Natural Spirituality

The evolution of human consciousness takes place in cycles of expansion and contraction. The latter has now resulted in massive environmental, economic, political, and personal imbalance. Nevertheless, this evolutionary cycle has once more begun its expansive phase. Signs are growing spiritual interests, research in mind/body connection, and quantum physics. During these changing times it becomes important to focus on prevailing behavioral patterns that limit our receptivity to love and harmony with all people and the natural environment. Through purging judgment, releasing guilt, and by dismissing selfishness, greed, and excessive need for control or power, healthy responses begin to emerge from within. Thus, consciousness expands in the realm of natural truths that respect all life.

Human beings are equipped with the potential to overcome the cycles of life and death, growth and decay. Through merging individual consciousness with the infinite consciousness, it is possible to rise above the manifested creation. We are put together in a way that allows us to experience the joy of cosmic consciousness if we demonstrate our love for the Source above and beyond our love for the creation. Devotion is the vehicle that accomplishes the merging, provided that this is the most prevalent desire. For most people, of course, the love for things, other people, or for themselves as finite entities is much stronger than their devotion for God/dess. This is because we are all so attached to what we perceive through our senses, that we take it as the only reality.

The saints of this world say that when a person truly seeks enlightenment, he or she will make choices that eventually lead to absorption in spirit. This is contingent on desire, willpower, and ardent steadfastness in making the right choices. At some point, an individual’s desire to merge with the Source has grown so strong that she or he will adopt a spiritual practice, and follow it conscientiously. Gradually, and with much perseverance we can advance on this path. Since the ultimate success is programmed in, there is a way to evolve from ordinary existence with average human conscious awareness to the state of enlightenment. The path to enlightenment is Goddess’ grace to all human beings to dodge the imperfection of the wheel of life. Since the manifested creation is an invention of the Source, it is only fair that we, who are made in the image of the Great Spirit, should have a way to merge with that which created us.

The soul is the infinite image of the Source within each human being. When we learn to identify with the soul rather than with the ego and the senses, we are on our way to liberation. This soul of ours is already perfect. Even so, our conscious and subconscious identification first needs to evolve before we can realize this. What is more, we are not able to advance on this path when we suppress a part of ourselves. In recent history emotions were considered less important than the mind, some bodily functions needed to be suppressed, and the mind with its thoughts was seen as superior to the body. On the leading edge of soul growth, human nature and cultural conditioning require closer examination. The religious idea that humanity is separate from the Source caused a loss of inner authority. People were then prone to giving away their personal power to outside sources. They did no longer think and act from an inner knowing of the non-severable unity with that which created them. Instead, the concept of the Source developed into an intimidating male figure in the sky that judged and punished from his lofty place of cold detachment.

This judgment began to permeate the collective unconscious in ways people did not recognize for what it was. By bringing about an illusionary kind of guilt, it started a wailing wake of bad. As a result people were inclined to have one of two subconsciously induced reactions. Either they denied within their own psyche those feelings that were suppressed, while demonizing them in others, or they desperately tried to atone for what they sensed was unacceptable.

In the first case these faulty notions and suppressed emotional responses led to an aggressive behavior of blame. Individuals whose focus was mostly mental took to it in a detrimental attempt to disperse their uneasy sense of inner emptiness, insecurity, and unnatural guilt. They refused to consider other people’s needs, rights and feelings. Their stance of superiority and authority was based on an escape into selfish exploitation of others. Those who were emotionally susceptible took the victim’s stance, accepting their situation in powerless passivity. In the delusive thinking that they were less than what they were supposed to be, they became obsessed with trying to find out what they did wrong, or how they could fix it. It was as though they were constantly looking backward in reflection. The two behaviors locked into a tragic dance of dominance and submission. This in turn became a culturally conditioned mode of operation.

To this very day this unfortunate pattern perpetuates itself for lack of better judgment and right discrimination. Crisis is the stimulus for reflection. It is connected with a perpetual need to analyze the past, to bring it back to the present. “Where did I go wrong?” is the question that needs an answer. However, this answer is elusive because it belongs to an objective view that cannot be gained without detachment from the prevailing cultural norms and taboos. It is also important to understand that these distorted psychological conditions are more pronounced in some individuals than in others.

Once these patterns have become conscious, and we make a decision to change them within ourselves, the healing can take us out of the past and into the present. Here we see that there is nothing to feel guilty or worthless for. If these principles make rational and intuitive sense, if they speak to us on a gut and heart level, and if we find them reflected in our environment, we will be directed to grow with them. Over time our innate sense will develop in the direction it is intended and most beneficial for us. Since in essence this is a vast, culturally complex, deeply psychological, and highly spiritual issue, it may take time for these concepts to become really graspable.

Unnatural patterns do not only influence and negatively shape human relations from personal to international, but they are also very destructive to the relationship humans have with their natural environment. The machinations of deterioration so painfully obvious in the progressively disintegrating biosphere are in direct correlation with a resistance to consider the selfish and exploitative actions of power hungry human beings. If all of us adhered to the premises of sharing and non-violence most of us learned in our early years, people all over the world could be fed and sheltered. Ultimately we are all in this together, and if we behave accordingly, we help each other to evolve to ever deeper levels of this realization.