by Marc Allen
What has left us?
Spirit has left — the vital part of us that animates us, and that moves on to other worlds after our death, living forever.
Call it what you will: spirit, soul, life, life energy, higher power, the Tao, the Great Spirit, the Force. I heard someone put it this way in an AA meeting:
If you don’t believe in a higher power,
go make a blade of grass.
DISCLAIMER REPEATED
As I’ve said earlier, it isn’t necessary to accept my beliefs as your beliefs in order to make these tools work for you. It isn’t necessary to be a spiritual person, whatever that means for you, or even to believe in the existence of spirit. The tools in this Course will work for you as soon as you understand them in words that are clear and acceptable to you and you apply them in your life.
We’ve already seen an example earlier of a completely nonspiritual way to use these tools: Simply write your goals, every morning, over and over for a length of time. That little activity alone is enough to move you toward your goals.
Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by the spiritual, and so it is a fundamental part of this Course. But if you can’t or don’t want to relate to this spiritual stuff, just skim or skip this part, and any other parts you want to skip.
Take what you need, and leave the rest.
Find the tools that work for you,
and use them.
A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
There are many people who, for many reasons, deny that spirit or a spiritual level of being exists. You can’t measure it in any known scientific way, after all, and it seems impossible to even sense, much less understand, things that are beyond the five senses of the body. Many people are skeptical of all things spiritual, and believe death is the end of it all, and nothing continues after the life of our physical bodies.
I don’t know who it was that said that any new breakthrough ideas and great truths that come along are first laughed at, then resisted (sometimes violently), and then accepted as obvious truth. These truths may be scientific — look at how Galileo was persecuted for his beliefs — or spiritual — look at Jesus.
Many times it takes some kind of crisis to change our ideas and beliefs, like the death of a loved one or a near-death experience. At those times, our beliefs can change suddenly and dramatically.
It happened to me: I had two near-death experiences in my early twenties. I was an actor in a play called Faust — an original adaptation of the Faust legend in which Faust encounters the four enemies to the “man of knowledge” that Carlos Castenada described in The Teachings of Don Juan — ignorance, fear, pride, old age. Everyone in the cast — men and women — played Faust at different times, and I played him in a scene where I was persecuted for my scientific discoveries, and an angry crowd took me up to a platform high off the ground, put nooses around an arm, a leg, and my neck, and threw me off the platform, where I hung suspended in the air through the next scene.
I’d always catch the impact of the fall on my arm and leg, but something else happened the last two times I did it. Apparently I was caught by my neck first, right in the windpipe, because I immediately stopped breathing and lost all consciousness of my physical body. Both nights I had an identical experience:
Instead of feeling the impact of the ropes on my arm and leg, I was suddenly soaring along, sailing at great speed over beautiful green hills dotted with oak trees, like a scene from Tolkien, or the foothills of northern California. It was exhilarating.
I looked around to where I expected my arm and shoulder to be, and realized I didn’t have a physical body at all — and yet I was fully, wonderfully conscious. I was aware of my surroundings and my thoughts and feelings. I was continuing on, purely in thought, feeling, and spirit, leaving my physical body far behind. It was ecstatic.
The experience went on and on; it was absolutely as real as the experience I’m having right now as I sit here writing this — yet it was far more vivid and alive and memorable. It was undeniable proof to me of the existence of a spirit within that is far beyond our physical, emotional, and mental bodies or states of being.
Call that spirit what you will — and there is no need to argue about what we choose to name it. Eckhart Tolle simply calls it presence or being, and leaves it at that. You can call it consciousness, or awareness. Or spirit, or life. Or God. Or Christ consciousness. Or the Tao. Or Buddha mind, the awakened state, cosmic consciousness, or our spiritual nature. Or the Great Spirit, or the Universe. Or the Source, or reality, or Ultimate Reality, or the quantum field, or the field of all possibilities. Or a new phrase I heard recently: the Mother Wave. Or some other word of your choice.
It is beyond any label we can give it, because it is beyond thought, and beyond our thinking mind’s ability to express in words. In fact we need to go beyond thought to discover it. Great art can do it, being in nature can do it: shock us into mental stillness, so we can feel the spirit pouring through. Meditation can do it, being still and simply letting our thoughts go as they arise.
Who would have thought that the solution to so many of our problems is beyond thought?
The way we discover the spirit
is through cessation of thought —
then spirit shines through everything,
every molecule of the universe.
When we experience it directly, it is a wonderful thing. The fear of death weakens to a shadow of its former self. We realize that life in this physical body is but one brief stage of an endless and truly marvelous journey.
We realize we are far greater beings than we previously thought. We understand ourselves more completely, for we have a definite experience of all four levels of our being: physical, emotional, mental, and spirit.
