The Human Experience: the Mind, Body, and Spirit
There are three layers to the human experience: the mind, body, and spirit.
The mind is a sharp tool. It can be precise and focused. We know the mind well because we have spent our whole lives in the mind. The mind believes itself and believes it is “self”. It believes the stories it weaves to justify the righteousness within. The mind seeks to affirm itself to protect from imagined pain — which is suffering — through avoidance of the imagined pain, through withholding forgiveness or humbly apologizing.
The body is a sensor, a blunt object that helps us experience the full range of emotions. joy, pleasure, peace, surprise, and also anger, grief, shame, and guilt. The body is always signaling in one of three directions: the desire to receive love, the desire to give love, and the desire to avoid death. The body manifests in the human experience as feelings and projects the voice of spirit as intuition. We feel in our bodies a tightness or a lightness, a crippling heartbreak or the radiance of a new love, a mother's embrace and a father's look of approval. But the body's intuition can be soured by the mind’s belief that it will or will not receive love, or that our consciousness will perish upon death. These are falsehoods of the mind that manifests in the body as impulse, which is driven by separateness and fear. This can often be confused as intuition, but it is not. Intuition projects into the body from Spirit.
The Spirit knows that the Self is Love, and that this Love is timeless, formless and certainly without judgment. This is because the Spirit knows that there is no such thing as good or bad. Those are mere stories of the mind to justify our own suffering. The spirit knows that whatever has happened has happened the only way it could. Neither you nor I nor even God could change the past, and why would we? All roads lead here to this present, perfect moment where you can experience an opening in your heart to experience your highest Self just a bit more. The spirit is the incorporeal ever present knowing often only heard as background noise of the great Truths: We are One; Love is the fabric of the universe; time and death are illusions; the greatest joy is to be in service, to help others love themselves and love others equally as much.
The Spirit can be felt in the heart. Its voice can only be heard when the mind quiets itself. This begins by proving to the mind that it can recognize its own mechanisms. Any story not in service to love, creation and spirit can be let go of in service to feeling greater access to one’s own soul, from where peace, joy and creativity flow. Spirit manifests as presence and inspiration, the ineffable feeling of sudden certainty, of timelessness, of non-linear thinking.
Inspiration feels as if everything suddenly makes sense. I have felt it when everything in my life – from moving around so much as a kid, losing my father to cancer, and even all the heartbreaking conflicts with my wife – clicked into just the right place. All my joy and all my suffering, it all brought me to exactly where and when I am now. If I can just pause and be present with what is – to not regret or feel guilt, to accept grief and my humanness, to release resentments and forgive – then I can open my heart to let Spirit in. I can let go. Awareness is the tool to witness Truth. This tool can be crafted and honed to unfold greater layers of Truth… to live life as Inspiration and intuition rather than impulse.
Think of how good it feels to know Truth. We have all felt it when your mother or father shows you love or validation to the best of their ability… when you feel warm, safe, and at ease… when you witness the beauty of nature, to stop and listen to the cacophony of trees, water, birds, wind, or fire… when you're in flow, knowing just how to move as you ski down a mountain, playing music, or solving a difficult problem. We know this feeling deeply and, in many ways, the meaning of life is to discover this essential Truth… to be the embodiment of it, to remap the mind to orient itself towards Truth. We are here to spread Truth in service of awakening others to levels of sustained peace, presence, love, and gratitude. We have the ability to feel bliss beyond what the mind can possibly imagine because imagination itself is a construct of the mind.
When you live in Truth and in Love, when you stop avoiding or ignoring the feelings you've buried in your body, then you feel better. You heal emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Diseases come from dis-ease, and by returning to a homeostasis of love, gratitude, kindness, forgiveness, patience, and acceptance – by aligning the mind, body, and spirit with love and integrity – life becomes easy. We can cure ourselves of suffering by letting go of suffering. If we can devote our lives to our own awakening and the awakening of others, we can be at peace.
This extraordinary peace, this boundless love, this infinite bliss… it can only be felt. The movement from impulse in the mind to intuition in the body to inspiration from the spirit can only be experienced. The more one can surrender the pull of the mind to let go of its protectors, the more one can feel the reward of disempowering the mind’s grip on suffering. We do this through presence and vulnerability. Presence allows us to quiet the mind long enough to release emotions that we suppressed and repressed into our bodies. Vulnerability allows us to bear witness to the humanness of us all, which allows us to feel safe to be human.
We have all felt shame. We have all felt guilt, grief, fear, anger, and pride. We have all withheld our forgiveness before by putting ourselves on the pedestal of righteousness or into the trench of victimhood. We've all hurt others, disrespected the Earth, lied, or cheated, or stolen. And we've all been hurt. Some of us have lost those closest to us. Some of us have betrayed or been betrayed. It's okay. It had to be exactly this way so you can be exactly who you are at this moment. We are all human and we are all Spirit.
Being vulnerable helps us recognize that we're all on our own journeys… that all we know is our subjective maximums. You may not know what it is like to be starving; you may not know what it’s like to sacrifice your youth for wealth; you may not know what it’s like to fire a gun at another human. But you are the world’s foremost expert on your experience of life. Your suffering is no less or more valuable than the suffering of others. The maximum pain that you felt is the maximum pain that you have felt, and no one else can measure that against themselves.
We're always trying our best. Even Hitler was trying his best. And yes, even that brutal man was a force, an energetic contributor to the birth of your grandparents, who had to suffer just the right amount and live life in just the right way to give birth to your parents. And your parents had to hurt you, or scold you, or abandon you, and love you the only way they knew how to so you could make your choices the way you did to become you at this very moment… to question who you think you are so that you can be here to really experience who you are. It all had to happen exactly that way. This is the perfect way because you are perfect.
There is nothing wrong with you. Everything you think is a flaw is a gift. A gift from God, from your highest Self to your self. A gift so that you can be here now to trust yourself, to open your heart to Truth, so you can feel the peace and Oneness that has always been there. Nothing can disturb you. You are a drop in an ocean, and the ocean does not feel any impact from the mind's machinations.
You know that sometimes you have to suffer enough to muster the courage to seek out the truth. You know everything happens for a reason. All the woo woo hippies were right all along: you know that reason is to bring you closer to God, to the God that is within you and all around you. All the suffering in your life has brought you to the point of this courage to live in truth, to be your word, and to dedicate yourself to four values: service, spirituality, creation, and community. To be in service and give without selfish desire; to pursue the Inner Journey of spirituality. To create beauty and art and life; and to inspire community through your beautiful being.
We begin here, together, in this Ceremonia circle on quieting the mind: to create the space for the mind to question its own beliefs, to harness its power as a tool of single-pointed focus on courage and intention. In this silence, we draw awareness to the body: all of the energies we’ve long suppressed, all the dis-ease that we’ve stored… to re-build trust in our bodies, to really listen to its signals, to honor our bodies as the container for our soul. Finally, when the incessant chatter of the mind silences and our body relaxes, we connect to Spirit: the seat of consciousness, of Oneness and timelessness, of goodness and love.
