Understanding soul and spirit (from April 2018)

Thursday, April 26, 2018

It is a mistake to think, “There is reality, separate from me, outside of me, and I am a latecomer to the program.” You as 3D individual came late to the show, but to say that is to ignore your connection to all the rest of you that co-exists with the reality of the 3D universe since its beginnings. This is not metaphor, not poetic license. It is fact, but requires explanation.

I assumed you meant that we in our individual lives are souls, but in our connection to our Sam are spirit, and not spirits plural but spirit singular.

Sometimes you surprise us with your leaps.

How can I surprise you? Don’t you know what I know? And before I do, myself, sometimes?

No, it isn’t that predictable. Your life in 3D is like peering out in a rainstorm. Much of the time, your vision is clouded by internal and external factors, and you can see only so far. Then there will be a sudden clearing – lightning, say – and for an instant you will get glimpses of things far away and usually hidden. That is what happened just now, or so it seems to us.

Interesting. Okay, so –?

So the part of you that is undifferentiated spirit knows things that you-as-fragment cannot, even in connection with your non-3D resources (when considered strictly in connection with your individual soul, rather than with your Sam).

I keep forgetting that we have to adjust our ideas about our non-3D component, ceasing to think that “non-3D = spiritual,” any more than “non-3D = infinite knowledge.”

It is a major readjustment, but it clarifies how you think about many things.

Now, what does it mean for you, in practice rather than theory, that you are in intimate connection with the one undivided eternal spirit? Does it not entirely change your world?

  • How can the indefinable, eternal, undivided spirit, coexistent with the founding of the 3D world itself be threatened by contemporary (or past, or future) events?
  • How can it cease to exist?
  • How can it be harmed or even impeded?
  • How can it be even opposed, given that it is part of the whole and – in a way – is the whole?

You as 3D mind see reality from the soul’s point of view. You identify with the body’s limitations, and to the extent that you learn to perceive your non-3D components, it is you incorporating a larger field of activity into the already existing, already defined, 3D personality. (There’s nothing wrong with this. It is an inevitable first step. We are not criticizing but analyzing.)

You as spirit existing mostly in the background of 3D mind is a thing to be considered separately. You as spirit know better than to think that life is merely 3D life, or that your soul is all you are. You as spirit identify not with any one character in the play, nor even with the playwright, nor even with the theater director, but with everything.

Well, how easily do you suppose that a point of view that identifies with everything can make itself clear to a point of view that identifies around one body and soul? You as spirit can hardly even be called a point of view; more like, a field of view. There isn’t the distortion of perspective caused by a single viewing-point.

So, I gather than the point is that if we learn to express, or experience, the undivided-spirit field of view, our way of experiencing the world, our lives, changes too.

What you said isn’t wrong, but it is far from the whole story. It isn’t so much about your potential to live a satisfying, less fear-filled life – though this is an obvious side-effect – as it is your potential to help all of you manifest rather than any of you.

I have been thinking of it as, “Growing to see things this way is important in our self-development.” I think you are saying, “Yes, that’s all well and good, but it isn’t about you as individual souls, really, but about the one undivided spirit.” Only, it’s difficult to apply that in practice.

But not so difficult in concept.

  • In concept you can see that what benefits the whole may or may not immediately benefit the part.
  • In fact, the immediate effect for some parts may be harmful, at least in its 3D manifestations.
  • So, from your soul perspective, you will count the cost to your 3D persona.
  • From your undivided spirit perspective, you will not only be willing that the cost be paid, you may not count it as a cost at all.

This is the psychology of religious martyrs, isn’t it?

That’s too broad a generalization, but that is a part of it, yes. Opinion, stubbornness, opposition, circumstance may all enter into it, but the martyrs who went cheerfully to their death obviously were identifying not with their one, 3D, contingent, liable-to-destruction selves but with the eternal sureness underneath, the eternal untouchable part of themselves. How they thought about it didn’t really affect what was going on, except that it gave them courage and sureness. But the identification did not depend on the definitions they put around it.

 

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