Out of my body, I had a wonderful journey in spirit to worlds of spirit. It ended when I flew through a tunnel that was like a whirling funnel, and broke through a brilliantly shining light at the end — and was gazing into the face of the director of the play. He had noticed I was jerking spastically, and ran and got a ladder, climbed up and held me out of the ropes, then carried me down over his shoulder. (Thanks, Marlow Hotchkiss, for saving my life.) The play was so unusual the audience didn’t even know it wasn’t a normal part of the production, and it continued on. I laid on the floor. At first I didn’t want to come back to this life. I wanted to continue the journey. It felt like I had been through graduate school, and had to come back and start over in kindergarten.
I had already played that role about fifty times with no injury, so I did it again the next night, and had exactly the same experience. From then on, the director took over the role, and managed to be thrown into the ropes without nearly dying.
OUR FOUR LEVELS OF BEING
In those two near-death episodes, I had direct experience of a consciousness — of life — beyond my physical body. Let’s reflect on this awhile; there are some great keys to be discovered here — keys that can be life-altering.
It’s very good to ask this question: Who am I?
You can put it this way as well: What am I?
When we begin to answer that question, we see right away that we’re vastly complex, multifaceted beings. We realize — just as many spiritual traditions have taught for millennia, and science has taught for hundreds of years — that we have separate arenas of experience, distinct and different levels of being that can be described as separate bodies.
Each is a world unto itself. An ancient chant in Romany, the language of the Gypsies, gives us this key to understanding the nature of reality, of who we are:
Many earths on earth there be.
You could say it this way: There are many realities on Earth. During the course of our lives, we move through many very different worlds, and through different levels of being. Whether consciously or subconsciously, as we grow we try on different personas in different realities, and pick the ones we’re comfortable with.
We’ve all experienced each of these different levels of being, t
hough we tend to specialize in one or the other, and sometimes we try to avoid one or the other, or even deny it exists.
1. OUR PHYSICAL BODY. We each have a truly phenomenal physical body that grows from the union of two tiny cells, a sperm and an egg. Within those cells are complex DNA molecules that contain the instructions to build tiny biological nano-machines that in turn build the intricate systems that create and preserve this marvelous body.
We can easily see and feel this body. We are fully aware of it, at least in some ways much of the time. It feels solid; it seems we can easily perceive it, though it is actually in a constant state of flux, repairing and changing all the time. It seems quite separate from the other things around us, though scientists tell us that on a molecular level there is no definite boundary between the outer layer of our skin and the so-called outer world.
Einstein once wrote, “There are two ways to view the world: One is that there are no miracles, the other is that everything is a miracle. I choose the latter.” When we take an in-depth view of our physical bodies, it is obvious that they are miracles of creation.
2. OUR EMOTIONAL BODY. We all have a rich emotional life in addition to our purely physical existence. Sometimes our emotions completely dominate our consciousness. Some of us live on emotional levels of being almost exclusively — we’re carried along from one strong current of feeling to another, and our so-called outside world is vastly affected by our emotional states.
Within our emotional body we can hold a lot of pain — so much that, as Eckhart Tolle points out, we create a “pain body” that can dominate us and overwhelm us. Many people identify so strongly with their pain body they mistake it for who they really are, and it runs their lives. They don’t even realize there are other levels of being, some of them capable of calmly watching the play of emotions from a different level of consciousness.
In other words, we are greater than our emotional life, just as we are greater than our physical body and our mental capabilities. We can go beyond our body, our emotions, and our mind and quietly observe them from another level of being.
Our emotional body is much more than a body of pain, of course. We all experience a vast range of emotions, including love and joy as well as anger and fear. And within these currents of feeling in our body is the gateway to our intuition and to a life well lived.
We are all psychic, to some degree. We just need to tune in to our emotions, our feelings, for a wealth of intuitive knowledge and psychic information. It is always there, within us, waiting to be discovered. It has a still, small voice, and once we learn to listen to it, it will answer any questions we ask.
3. OUR MENTAL BODY. We have amazing mental capabilities, a great life and unique world that is exclusively of the mind. We have evolved a tremendous cerebral cortex with abilities we have only dimly begun to realize. The mind is limitless, infinitely expansive, able to penetrate the far mysteries of the known universe, able to probe beyond what is known.
A great many people in our culture are predominantly in this mental body, most of the time. Most of our formal education is exclusively mental. Most of us have a constant stream of words going through our consciousness, an endless mental commentary. Sometimes it’s enough to give us a headache.
Eckhart Tolle mentions the crazy people in our cities who go down the street yelling or muttering constantly. He says most of us are just like those people, except we keep our mouths shut. We still have a constant stream of thoughts — and many of us completely identify with those thoughts, and think that’s who we are. We find something truly amazing and wonderful happens when we learn to find the “off” key that can quiet those thoughts, even if for just a few moments.
