[This was written spontaneously, late Tuesday night, June 27, 2017, not in response to, but merely by reading the title of a recently published Elephant Journal article about "Breaking Up With Spirituality."]
Living spirituality starts and ends with true spiritual conception - that regardless of body, mind, species or realm, we are all eternal spirit souls choosing lessons and experiences in varying degrees of subtle or dense dimensions of existence. Realizing spirituality is literally a re-membering that we were never not spiritual, that we just forgot in our insistence upon mundanity and ego conception, and that in truth, we are never separate from spirit. The moment I begin judging others' spirituality or their attempts at it, however thinly veiled they may or may not be, is the moment my consciousness is displaced from its original enlightened nature and becomes distorted in my personal projection of other, from ego, and in a way that immediately creates and holds them as something less than a divine spirit soul. We are all in various stages of remembering, forgetting or being tossed about by material energies like a matchbook on the ocean waves. Being spiritual, or aspiring for spirituality in our lives, births the discernment that is love in action - it is not aloof or inactive. This skillful means gives us the ability to navigate circumstances and situations with the utmost clarity and compassion while also being able to maintain our innate soul state which is unfathomable peace, while incessantly, tirelessly choosing to act as an instrument of divine will to alleviate the suffering of beings, and also offering those actions and the fruits of our actions to our Beloved, staying light and joyful to the best of our abilities, even in laughter. Spirit is the inseparable web of oneness that the entirety of divine creation, in all of its seamless, multidimensional expressions and possibilities of experience and existence, hangs upon. Spirit responds to the love that we are, as an individual. Our love, in devotional surrender, with child-like eyes, restored to original innocence, tugs on the dazzling strings of that great web, and with the dance of miracle consciousness, the dawning of our enlightenment, spiritual realization ensues. As there is no place that spirit is not, there is no place where God is not. This is incredibly significant, for the moment we become humble, present, sincere and surrendered in our efforts to be an instrument of divine will, to move beyond ego, material conception, and body/mind identity, we actually begin to perceive that we are eternal now, not at death or some later point, and that Self-revelation and the rekindling of the eternal relationship to the Supreme Beloved, is not only possible in this life, but is meant for this life and that there is nowhere to go (externally or linearly) but deeper into one's own spiritual heart. Even the conception of increasingly more subtle dimensional realms to ascend through to some idealized perfection or even a linear conception of near inextricable karmic cycles and wheels of life, become like dense bars, iron curtains even, of paradigmic and institutionalized rules and structures, whereby we need an outer permission or yet another magic key which we do not possess, to dare enter or transcend. We do not have to go anywhere to find spirit or the Beloved, and this grace-filled realization gives rise to lila consciousness, the worldview that this life is part of the eternal divine play with God and spirit, thereby shifting us out of victim programming and even out of the drama and tragedy aspects of our stories and into a love-fueled, service-based life of coming to realize that all creation is divine and sacred, and here, now in this realm, lies our potential freedom… and the Beloved. Transcending the illusion of ego, of finiteness, of forgetting our eternal soul identity and the ecstasy and light of our own being, isn't going anywhere but deeper into the Sacred Heart in surrender, sincerity and humility. Transcendence (or yoga or ascension) is not spiritual escapism, trying to skirt 'what is,' or unaccountability, but to the contrary, is the deepest accountability and exploration of own individual lives, conceptions, beliefs, circumstances, our relationship to Earth and all of life, in the intuitive awareness that it is possible to remove the astigmatism of avidya, ignorance - forgetfulness of our spiritual identity free of all material conception and covering - while in this body and in this realm. Our vision thereby returns to its original spiritual state. Love is the only entrance key to the Sacred Heart, this magical portal to all that is, and it is the individual alone, that is Gatekeeper and Key Holder. Yet, the number of Avatars and Masters and Archangels helping us now is beyond our wildest dreams as they flood to our aid in direct proportion (and beyond) to our surrender and sincerity and humility, even merely by asking for guidance, and even transmuting seemingly inescapable programs, karmas and desires born of our own infinite lifetimes of forgetfulness, with rays of alchemy that we will soon come to know as divine grace in action. In the end, there is no amount of effort that can wrangle, force, or bring about our eternal spiritual identities. Practices create the framework whereby we can assert our sincerity and utilize 'time' to engage in such helpful, persistent, reminders and pursuits. What we have been seeking for lifetimes outside the Self, outside of the eternal relationship to the Beloved, beckons and calls and awaits the turning inward of the light of awareness. The heights of Divine, spiritual creation exist Now, in the Sacred Heart. Everything we have ever sought exists eternally in us, as us, in ecstasy, light, peace and wisdom. And while there is literally nowhere to go to remember and reclaim the Kingdom, it may as well be as far away and inaccessible as the most indefinable outter edge of the vastness of the infinite universe(s) or the third parties that we assign our security and salvation to. It is Grace alone, that delivers us into that sweetest of all places, within, where all is revealed and where all is healed. It is Grace alone that triggers the evolutionary process of re-membering and reclaiming of our divine identity while in a human body. Remember, we are already eternal and free, in spiritual conception - but some bodily systems and the 'by design' hyperfocalized, linear aspects of brain/mind, need to update and integrate to experience I AM in this vessel. Grace is the Divine force that makes the impossible possible, and possible without effort. A bhakta, lover of God, becomes dependent on the presence and operation of grace. Most of the yoga practices are to remove everything mundane that we have placed between ourselves and our Beloved and the eternal presence and workings of that grace.
We may even begin to perceive that the Earth is a more miraculously divine and profound place than we could have ever dreamed of, in that the relative short life span and the friction caused by what has been the prevailing, forgetful, dualistic bandwidth of consciousness, may cosmically provide optimum conditions to launch to the heights of spiritual investigation and remembering while in a body, if we so choose. When we choose Divine Love, the non-dual ground of being, as expressed in the highest qualities such as compassion, non-harming and forgiveness in the free will choice to choose otherwise, we are actually evolving our consciousness and triggering the mechanism in our DNA to give birth to the Christed human, the yogi, here on Mother Earth. Yes if we become quiet and still enough, we are indeed witnessing evolution in the quantum leap of one birth, yet that is merely from the linear perspective of a human on earth. The soul, our eternal spiritual identity is forever free, spotless and does not suffer despite our forgetful insistences to the contrary. This spiritual consciousness has always been available on this planet, though prevailing paradigms, densities, looping karmic cycles, disconnection from the Earth and all life, astrological alignments, etc., have rendered its accessibility challenging, or even completely hidden by institutional agendas and power plays. We may begin to perceive that sacred Earth holds a rare and unique place in all that is, as it is a powerful portal, where the Masters and Avatars have walked, in the fulfillment of the becoming of the cosmos in love and the Earth as a planet of unity and peace - a rare place where it is possible to have an embodied spiritual experience in the fullness of that remembering.