useful. They are like the support wheels on a child’s bike. They help. They give confidence. They give re-assurance. They call. They lift the heart. They help us embrace the invisible.
When someone finds that they are losing their religion they generally tend to be experiencing a crisis of faith. For many sincere fans of the customs of religion this crisis of faith is sometimes, and for the most part is, very painful. It is for that reason that I write about the various and diverse stages of personal and personal development. The crises of faith that many experience is a recognized stage of faith development. It happens to be a terrifying side of such religion development. Such crisis of faith is not something that anyone of us would consciously invite.
Only to “be truly religious” you have to let go of all words. You have to lose “your religion” so that you become “truly religious.” You have to take the risk that without the support of the words of your scripture that you will find what is beyond the words. Letting go into the heart with trust and faith you will find you are given support beyond belief. Rather than be a “religious person” you become a faith filled being of Light. You drop belief in order to “be life.” Many of us who profess faith fear loosing it. We fear that one day “our faith” will no longer be there. This is because it is “our faith.” We are the ones who cling to it for “dear life.” Ask us to give up the support of the wheels on each side of our life and we fear we will fall into and abyss. We might even end up in hell.
When you let go into real faith and trust you fall into balance. You can flow with life. It is already holding you up. You cannot fall out of life no matter how hard you try. With “your faith” you are like a fish in the ocean looking for water. You hold on to the extent that you miss. Many of us who are “religious people” do our religion. We do the practice. We engage with the ritual. We belong to a group. The more people we have in our group the more it seems that the truth of what we “believe in” is manifested. Assuredness in “our faith” becomes a numbers game.
Losing “your religion” and going through a crisis of faith is a requirement of the true seeker.This is the one who wishes to know the full experience of love and life eternal. Your religion will eventually have to go. Everything has to go. In the end the very idea of God has to go. In this letting go of all that you think you are “love is.” The Beloved is seen and you return to your original face. You and the dance of life are one. Does the mean we do away with all the Churches, Temples, Mosques and other places of worship. These places are not the issue. It is the attachment to such places and their teachings that are the issue. The teachings are needed. They help take you beyond. Only rather than liberate they themselves often become the prison. We get attached to our “religious” label and then anything can be and is justified in the “name of God.” Losing your religion is a great cause for celebration.
You become an individual. For one moment you are free. You only need one moment. The experience of the Divine opens up to the unidentified heart. The surrendered heart is waiting in the moment to be fulfilled. It is filled with the experience of love eternal. There is only the experience and nothing but the experience. There is no ego getting in the way to step between you and the dance. For one moment you are life and not someone having a life experience. For one moment you relax into being life. You are not Tony Cuckson (to use myself as an example) having an experience of life. You are life itself. You are life experiencing the joy of living. Life is only moment-to-moment and you know that life is love. There is no problem. Tony Cuckson is the problem. Our identification with ego is the problem. To lose your religion you need strong ego boundaries. You need to be able to stand-alone. You need to be able to be comfortable in your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies. You need integrity. You need to be one body. You flow toward discovery that you are integral. Then at one time you are integral. You are certain. Certainty comes. This is not something that is cerebral. It is total. It is whole. It makes you whole and holy. This is the religious experience.
The religious experience is not dogma. It is not fixed for eternity. It is forever in flow. Dogma is the stagnant pool that too many drink from and espouse as being “the water of life.” They live far from the river and even further from the ocean. In the religious experience one becomes knowing. One goes beyond the issue of believing in God. What to believe when you know. Belief is a hindrance. It holds you back. Belief, as I understand it, is an instruction to “be life.” This is the key to the door of the prison of illusion. Somehow this word “belief” has been devalued. It has come to be understood as an attitude of mind. It has become something that one chooses rather than one becomes. Yet we use the words “beyond belief” to describe the most extra ordinary experience. This is the “religious experience.” This experience as we know has, and always will be, “beyond belief.” The experience of the Beloved is “beyond belief.”
Beyond belief you are a life of being. The Beloved comes and dances. You and the dance are forever one. What if you stop believing? What will happen to you? If you are lucky you will begin to disappear. You will feel empty. The wheels supporting “your life” have been removed. Do not confuse “belief” with “non-belief.” Each is the other side of the coin. Each is a choice. ” With belief” and “non-belief” there is still the ego. There is still the tension of the ego. The one who knows needs no belief. The one who knows goes beyond the limitation of ego. There is only the knowing. There is the delight of knowing “one is.”
