The Nature Of Being Human

When your spiritual center begins to manifest, your ego-consciousness integrates with it, and you begin to be “lived through,” as it were, by the spirit. Your living becomes a spontaneous, effortless flow.

Eva Pierrokos wrote those thoughts in her 1990 book, A Pathwork of Self-Transformation. Eva does an incredible job explaining the fact that our consciousness forms the blueprint and the foundation for our physical experiences. We don’t think about our consciousness all that much. Our mind is part of our consciousness, but we don’t acknowledge that marriage as such. We are confused by the words we use to describe the inner workings of consciousness. The ego, consciousness, mind and soul have diferent meanings to each of us. Religion does a very good job of confusing us when it comes to pinpointing the differences as well as the similarities that exist within us.

If we try to distinguish our ego from our spirit, we fall into the void that develops from our massive belief system. If we try to explain the difference between the mind and the soul, we lose ourselves in a timeless tunnel of beliefs that has no beginning or end. We are confused by the terminology that describes us, so we look for help wherever we can find it. That help is usually found in a new belief or an old one. Our beliefs guide us and help us make sense of the dynamic segments of our consciousness. If not for our beliefs we would flounder through our physical experiences without focus. Our beliefs make the diversity that exists within our consciousness real to us.

We may not understand what our consciousness truly is, but we totally understand what we think we believe it is. Whatever we belief is real in the effortless flow of consciousness. The names we use to describe us are part of our beliefs about the nature of being human. The nature of being human is part of the nature of being consciousness. We only need a few words to describe our physical being, and those words have a different meaning to each one of us. But no one can deny the fact that we all are a spontaneous consciousness with a specific focus.

A Muddy Mental River

Ignorance prevails as long as the will remains cheated by its own offspring or its own image, consciousness, in which the knower always stands distinguished from the known. The darkness of ignorance cannot be dispelled because it is its own self.

D.T. Suzuki wrote those thoughts in his book, Doctrine Of No Mind. We all taste the water of ignorance as we travel through this physical life. Ignorance is a faithful companion, but it changes as we change. We are not always ignorant of things, but we are always ignorant of somethings.

Ignorance is a free-flowing muddy, mental river. As we experience life, facts and tangible things pull themselves out of the muddy waters of ignorance, and we see another side of our mind. Suzuki explains that ignorance is its own self. We think that self treats everyone the same, but that sameness has its own unique way of manifesting. We never really know ignorance until it disappears or is suddenly awakened by a mental nudge.

Our minds contain invisibles civilizations. Each mind has a personal history, geography and a unique personal culture. Ignorance lives in that culture in many different forms. There are peaks and valleys in the geography of the mind, and ignorance lives in every geographic fold within them. We travel some of these mental roads in ignorance. Our only tool on our journey is our ability to experience. Experience is a mind opener and an ignorance finder. Once we find ignorance we absorb it, and it becomes part of our mental personal history.

Magic Slate

If you want to meet someone who can fix any situation you don’t like, who can bring you happiness in spite of what other people say or believe, look in the mirror, then say this magic word:

“Hello”

Richard Bach wrote that insightful message in his book, Messiah’s Handbook. We do look for things to make us happy. We buy, sell, bargain and concoct stories and tales so we can get what we want. The wanting is an insatiable nagging. This nagging has roots in the one place we can’t touch. That place is our ego.

We don’t think about what we see in the mirror. There’s more there than meets the eye in the mirror. The eye and the ego have control in that personal interaction. If we took a minute and looked behind the ego, we would see a specialness that yearns to give us everything we need. Behind the ego is the fertile ground of consciousness where all things are possible. It is place void of time and space, and we feel very comfortable there. We also feel a little naked there. Naked, for some of us, is a condition of discomfort, but we all start our physical life that way, and we go back to that start every time we die, or every time look behind our ego in the mirror.

Looking behind the ego is a little like death. There is nothing there or anywhere, but every thing we ever wanted is there. It’s a blank slate within our consciousness. That slate is their for us. No one has a slate like ours. They are all different, but they all do the same thing. Our blank slate gives us the ability to change what we don’t like, and add what we do like. It’s a magic slate, and the only thing we need to do to get it started is to say, “Hello.”

The Truth We Sell

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

But this all points to direct face to face verification somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash basis whatever. You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade each other’s truth. But beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure

William James wrote those thoughts in his 1906 essay, Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth. Truth does have its own type of value system. We want to believe each other, but there is a deep sense of doubt that surrounds our desire to believe. It seems the truth we sell has been discounted by own idea of worth. We have an enormous amount of influences and associations attached to our version of truth. If any of those elements are in question, the truth created by them is considered suspect.

