How do you know if you are living a spiritual life?

What happens when the spirit becomes real?

To know what you are, you must go beyond the mind.  Awareness is the point at which the mind reaches out beyond itself into reality.  In awareness, you seek not what pleases but what is true… You rotate into a new dimension, seeing from which the previous ones are mere abstractions.  Just like on sunrise, you see things as they are.  So on self-realization, you see everything as it is.— Nisargadatta

Last essay, I ended with this quote from Nisargadatta.  I reminded me of a passage I wrote in a book I finished seven years ago but never published, Spirit Athlete.  I was told at the time that by my spirit, that it was too soon to release the book, and so I put a few years of work on the shelf.  I finally feel called by my own spirit to edit and publish it.  The entire book was essentially “downloaded” from some kind of spiritual source which came to me while I was on an exercise bike.  The book was about how different movement and exercise would be IF we came at it from the reality of spirit as an unlimited superior conscious energy working through our bodies, beyond our personal minds and conditioning. 

It serves as an intriguing point of departure on the question of this essay:  “How do you know if you are living a spiritual life?”  For if we could demonstrate physically that spirit can transform us FROM beyond ourselves TO some state of being and awareness beyond ourselves, then we have a certain kind of proof of the spirit, the higher and realer, that can transform OUR human experience in evident ways, not simply as tricks of the mind or imagination.  What are the tiny miracles that can poke through the fabric of a mind-driven human dream to reveal the fuller, deeper reality of spirit?  

I claimed in the last essay that we can only become deeper, truer, and higher by opening to an intelligence and wisdom beyond ourselves.  Some people call this “God”. Others call it “Spirit”.  Others refer to beings greater than themselves.  Many of you have, no doubt, have experienced at certain points in your life a preternatural intuition that shows you surprising things, things that pull back the curtain of life beyond your limited understanding of the world and of yourself. Where does that come from?  It often feels like it comes from OUTSIDE, but it is ARISES deeply INSIDE.  It does not come from the mind, but usually through the heart or the gut or some more ethereal place in oneself.

If we examine this experience deeply.  If we meditate upon its nature and contemplate its attributes we come to an interesting conclusion:  We are not “doers” with personalities and separate individualities, but rather unlimited souls participating in a “deed” larger than us.  We have chosen to build a house to live in called our bodies and way of apprehending and analyzing our experience called our minds.  But these are not the engines or drivers of our realities.  They house and respond to reality.  They do not create it.  The may RE-CREATE reality in imagination and assumption, and they may manage the torrent of intelligence and energy given by the spirit, but they do not create reality, any more than a film creates the reality it depicts. 

So below is a kind of guided meditation straight from the original draft of Spirit Athlete.  It is an offering for contemplation of what we may REALLY come to when we realize our spiritual nature and focus not only on the “within” but the “between.”

We are ongoing deeds.  Our bodies are dimensions, just like time and space, and they express infinite worlds of possibility in ways that look contained and continuous in memory (but aren’t).  We choose our possibilities and then look at them in the rearview mirror as constituting who we are.  We are retro-editors of our life and read our life-story backward. 

But if we lived our life-story forward, as a writer does, feeling out each branch of possibility and exploring where the story might go, what might we then become?  Instead of simply extrapolating forward from goals that are largely drawn from the repository of memory and culture and habit and expectation, what would happen if we allow serendipitous possibilities to transform our path, where might we go?

This writing-the-story-forward creatively with the body, mind, heart, and soul is what it means to be a spirit athlete.  I truly do not know who I am and what I am capable of!  I am not my past, though that may lay a foundation for capacity.  I have not yet arrived in my future.  I am now.  My job is to find out and feel out those things I might become continually through open conversation, experimentation, and relationship with my spirit. 

This is the mystery of spirit.  Infinite possibilities articulate themselves and express themselves through our choices.  Quantum possibilities continue to “collapse” themselves into and emit themselves as a string of events in our lives.  We, again, are walking events generated through the active singularity of our personhood.  We are collapsing and generating.  When we lift weights correctly our muscles are ripping on the micro level and repairing and therefore growing. So it is with our minds and our hearts and our souls. 

Consciousness is the gravity of our lives that holds this collapsing and creating together.  Consciousness tunes us into the rhythm of this life-wave now.  But without love, we cannot share this life with others, and we cannot apply our life-force fully and properly to the rest of the world, including our athletic activity.  Consciousness, being in-tune with the internal, is not enough.  We must become in-tune with the “between” for our bodies to do their best.  What is coming though us?  Where can it go?  What is my relationship with my own movement?  What am I offering by my movement and my energy being brought into the world?  Flow and energy exists between things as well as within things.  The spirit athlete must attempt to become intimately familiar with both the “within” and the “between.”

Consciousness makes us aware of ourselves as events and our power as creators.   Through our choices we give ourselves to greater or lesser spiritual flow.  Giving ourselves to that flow in its fullest (the greatest that can be absorbed by our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls) requires a deep desire, a love, that supersedes our intimidation or fear of going beyond ourselves and losing a measure of control.  This is a motion of faith, trust, and learning and ultimately even a respect for the greater wisdom that exists around us, between us, and through us when we commit ourselves to interact with greater forces. 