So here I am writing in my corner and “losing my religion.” These “religious teaching” have been companions and a support along the way. These teachings have been a vehicle for “going beyond.” They have been a vehicle to carry “little me” beyond belief. This is so that “little me” disappears into the knowing of love. This is not such a loss. For many, religion has become a burden. They carry this burden on their backs much of their lives. I have, as a child, been taught by many who have carried such a burden. I have seen the burden of religion carried by many people in the country of Northern Ireland. This is the country into which I was born. This is a county were religion rather than the religious experience has and still reigns. This is no different to most countries.
Castle on a Riverbank – Harold Hitchcock
Religion for many has become and issue of comfort from the fear of death. It is an issue of security. Many belong to a religious group “just in case.” For some this is because of feelings of deep unworthiness and self-doubt. Rather than be lifted up they carry the additional weight of a religious book. This often becomes a prison rather than the key to liberation. “Religion” as a word means, “to bind. The word “religious” means “reverence.” One keeps you tied and the other gives freedom. You are either a “religious person” or you are a “being of love.” One can be a satisfactory ego identity and the other is the experience of peace beyond understanding. Lose your religion. Become the experience of reverence and surrender. Christ was not a Christian. Buddha was not a Buddhist. Mohammad was not a Muslim. They were all living experiences of Universal love manifesting within time, space and culture. Each is the knower of eternity. Theirs is the living teachings beyond belief.
OTHER GREAT CONTENT
Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.
Losing you Religion as a Way through a Crisis of Faith
THE SOUL JOURNEY – Spiritual growth programs guide you on The Soul Journey. It and many spiritual ebooks will support your growth by developing more soul consciousness.
THE NEXT STAGES IN HUMAN EVOLUTION – We are now entering the twenty-first century and the third millennium. A perceptible feeling hangs in the air that the world is rapidly approaching one of history’s decisive seismic shifts. Changes are looming ahead o
SELF HEALING EXPRESSIONS – Browse various articels related to topics such as Spiritual Soul Mates, Life Purpose and Dream Interpretation
The Breakthrough Experience–Beyond Your Wildest Dreams of Logic
It is my intention to invite you into the direct knowing of what might be referred to as The Breakthrough Experience. As a further exploration of personal and spiritual development I am intending to produce a weekly podcast – a recording of the material that I write. I have to acknowledge at the outset that there is a resistance to doing this. The reason for such resistance is not yet clear but I hope to work through such resistance and move beyond it. I have started again to work with the technical aspects of podcasting and offer to you a podcast that I recorded some time ago. This podcast is from a series that I call The Deep Hearts Core. The edition that I include below at the end of this blog post is entitled The Breakthrough.
I have a love of mystical poetry. It is the invitation from such poetry that inspires me and when I write about this poetry I feel, for the most part, in a state of flow. It is as if the writing writes through me. I feel the love that is contained in the words and the words seem to simply move the hand. This podcast entitled The Breakthrough is based on a short but beautiful poem by Eva Gore-Booth
After the Storm
Clouds and waves are one
The storm has cleared the air
The sea holds the sun
And the blue sky
There is no under, no above,
All is light, all is love
Is it like this when you die?
Eva Gore-Booth
The best way to listen to this podcast is to get relaxed. Simply listen to it lying on your bed or lying comfortably on the floor. The intention is to invite you into the deep hearts core. Switch off your mobile phone and try and create for a little while a place of sanctuary where you and the invitation to a breakthrough experience might be graced. This podcast lasts for about 20 minutes. You might drift off to sleep but allow that if that is what the body requires.
I write about various stages of personal and spiritual development. At each stage there is a crossing of a threshold and there is a resistance to crossing this threshold. This for the most part is a gradual process and tends to be viewed from a point where one metaphorically speaking is higher up the mountain. There are, however, breakthroughs. These tend not to be gradual but instantaneous. They might last a few seconds or a few minutes. The perfume of the experience will tend, if you are faithful to it, last a lifetime or more.
The Breakthrough Experience
People have over the years asked me what it is I know. They are aware that I have a knowing of a kind that they do not have but wish to have. This knowing is the grace of the breakthrough experience. It is a taste of enlightenment. This taste of enlightenment isn’t permanent but it is enough, or at least it can certainly be enough. It is a breakthrough into the dimension beyond time and space and form. I understand this to be what is called in Ireland the Land of Tir Na Nog.
This is the Land of the Forever Young. Don’t take this term Land of the Forever Young literally. This Land of the Forever Young is not a physical land but a state of consciousness. The phrase forever young is really a paradox. The word forever in a very real sense has no connection to the word young because forever is timeless while the word young is time based. Most people who have never been graced the experience that breaks through the limitation of time and space have no idea of the glory that is beyond such a dimension. When they read about the idea of eternal life, or the Irish equivalent of the forever young, they assume this is something that goes on for a very long time but not something that is outside time itself.