The great English writer John Milton suggested we look at it this way:
The mind is its own place, and can create
a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
If we can understand that, we can create a heaven on Earth. The mind is a wonderful tool, a great servant, but not a good master. The mind needs to be guided by the spirit. Once it is, it is limitlessly powerful.
4. OUR SPIRITUAL BODY. We all have a life of the spirit. We know it as children; we know it as we approach death. Many of us forget it in between. And yet it is the greatest part of who we are. It is the most expansive part of us, the highest, the most rewarding, the subtlest, the brightest, the most elusive, the most wonderful. It is the source of a peace beyond description, a peace that knows no opposite.
We are beings of spirit.
It is the part of us that never dies.
We are beings of light who live forever.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it brilliantly: We aren’t physical beings who may have an occasional spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.
If we can understand that, it puts every moment of our lives in a much greater perspective.
Take a moment to relax. Let all thought go for a moment and try to see, feel, sense, grasp, understand your spiritual nature.
Stop thinking for a moment. Close your eyes and meet your spirit. It is your presence, your being. It is your life energy.
When we consciously enter the vast body of our spirit, we understand the great truth behind all religions — we understand the “gospel,” which means “the good news”: We are spiritual beings who live forever. We are filled with an energy, a presence, that animates us and that lives eternally. We see that we truly are One with All, ultimately, a perfect part of the endless quantum field.
The key to this understanding is within us: The Kingdom of Heaven is within. It is our essential nature. We are an essential part of the all knowing, all powerful, and omnipresent source of creation.
Prayer and meditation give us access to this reality. Through prayer, we invite spirit into our physical, emotional, and mental lives. Through meditation, we can directly experience our spiritual nature, our oneness with all of creation, the truth of who we really are. For in reality we are directly connected, always and eternally, to the source of the creation of all. When we ask that source for guidance, we receive it.
Spirit is always waiting to answer your prayer.
Ask and you shall receive.
This is the power of prayer.
THE POWER OF PRAYER
We discover a great key once we understand our spiritual nature. It is a key not only to tangible, worldly success, but also to something far more important, a key to what is most important in life for all of us, in whatever words we want to use — fulfillment, contentment, self-realization, self-actualization, serenity, enlightenment, peace. Find the word that’s best for you.
The spiritual path is simple,
direct, and greatly rewarding.
Ask in prayer, and let God work out the details.
One of India’s greatest contributions to the world is its vast body of ancient spiritual literature. The most accessible work that I have found so far is The Bhagavad Gita, or “The Divine Song.”*
This great book gives us the story of the Divine Krishna talking to the very human Arjuna as they are poised on the field, preparing to fight the greatest battle of Arjuna’s life. Krishna speaks with the gentle and powerful voice of Divinity, and gives us clear, transcendent instructions for a life well lived, and for full realization of the eternal wonder of who we really are. The key is to live a spiritual life — to have an awareness of our spiritual being, and to let that guide us at all times. The key is to remember that God (or spirit, or whatever word we choose) is all knowing, all powerful, and omnipresent, within every atom of the universe — including ourselves.
When we call upon God, when we realize the presence of God within us, in whatever way we understand God, we avail ourselves of the creative forces of the universe.
When we pray,
we set in motion the ever-mysterious forces
that create the answers to our prayers.
The Bhagavad Gita goes into this in fascinating detail. It says, for example, there are f
our types of people on the spiritual path:
1. Those who are world weary or ill physically or disturbed mentally. The Gita nonchalantly says that the spiritual path will inevitably help these people receive what they want and need in life. If they ask, they will receive.
2. Those who are dissatisfied and wish to improve their lot in life, those who want more prosperity or satisfaction or fulfillment. Here too, the Gita says that the spiritual path works perfectly for those wanting to improve their lives.
3. Those who realize that the spiritual path is far more valuable than anything else in life, and seek a life of the spirit. They too will be guided by spirit to realize who they are. If they seek, they will find. They will attain self-realization, an awareness of their eternal connection to the Divine.
4. Finally, there are those who have already attained a state of constant awareness and realization of their spiritual nature. These people seek nothing, and need nothing. They have realized the reality of our spiritual nature.
The Gita states the truth so simply and clearly and emphatically it is downright blunt. We can put it this way:
If we pray, our prayers will be granted.
If we seek to be guided by spirit,
we will be guided by spirit,
and everything else in our lives
will fall into place perfectly.
THE POWER OF RITUAL
It is a very good practice to start the day with a ritual of some kind that acknowledges and remembers your spirit. It’s good to have an afternoon or evening ritual as well. And it’s good to have something that reminds you to acknowledge spirit many times throughout your day. I wear a ring to remind me. It can be a piece of jewelry, an affirmation on a card in your pocket, a photo, a rubber band, a screen saver, anything.