This vulnerable movement is not some kind of voodoo or “woo woo” Twilight Zone kind of magic.  It’s very straightforward, requiring an open mind and a strong enough vessel to conduct the learning, enhancement, and energy brought by the spirit.  (This is why training physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually is important.)  Spirit movement is a direct process and that can make it somewhat hard to take.  Spirit movement is largely unfiltered, unmediated, unpackaged.  It can feel jagged, like a low-grade electrical shock at times.  But you can learn to be more accustomed to this movement, more graceful, with practice.

Currently we allow ourselves to be prodded upward by goals from our limited imagination and by energy from our limited physical power. We also allow ourselves to be pulled downward into our unconscious or subconscious habits.  We most often try to “escape” the tension, the “nowness,” and the presence of our life-wave for a number of reasons.  It can be disorienting and bewildering.  And when we do escape, our active and creative singularity vanishes along with our potential.  We have sold out either to limited, narrow goals or abandoned ourselves to our blind impulses. 

These are the limitations of the human will when we rely upon human will alone.  However, when the human will, in the form of desire (within a vessel that has learned to develop its capacity) is connected with the spirit, our goal grows beyond limited human imagination and skills.  Capacities and energies emerge within us beyond what can currently be imagined.  Our ability expands and deepens even though we do not “catch” our limit/goal as it continues to expand and deepen in front of us.  We forgo the satisfaction of an accomplishment that we can possess, and trade it for performance, an ever-increasing ability/movement that simply draws us forward.

Our desire to be “solid” (static) versus “liquid” (flow) and to consider that the solid is the only “real” is what holds us back:  “I have done this.”  “I accomplished this.”  “I own this.”  “I am this.”  So what?  So you have owned, accomplished, done, been this.  So what?  Does that “make” you anything that you weren’t already?  Does that work promotion increase your worth in the eyes of the universe?  No.  Can you enjoy the benefits and shoulder the new responsibilities?  Sure. 

This puts new opportunity you in a new arena, with new possibilities.  Let’s see what you can do with them.  Do you see?  The actual promotion or its benefits are not the key. They do not drive you.  The true value of a work promotion (or a personal record in a 10K run) is the new opportunity you gain to learn, improve, and create movement.  If you are just doing these things to prove yourself against yourself or to others, you are fighting against your own growth.  You are putting your attention on the negative (“I don’t want to be less.”) or the quantitative (“I want to make more money, lower my race time, etc.) rather than the affirmative (“I want to see what I can be capable of.) and the qualitative (“I want to experience something deeper and more challenging.). 

Do you see what I am getting at here?  The spirit athlete brings deeper reality into the world through experience and relationship with a greater spirit.  This itself is the reward not only for individual spirit athletes but for those around them.  This spirit energy can be shared.  It does not only benefit personal performance, but stimulates an atmosphere, a “rising tide,” of capability that benefits others as well. 

Many of us feel this in simple form by drawing from the positive enthusiasm of a fitness instructor or classroom teacher. We become interested or motivated because they are interested and motivated.  In very palpable ways, we can feel their love for what they do and their desire to share what they love.  This energy they are radiating affects us in physical and mental as well as emotional ways.  We are caught up in their rhythm, in their affirmation, and we all benefit. We are turned “on.”  Win-win.

Compare this to a boss that just wants to get something out of you for his or her own short-term purposes.  This does the opposite, right?  It draws the energy right out of you.  It saps your motivation and interest and makes you want to turn “off.”  Lose-lose.  What is the difference?  You are being treated as dead objects to be used as some kind of tool for some instrumental, mechanical purpose. 

And yet we do this to ourselves too!  Like horrible bosses, we will “push our bodies” as tools for some kind of arbitrary personal goal we have established.  We don’t respect the body as an equal partner that we share our spiritual enthusiasm with.  We do not exercise the humility to learn from and be aware of our bodies when they are trying to tell us something like they are about to break down or they need rest.  We keep pushing and pushing. 

Higher performance, by contrast, is always based on things working well in concert.  Performance is limited by the weakest link when all elements are brought together. The best way to bring things together is to make sure all the elements are strong (training) and to respect fully the part that each plays in the performance (awareness).  The body, mind, heart, and soul all provide essential drivers for performance.  By respecting and deepening each aspect, by training each, and bringing them together with enthusiasm, you get maximum performance. 

The spirit is the key “integrating factor” for the parts of ourselves, yet it is the one element that gets the most neglected!  Spirit has the wisdom to bring body, heart, and mind together optimally.  It is the great connector.  Spirit is also a source of unlimited energy, subverting what appears to be physical rules and limits.  Active spirit also determines rhythm, seen most notably when teams are playing together at a seamless, high level.

Spirit draws you out beyond yourself and your small mind, so it expands what is possible in your world.  We have so much to learn from spirit, that this book can only be a sketch, an outline and handbook of experiment and creative thinking about what the spirit can do and what it might be like.  The greatest advances as spirit athletes will come when we start to share our experience and knowledge.   

Be well, be joyful, be loving, be learning. 

All blessings, Zeus