We are living in a world in a time of great change. We are suffering the result of logic gone wild and as the modern day mystic Eckhart Tolle says, gone mad. We have as a collective species called humanity taken the energy of logic and reason and we have made them into a false God. This God has given us great gifts but the result is that the planet is now under threat. We think that we are entitled to destroy and exploit all that does not have this intelligence of the linear and logical mind. We live for the most part from the neck up and the mind of logic is the mind that we cannot switch off even when we wish too. There is no real peace of mind and real peace of mind cannot be found within this linear logical stage of personal and spiritual development.
We need more individuals to see the danger of the worship of the logical mind and be willing, in the words of the mystic poet Rumi,
Trade logic of bewilderment.
This bewilderment is a stage of spiritual development that is incredibly challenging because it involves the willingness to go out into the desert of the unknown seeking, not knowledge, but the grace of knowing. The problem is that the logical mind thinks it can know in ways it is not designed to know. It knows logic but it does not know wisdom. It does not know insight. It does not know wholeness. The breakthrough experience takes the individual beyond the logical linear mind into a dimension I call knowing. Knowing is not more information. Knowing is a third eye experience – a sixth chakra experience. It is when one is graced the seeing, and in the seeing, the knowing of what is real. This seeing is not a physical seeing but a spiritual seeing.
You cannot force this experience of knowing but the soul knows and is the knowing of this experience. You can only prepare the ground but in such willingness there is the availability of grace. No one can say, and I cannot say, why one person is graced such knowing while others appear not at all interested even in its possibility. My limited understanding is that this is due to the level of consciousness with which the individual views the world. My intent, however, is to make this invitation to the experience of the grace note that you are part of your education and in a very real sense make it a part of your true education. This is the education that reveals the revelation of the truth within.
I suspect, but I can’t say for certain, that this grace is given when the individual longs for such unknown grace with all their heart and mind and soul. This grace was given to me at a point in my life when I was no longer prepared to live a life without Love and to the point where I wrestled with the pull within me to end it all. This wasn’t simply a call for help. I couldn’t stand the loneliness of separateness from Love. This is why I so identify with the Hafiz poem which really sums up my life in two parts. The part before the breakthrough and the part following the breakthrough. In the first part there is my life summing in the following lines.
Everyone I meet I say to them “Love me.”
Of course I don’t say this out loud
Because someone might call the cops.
There are transitions and there are breakthroughs. The breakthrough has been called different names in different traditions. In Buddhism it is called stream entry. This means you cannot fall back into lower levels of consciousness. Breakthroughs tend to be beyond describing. Breakthroughs are the experience from which most real religious texts are written. However, religious texts for the most part are interpreted by those to have never been graced such a glimpse of the state called Enlightenment, Heaven or Paradise.. These are the people that the modern enlightened master Osho referred to as logic choppers. The world is full of believers in the word who have never had any direct knowing of the Word. They read their Bibles, their Gita, their Koran and even take pride in knowing the words off by rote but this is not knowing and not revelation.
The grace note that you are is forever. You never lose that because you can only ever lose what you are in reality separate from. The problem is in forgetting. The problem for the modern mind is that the logical linear mind thinks it is the power that grants remembrance. It is not. What grants remembrance is grace beyond logic. What grants remembrance is the power beyond the known which paradoxically speaking knows all. The breakthrough experience is beyond the wildest of your dreams. The ego doesn’t like this because it is not in the power of the ego to grant such power. This is because such a breakthrough experience is beyond the separate sense of self called me, my and mine. Having said that the realisation of this state is the purpose of life in this dimension of time and space and form. It is this writer’s view that you should at last be made aware of this as being the true potential you are here to be graced and to grace the world from.
So take a listen to this podcast on the breakthrough experience.
Share this podcast with anyone and everyone you might care to do so. This isn’t just more information but an invitation to the deep hearts core within you that knows this invitation to the timeless is your true hearts core and,
Find in thee the old enchantment
there behind the veil
Where the gods, my brothers, linger.
hail, forever, hail!
OTHER GREAT CONTENT
Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.
breakthrough experience
THE SOUL JOURNEY – Spiritual growth programs guide you on The Soul Journey. It and many spiritual ebooks will support your growth by developing more soul consciousness.
THE NEXT STAGES IN HUMAN EVOLUTION – We are now entering the twenty-first century and the third millennium. A perceptible feeling hangs in the air that the world is rapidly approaching one of history’s decisive seismic shifts. Changes are looming ahead o
SPIRITUAL THEMES IN YOUNG ADULT BOOKS – Many young adult books can provide the spiritual information young adults need to assuage the loneliness of their passage; some of the possibilities are presented here.