"Apprenticed to the Spirit"

[Ulises]

Just released: "Apprenticed to the Spirit", the memoirs of David Spangler. A jewel of abook. A deeply healing spiritual detox, an emergent new spirituality (honoring Gaia, boundaries...), among other things...in many respects, very resoan (to me)of Taoism

 

Some quotes:

 

A STRING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

I came to realize he was working working with me at both ends, so to speak: training me to attune to the higher frequencies of my soul but also training me to appreciate and attune to the resources of spirit and sensitivity within my body. In fact, he was asking me to go beyond such designations as 'body' and 'soul'. "You are an spectrum of consciousness," he said once. "You are not a soul in a body like a driver in a car. You, like everyone, are more like a string that has been tied into a series of knots. Each knot is a mode of consciousness. You look at the knots and say, 'I am this body' or 'I am this soul', but in truth, you are the string."

 

From John's perspective, it was ultimately the string that perceived, the string that discerned, the string that had consciousness.

 

***

 

"The point is that the world, like you and I, exists in different states of beingness and relationship with its environment. Some of these states emphasize distinction and difference and others emphasize unity and oneness. None is better than the other. All are necessary. The partnership of the world with the cosmos occurs along all these avenues of relationship, and that is true for you and me in our partnership as well. There is the universal and the individual, the vast and the particular, and both are needed, both are real."

 

***

"When you say that you behaved badly because of your personality or your ego, who is the "you" who is saying that? When you say that your ego or personality is the negative side of you, who is the positive side? Who is the self that has a negative and a positive side like good and bad sets of luggage, and what will that self become if you keep one side but eliminate the other?

 

You are drawing an artificial line, creating a new inside and a new outside, saying in effect the personality appears to be you but is not the 'real you' or the spiritual you. You think that the real you is the inner self but that the personality is outside who you are, a false self. But once you have purged this false self, what is to stop you from drawing that line again and again, always dividing yourself into the part you like and the part you don't, the part that behaves and the part that doesn't, a new inner part and a new outer part, a new 'true self' and a new 'false self'? Where does that process end?

 

From our perspective, the personality is created in relationship to the world; it is the expression of a relationship. It is you as soul in a certain mode or function of relationship. If it is dysfunctional and negative, as it may become, the blame does not lie either in the personality or the world but in the way the relationship is being constructed. That is a pattern you have the power to change through understanding, through love, and through practice. But you begin the change by honoring the function and the relationship. Honoring the personality and its purposes is a step toward the integration and wholeness you seek."

***

"Our advice is to be careful of those perspectives that divide you, especially if in that division one part is turned against the other. Both you and we are diminished by the idea that the spiritual and the personal are in conflict and that for one to triumph, the other must be overcome. When you assign all the blame and responsibility for your problems to a particular part of yoruself, yoou are creating a scapegoat. You spend energy and time trying to kill the scapegoat, which in the end does little to solve the problem.

 

If you behave badly, instead of saying, 'This is the fault of my personality or my ego', say simply, 'This is my fault. i have behaved badly'. Let your whole self take the responsibility rather than lying the blame on just a part of you. herein lies the possibility of learning, healing, and wholeness. Your personality does not make the choices that become negative actions. You do. You are soul and personality, a single thread on which is tied two knots. Honor that wholeness. If you can make a mistake, you can correct it and you can learn from it. Taking responaibility opens the door to wsidom. Otherwise you are always a distraught master trying to control and discipline an unruly horse."

***

"The personality is not your 'lower self'. You have no 'lower self' as such. What you have is a part of your soul adapted to function in engagement and connection with the particulate nature of the incarnate realm. Nor do you have a 'higher self'. These are constructs you form in your mind, and by the power of your belief, you can bring them into being and divide yourself. What you have is a single self with different functions and attributes that you are seeking to express in wholeness. What you have are differences within you, not separate entities or selves. In some ways, these differences are highly creative, but because they are different, they can come into conflict and they can interfere with each other's function. Your incarnate energies can interfere with and in turn be interfered with by the energies of your soul, but the solution is not to eliminate one or the other but to develop the skills of integration and synthesis. You, in your incarnate experience of yourself, are not one or the other, personality or soul, but that which emerges from the interaction and blending of a wide spectrum of energies, physical and non-physical. I don't care what you call yourself or this emergence as long as you see yourself as a wholeness.