Our truth may not be fact. It may be fiction, but we still believe and live it. We live it because it has mental structure. That mental structure becomes real. It gives us hope and faith, and those emotional unknowns are the foundation of our time-motivated knowing. Without faith and hope no one would buy the truth we sell because they are the primary influences within our truth. But even after we sell our truth there is a constant influence at work which alters it in some way.

That influence is our innate knowing. Innate knowing is the foundation for all truth. Our internal timeless clock separates the fabric of our subjective truth and then mends and shapes it into another suit of truth. Once that suit of truth is ready for sale, we offer it to our faithful and hopeful bidders. The successful bidders then wear that truth as a belief. They, in turn, sell, trade and barter those beliefs. When they do, they feel the rewards associated with physically feeling the effects of their prize influences--- hope and faith.

Strange Bedfellows

Fear not that life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.

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John Henry Newman was a major figure in the Oxford Movement. The Oxford Movement's goal was to bring the Church of England back to its Catholic roots. The movement tried to merge different beliefs into cohesive branches of one religious tree. Ideas and ideals got in the way, and a major legal battle ensued. Our history is filled with different religious movements that wanted change of some sort. Change is a hard pill to swallow even though we are in a constant state of change.

Fear certainly has a close bond with change. We fear change, and we fear when we think there is no change. Fear and change are strange bedfellows, and we constantly fuel their dreams. We could say our religious history has a lot to do with our fear of change. We have made that history the one light on which we focus. We believe our religious history is ancient, but it may not be as ancient as we believe. When we think about it, our religious history only represents one thin line of probabilities. We innately know that our religious history does not represent our entire reality. Our religious history is far more diverse in terms of cultures, physical rituals, wars and the fears associated with those interlocking realities. We choose to ignore the fact that there are endless possibilities and conscious developments that have been and will be part of our religious evolutionary system.

Newman’s statement about fear is a valid one in one respect. There is nothing to fear. Consciousness has no beginning or end. We create those restrictions in order to feel the religious reality we create. We focus on one thin line in our religious history in order to give our reality value and truth. Religion has value. Our valuable religion will always be filled with change as well as fear. We have always been beings of change, and creators of fear. But we want and will, at some point, experience other lines of our religious history without those strange bedfellows.

The Voice Of Creation

Her pure and eloquent blood spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, that one might almost say, her body thought.

John Donne, the 17th-century poet, wrote those thoughts in his 1611 work Of The Progress Of The Soul. We don’t realize how much our body says about us. We’re too busy listening to the static we create from our fears. We forget about our molecules and cells. In a sense, they do have a mind of their own. They constantly reinvent themselves, but thanks to our emotional energy we alter their bodily inventions. We don’t give ourself credit for those changes. It’s always something outside of us that is changing the way we look, feel and react.

Our bodies tell us what we think by how it functions, but we ignore those messages. We believe there are other influences that create our various dis-eases. We don’t take credit for creating an outward appearance that tells us about our inward state of mind. We want to hold someone or something accountable for what we create. Creation is too strong a word to own.

But we do create and our bodies think. They show us the true meaning of “expose yourself.” All we are and all we become is not by chance. It is by choice. The good news is regardless of our bodily state we can change. We can send messages to the body that give it what it needs to achieve our innate purpose. That purpose is always achieved through feeling every emotional experience.

Some bodies are bent, broken and deformed, but all bodies think for themselves until we decide to move on without them. The blood that speaks in our cheeks is the same timeless energy that speaks through our cells. That energy is the voice of creation.

Desires Make Us Human

You can't teach anybody anything. You can only show them that the answers are already inside of them.

Galileo, the 16th-century Italian genius, wrote those thoughts sometime during his illustrious life. It’s true. We believe we want to be taught how we got here. But at some point, we realize the answers to all our inner self questions are within us. We have the connection to the genius inherent in all consciousness. Off course, we can and do debate that fact.

We don’t experience this aspect of life as know-it-alls. We experience life to feel what we already know. We want to physically and emotionally feel each thought. Each thought is a burst of energy. Every thought manifests somewhere, somehow.

Our thoughts become things. We don’t always use the inner wisdom within us to think. We want to challenge what we think we know. When we do, we get closer to where we’re going. But we don’t always know where we’re going. And when we don’t know where we’re going, as the great Yogi Berra said, “we wind up somewhere else.”

Somewhere else is our place of expansion. Life is not about finding the self. We already know the location of the self. Life is for tweaking and expanding the self. We use the energy within us to accomplish those desires.

Desires are the catalyst for growth. Desire is action. It is the fuel for physical emotions. Desires hold the answers to all of our questions, or we would not create them. Desires make us human, but they also make us divine.