Contributor, ZenGardner.com
“Spirituality and being spiritual mystifies us from being all who we are truly meant to be.”
Soul Distinction:
We are not spiritual. When we are attempting to be spiritual, we are not being spiritual. We may practice one or many styles of spirituality enough to consider or call ourselves “spiritual.” Yet, by our very nature in relation to the common reality and the dynamic of contemporary society, we are not. We may give the appearance or impression that we are or do, though we truly aren’t and don’t. When we present ourselves as being “spiritual,” we aren’t “being” spiritual, but more often disingenuous, eccentric and superior. When we believe we are enlightened is usually when we are furthest from it.
Living a spiritual life is publicized as something we must learn and develop; yet it is something we rarely experience or become. Whatever medium of spirituality we may believe we are performing is a characteristic of our individual interpretation. It is simply not possible for us to share the “wisdom” we may discover, adopt, reflect or convey. It is ours alone and may only work for us in our lives. There are over six billion truths, perceptions, opinions and encounters with spirituality in the world. It is narcissistic to believe that “our” understanding of spirituality is universal or “the one.”
When we choose to embrace living a lifestyle that brings us into alignment with our soul’s purpose and destiny, we begin to draw lines of distinction between what we believe our path to be and what it truly is. More often than we would like to accept, how we choose to live determines whether we are talking and proselytizing a spiritual life or walking and living it. The use of the term “spiritual” implies that those whom are intending to be it are not. Most people that seek to live a spiritual life never realize that they may be feeding their ego more than they are being an expression of their soul.
Lost in the Logic:
Relation with the spirit is a very unique experience. When we attempt to quantify our illuminations using thought and reason, we have already diluted and eventually lost their true essence. When we listen to a spiritual speaker, read a book or an article or watch a video, we aren’t receiving the entirety of the message or its wisdom. It is compromised as soon as it is translated from a four-dimensional experience into a three-dimensional reality and captured with two-dimensional logic and ideology. As soon as we attempt to speak about it we have already lost it.
Many “spiritual” leaders, gurus, shaman, ministers, priests, etc. have sought to be an intercessor for all emanations of spirit. Many members of congregations, fellowships and religious and spiritual organizations have willingly sacrificed their personal truth, power, purpose, freedom and destiny seeking outside of them that which already abides within. The pursuit of artificial belonging, comfort, convenience and common belief ultimately “converts” a revolutionary, transformational four-dimensional experience into a contrived and routine two-dimensional secular sentence.
Ritual of Rhetoric:
As central as the ritual is to one’s practice, it is not the end all be all. It may seem ideal to live a life in constant ritual, yet it is not realistic, nor is it beneficial. At some point, all of us must return to our daily lives and apply to them what we have experienced in ceremony. If the spirituality one is practicing is not proactively useful, personally innovative and progressively transformational, it can become more of a detriment than a benefit. Millions of people use rituals everyday to escape the reality to which they subscribe. Even a ceremony can distract one from the evolution of their life.
Rituals open the door and guide a person into the realms of epiphany, consciousness, appreciation, transformation and wisdom. These practices allow us to step outside of our lives and ourselves and experience something new, bold, radical and revolutionary. They allow us to relate with our heart and soul through our connection with the vision, insight and expression of our intuition. Ceremonies balance our body and mind with our heart and soul. They assist us in establishing and maintaining the sacred alchemy of our four-dimensional potential.
Participating in ceremony is essential with our intention and need to live harmonically and symbiotically with our heart and soul. The frequency of our participation and our experiences help us to discover and sustain our awareness to, relation with and expression of the creative force of the universe. This is our fullest potential which all of us are born to bring into three-dimensional reality, beyond even our imagination. This is the life force that creates the possibility of transforming ourselves, our reality, our environments and ultimately the world.
Soul Distortion:
We have been turned around so many times in our lives by the common reality and the society in which we live that we fear and resist all that we should embrace and apply. We surrender and acquiesce to that which is outside of ourselves as our celebrated contemporary lifestyle. It has become the customary way of life. We have found a false sense of security, worth, empowerment and fulfillment in being afraid of our own shadows. Throughout our lives, our fear grows to be insurmountable. It ensnares us into a perpetual state of delusion, confusion and indifference.
Eventually, we allow the social rules, obligations and havoc of our human experience to distort our intuitive vision and suppress our emotional expression. We do not truly live. We merely survive a two-dimensional existence. We attempt to compensate for the lack or loss of our heart and soul with left-brained intelligence and gratifying our insatiable, instinctual desires. We become masters of reason, opinion, duality and common sense. With every shallow breath we take in our unconscious existence, we further sever our relation with our soul.
The Illusion:
Before we are able to comprehend the necessity of our relation to and expression of our spirit in our life, it is relentlessly charmed and seized by numerous facets of society. As children, we live from our heart and soul before our bodies develop and our minds are manipulated with two-dimensional intelligence. As we “mature,” our emotions are repressed and we are alienated from our intuition. We begin to believe the truth of those around us as we inhibit and bury our own. We live so removed from our heart and soul, what we are faced with on our deathbed is our fear of the unknown we ourselves enabled.
We are programmed, conditioned, educated, emasculated and enslaved into an artificial, three-dimensional reality living a two-dimensional existence. Everything that we are told we ought to live for by our family, friends, peers, teachers, preachers, professional associates and authoritative figures is the mask of the illusion we call “life.” We drive ourselves with the initiative of acquiring more to eventually buy our freedom from the communal prison of reality. When we reach the mountaintop of “retirement,” we isolate ourselves further from the world. Our surrender is complete.
The greatest illusion ever invented by humanity was the belief that we are separate and divergent from our soul. Our society is built upon this lie to sustain this deception for the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The common acceptance of this perception has segregated us from the extraordinary expression of who we truly are. It has condemned us to the shadows of existence from our fulfilled potential and the true purpose of our destiny. Yet it is our own fear of the pure power of our soul and our lack of loyalty to it that has suppressed and separated us from our four-dimensional experience.
We are whom we have been waiting for. We are the key that unlocks the door. This has always been the truth and purpose of our lives. This is why we are born into this artificial, three-dimensional reality and consistently challenged by a two-dimensional existence. It isn’t to sentence us to a life of fear, servitude, escapism and self-indulgence. It is to inspire and empower us to choose to transcend and transform this simulated reality. This is how we discover and declare our personal truth, power, purpose, freedom and destiny. This is how we become the soul we are meant to be.
“The greatest illusion isn’t that we are separate from each other.
The greatest illusion is that we are separate from our souls.”
– Iam
Source:
http://www.zengardner.com/the-greatest-illusion-2/