***

Wholeness is not the same as unity or oneness. Wholeness comes from differentiation and maintains that differentiation to generate a flow of energy that supports interconectedness and organization. Its purpose is to enhance and promote emergence. Wholeness is created and maintained by the power to hold oneself in being and simultaneously to give oneself away. Wholeness emerges from a creative tension and engagement between the part and the whole. The universe unfolds from such tension. Oneness, on the other hand, the unity of all that is, is the mystery on which all things rest. It is the rest state that complements the drive to create wholes.

***

We cannot assume the sacredness nor spiritual livingness of the earth or accept it as a new ideology or as a sentimentally pleasing idea. We must experience that life and sacredness, if it is there, in relationship to our own and to that ultimate mystery we call God. We must experience it in our lives, in our practice, in the flesh of our cultural creativity. We must allow it to shape us, as great spiritual ideas have always shaped those who entertain them, and not expect that we can simply use the image of Gaia to meet emotional, religious, political, or even commercial needs without allowing it to transform us in unexpected and radical ways. The spirituality of the earth is more than a slogan. It is an invitation to initiation, to the death of what we have been and the birth of something new.

***

"The intelligences that act as the souls of the planets, such as the soul of your world, seek to create conditions and connections that allow life and consciousness to emerge, grow, and gain in potential and capacities. They incubate participants in the ongoing co-creative emergence of the universe. When you, through your acts of will and love, enhance the creative ability of another, by which I mean enhancing the well-being and wholeness of their lives so that they may grow and prosper, you are acting and thinking like a planet."

***

I found myself immersed in verdant life, surrounded with varying shades of green. It was like being in the middle of a green fog and in the midst not of living creatures but of the power and vitality of life itself. I had a sense of an immense presence, a bit like being at the base of a mountain, only more so. I felt a multitude of impressions and images pressing in on me, more than I could process or interpret.

 

Then the fog parted, and I gained a different perspective. Things began to fall into place, or at least, my mind began to fashion an image it could comprehend and use to organize what I was experiencing. I was seeing the world from a distance, but it did not at all resemble the images of the planet from space. Everything remained green, and there was no differentiation between oceans or continents. It was like looking at the biomass of the earth presented as a collage of images of various life-forms, from microbes to moose, from protozoa to pinewoods, with fish, birds, animals, humans, plants all represented. This was very impressionistic, with a few sharp details, including landscapes such as forests and mountains. And underneath the green light was a deeper core of light that to my sight was a reddish gold, conveying a sense of love.

 

Quite beyond the imagery, however, was a sense of presence. It felt vast, but at the same time it felt intimate. I did not feel diminished by its vasteness. I felt that whatever this was, I was part of it, and it was part of me.

"This," John said, "is the World Soul. It is the life and consciousness that infuse the world, giving of itself to support all the other lives that are evolving on this planet. Humanity is helping it to incarnate, but its gift back is to enable you to develop a planetary consciousness. This is an essential part of your destiny as a species, a destiny which you are confronting at this time in history."

***

 

 

~David Spangler, "Apprenticed to Spirit"

Edited October 5, 2011 by Ulises

[Marblehead]

"The point is that the world, like you and I, exists in different states of beingness and relationship with its environment. Some of these states emphasize distinction and difference and others emphasize unity and oneness. None is better than the other. All are necessary. The partnership of the world with the cosmos occurs along all these avenues of relationship, and that is true for you and me in our partnership as well. There is the universal and the individual, the vast and the particular, and both are needed, both are real."

 

I like that very much.

 

I have tried to say that many times myself but have never been as successful as this quote above is.

 

I thank you for sharing that.

[Ulises]

My joy! = )

Edited October 5, 2011 by Ulises