“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
As we enter 2010 I am seeing so many people beginning or deepening their connection to a deeper sense of Self. Thoughts, feelings, insights, and unexpected desires and shifts in priorities they would never have had before are suddenly bouncing in their consciousness. And uncharted paths are opening, often asking them to leave something familiar to step into a new adventure. Life is moving in new directions, and it can seem like life as I knew it is getting bigger than I even knew it to be.
These increasingly common signs prevailing in our communities are pointing to a shift between what I consider to be stage one and two of our soul journey. In general, I consider our journey to have three stages:
1. Human Experience
2. Spiritual Experience
3. Spiritual Human Experience
“The first thing you learn at a business school is that the number one priority of a business is to raise the share values for its share holders. The true purpose of a business is to raise the consciousness and well-being of the planet with an understanding that everyone on this earth, including the animals and the earth itself, is a shareholder of the business.”
~Quote adapted from an interview with Deepak Chopra on CNN
1. Human Experience
In the early stages of our life we live out the human experience. Characteristics of this stage include:
- Defining ourselves by our name, body, possessions, education, career path, family and heritage.
- Learning the tools and knowledge necessary to survive and hopefully thrive in the world.
- Prioritizing pleasure, finding a good job, relationship, success, money, possessions, and having a family.
- Separating our professional life from our personal life
- Driven by thought, fear, lack, intellect, recognition, competition, responsibility, comparison, ego wants, a need to prove, overcome, gain power or make it in some way.
- Believing there is only so much resources available and we need to work hard or fight to get it
- Making the logical mind and intellect the masters, with intuition having little, if any, voice
- Experiencing ourselves as separate from others, and our earth, and believing it is up to us to ultimately take care of ourselves
2. Spiritual Experience
For some people the Human Experience is as far as they get in their entire life. As a whole, our planet is only now just beginning to enter the Spiritual Experience after centuries of human dysfunction. Characteristics of this stage include:
- Soul searching and awakening through a deep yearning for more, personal loss or health crisis
- Conflict between old human and new spiritual values, manifesting in questioning existing relationships, careers and oneself.
- Gravitation towards new friends, communities and careers
- Wanting our professional life to be an inextricable expression of our authentic Self
- Driven by feelings, intuition/inner guidance, soul desire, compassion, love, wisdom and purpose
- Prioritizing holistic service, community, conscious relationships and sustainability
- Knowing infinite abundance is our true nature and that it’s always available
- Making the intuitive mind and soul the masters, with logic and intellect as the servants
- Knowing ourselves as an inseparable part of a loving, intelligent universe that is always guiding us towards truth, healing, fulfillment and purpose.
Being a Spiritual Human means having your head in the clouds and feet on the earth
If we lean too much in either the Human or Spiritual Experience our view and experience of life is limited.
The Shadow Side of the Human Experience
By only feeling our feet on the earth in the Human Experience we cannot see things from a higher perspective, and therefore cannot offer or receive the wisdom of the greater order of life. We are limited to the concrete world of logic, facts, and the five senses, and are more likely to feel victimized or take too much control when things don’t go our way. We only see ourselves as the waves of the ocean, disconnected from the vast depths of our being.
The Shadow Side of the Spiritual Experience
If we lean too much in the Spiritual Experience, we can become disconnected from our body and the practicalities of life. I recently told a spiritual man how I loved money, and he said it was ok to love people, but not money. I met another person who was having a hard time building her spiritual practice as a healer. When I asked her how her business development and marketing strategies were going, she reacted by saying she didn’t like focusing too much on the business side of things as it would take away from the sacredness of her business. Other signs of being ungrounded in the Spiritual Experience include extreme renunciation of things like the corporate world and even the body, addiction to spiritual growth courses, using lots of esoteric, abstract language (and being afraid of words like “concrete” and “action”), having little money, and feeling a sense of spiritual elitism whereby you view yourself as superior to the non-spiritual humanoids.
Each stage is necessary, but it is easy to hide out in either for a long time. There are plenty of material goods, relationships and work challenges to get distracted by and addicted to in the human realm. And it is easy to become lost in searching for more answers while in the spiritual realm. And yet for a spiritual person to live on purpose he must resurface from the journey to the bottom of the ocean to be amongst the people, bringing with him the depth of his being to share.
3. Spiritual Human Experience
Stage three is a sign of maturity. We have graduated from the sleepy, myopic stage of the caterpillar, upwards and onwards through the metamorphosis within the Chrysalis, and finally into the graceful stage of the butterfly, where we get to spread our wings and fly into the clouds and onto the earth. We are both grounded and free.
We have captured our spirit and now it’s time to reintegrate into society with our soul purpose and vision intact, anchored in our body, and fully ready to be expressed through the necessary practicalities. We are not identified with being human and unaware of the spiritual, nor are we identified with being spiritual while denying the human experience. Instead, we wisely use the material makings our human experience, such as computers, cars and money, as well as the gifts of our intellect and logic, in service of our spirit for life affirming purposes. We join with others in our community to build bridges for humans to walk across from stage to stage, knowing each stage is important and temporary, including being a Spiritual Human.
* * *
Related Reading: