I know: you never thought you’d find the ultimate answers to life’s questions in a blog, but I was prompted to share something that really was quite basic to my own awakening and resuming this spiritual path.
Some of my favorite dialogue from the Monty Python movie may be relevant:
Chaplain: Let us praise God. O Lord…
Congregation: O Lord…
Chaplain: …Ooh, You are so big…
Congregation: …ooh, You are so big…
Chaplain: …So absolutely huge.
Congregation: …So absolutely huge.
Chaplain: Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell You.
Congregation: Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell You.
Chaplain: Forgive us, O Lord, for this, our dreadful toadying, and…
Congregation: And barefaced flattery.
Chaplain: But You are so strong and, well, just so super.
Congregation: Fantastic.
Humphrey: Amen.
Congregation: Amen.
I love that “prayer”. Brilliant satire.
The men of Python were most astute. The above, essentially, is the form that most prayer takes within organized religious tradition. It is also one of the main things that made me question those religions all my life. My thinking was something like: if God is so big (and by definition He must be), why on Earth would He need us to constantly tell Him so? Does it mean that God is the ultimate insecure bully…needing constant praise and adoration and punishing us if we don’t do that (and often, even if we do)? Sorry – it just doesn’t make sense to me. The concept of “worship” in the sense provided by religion may have served a purpose, but man has evolved past that.
When I awakened and resumed my spiritual seeking in earnest a few years ago, the first book I was drawn to read was The God Theory, by Bernard Haisch. Through my intuition, I aready instinctively felt there was another “realm” of existence, and that in that case there would probably be an over-arching theme…some reason for what we see (and don’t see) to exist.
I was looking for a theory of the Divine that I could relate to science in some way, as well as for some ideas regarding why, if there were a God, He would bother to manufacture creatures in the first place. I was pretty sure it couldn’t be the Monty Python version.
The God Theory changed my life. Many other books or teachers might have gotten me going in the right direction, but in my case this was really my launching point. Yours may well be different, but I do highly recommend the book. It is broad enough to postulate answers to the big questions; for me, once I had a feel for that order of magnitude (as well as a human mind can, I think), I could go on to parse things down to the level where we live on this plane.
To my mind, the Godhead created us in order to experience His own creation in the fullest sense possible. To this end, He (or It if you prefer) generated tiny pieces of Himself; our souls. I think of it as the spiritual equivalent of the Big Bang – a cosmic explosion where the Godhead exhaled, and expelled a million million particles of Divinity across existence. Thus he dispersed His consciousness far afield, creating Something out of Nothing.
These particles of God are what we are. But simply replicating Himself wasn’t enough – experiences had to be created. The particles had to be altered to vibrate at a far lower frequency than the Source, otherwise there could be no new experience. Growth and evolution are the objects of and facilitators of experience. Movement gives life to our souls…not only movement, but acceleration, is necessary for God to experience himself to the fullest. Note that when you are moving along with the flow of a river, you are indeed moving; but it is only when you exert effort to change direction or speed relative to the river that you can change your situation. But I digress.
Being the particles of God that we are, still we are God. (Oh horrors, heresy; if your Christianity is offended and you are concerned with this concept I direct your attention to Psalms 82.6: “You are gods; you are all sons of the Most High. But you will die like mere men.”). So, in order to force change and experience, what we see as physical reality was created. Our souls by themselves are much closer to Source than our minds or egos are. So in order to create growth, these particles of God are placed into a vehicle – our bodies. A veil is dropped over our perceptions, and so at birth our salmon-like swim upstream begins, experiencing all that “reality” has to offer, learning and growing on our way back to Source.
Unfortunately, not all experiences are pleasant. As I see it, the Godhead wants to experience everything. From that perspective, there are no “good” or “bad” experiences. The idea that being born a starving child in Somalia or dying horribly as a victim of a Nazi concentration camp is repellent; but there’s no denying those are powerful experiences and growing tools.
From the big , wide viewpoint of a soul perspective, we may live a life of agonizing misery, but once it’s over, we absorb the lessons we’ve contributed to Consciousness, and then begin planning the next life. One life spent in misery, from this perspective, means nothing compared to the hundreds or thousands of lives available to each soul.
And yes, I believe we do plan out our incarnations to some extent. We can’t dictate the whole story, because free will is the province and growth-tool of the incarnated ego; but, we can choose to be born into situations that we see will likely lead to the experiences we want to have in order to learn. Indeed, in many cases we probably choose some lifetimes in which to act as bit players on the world’s stage; perhaps a soul needs to have the experience of losing a child, so we agree to be incarnated for a mere 5 hours. Or the population of earth needs to learn compassion, so thousands of souls agree to spend a few years incarnated as those starving Somalian infants. Might be you this time…next time, it might be my turn. Either way, when it’s all over we return to the place of Light whence we came, and the planning begins again.
On your path to enlightenment, it is well to remember that although the goal is important, the path itself is paramount. It ain’t where you’re going; it’s how you get there.
All a matter of definitions. Thanks for your comment.
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From what I understand, we can become guides and teachers in the spirit realm if we wish, once we have grown in maturity enough (after learning our lessons through incarnating).
Oh okay. Well, thank you Michael because I always thought that eventually we would learn all our lessons and then move up and become spirit guides, guardian angels , or something of that nature.
Well, I don’t know that, Mecedes. Maybe we do know that on some level…but that’s a little too specific for me, at least! :)I would say it’s probably not that cut-and-dried – probably different for every soul.
In Soul Realignment we can measure the “vibration rate” of a soul, which in a way is a measurement of how close we are to ascending to the next level of existence. It give one an idea of how hrad you’re been working on your spiritual development.
BTW…we will never be angels. They were created apart from our type of souls – they have different jobs to do.
Okay I thimk I understand it now. Incarnation is what we choose to learn our lessons while karma is how we learn the lesson. Say for instance, I am a thief I have to experience going to jail or what not to learn the lesson of not taking what doesn’t belong to me. So how many lessons does a soul have to learn in order to become a spirit guide or an angel,plain and simple not to return to earth again?
You’re talking about karma…every action has a reaction. In my understanding, when we die we undergo a life review wherein we experience all the good and bad we’ve done…if we’ve caused pain to others, we experience that same pain. Thus karma is a learning tool.
Incarnating is a method we choose in order to learn from karma. Without being incarnated we would not be doing the things that bring karmic experiences, and thus learning.
Ideally, we can learn the lessons in this life and correct our behavior, then move on to another lesson. If not, we’ll repeat the lesson in the next incarnation until we do learn that particular lesson.
One block/restriction we often find in a Soul Realignment reading is called the “perception of unresolved karma”. It involves a lesson that we have already learned, but the experiences around that lesson were so strong and negative that we unnecessarily continue to attract situations to reinforce the lesson – sort of like having passed a test in school but continuing to study constantly because we’re afraid we really don’t know the material. This is cleared in a realignment because it just gets in the way of moving on to the next lesson we need, whatever that may be.
I always thought of re-incarnation as going through things until a person gets it right, say you came here on earth and you were a thief you will continue the same pattern until in one of your lifetime you decide to change. Am I summarizing things right? How can a person move to a higher vibration or move closer to the source if it still has not decided to change his or her old ways.