Body Mind and Spirit: The Experience Of The Spiritual

By Eldon Tucker

The Experience Of The Spiritual

It is said that it is much easier to begin training in the Mysteries as a youth. One advantage of an early start is that there is considerable energy for growth and exploration of life in the early years while the quota of life, of prana, is full, before it is exhausted in the excesses of later life. A greater advantage, though, is that there is much that does not need to be unlearned. The knowledge of our Western, materialistic civilization is both a blessing and a curse. It informs us; it gives us power over material things; it has a great deal of truth to it. Yet with regard to things on the spiritual side of life, it has huge blind spots, huge gaps it won't recognize.

When we study a subject, we try to tie in what we already know with what we are studying. This is a helpful approach, as long as what we know is true, and the connections that we are making with the new learning expand our knowledge. It is much harder to study a subject when we are required to give up what we think we know! This is the case with much we may have picked up in popular thought, as well as perhaps some of our ideas originating in popular New Age literature.

Consider spiritual consciousness. What is it? Where does it appear in our lives? Is it something real, permanent and lasting, or something delusional, a product of self-deception? Is it simply a happy feeling, or is there something more substantive, more real and lasting to it?

Like any form of consciousness, it can be experienced as transitory, as something that comes in flashes or lasts for a period of time, then is gone. This temporal experience is the precursor to its permanence. There is a real, solid, permanent nature to the spiritual-intellectual that can become a continuous experience throughout life, in much the same way as thinking and feeling and sense perception are continuous experiences of life in the world. Although it can become a permanent faculty of consciousness, it is not guaranteed, and could be lost at some future time. Especially in the early stages of spiritual progress, the connection is tenuous, and can be broken at times.

It is possible to lose one's higher faculties. Once lost, they might leave us feeling that our previous state of awareness was unreal, like a beautiful or bad dream. We might look at legitimate cases of self-delusion in other people, and wonder if we too had not been deluded. Since we need to view things as moving forward always for the better, we might not want to think of the situation as having lost a great treasure. It is true, however, that there are spiritual treasures that can be both won and lost. There are grand prizes awaiting us. And we cannot take for granted an automatic right to what we have already attained; we can lose what we have if we do not use it rightly.

Outer society tends to punish dissent. Those who go against the established order are opposed, suppressed, and sometimes expelled. This is true of all organized bodies. A church may use the threat of damnation to scare its followers into keeping in line (keeping their eyes down and their minds closed). An established body of psychologists may use the threat of mental illness or insanity to restrict our thoughts and behavior, lest we dare leave normalcy behind. Scientific bodies may use the threat of banishment, the cutting off of research funds, refusal to publish papers, and other forms of shunning to expel heretics. Political groups can use prisons, oppression, and the imposition of economic hardship to keep citizens in line.

Why should we feel in danger of banishment, in danger of arousing the opposition of the established order of things? We shouldn't, unless undertaking a certain lifestyle of active opposition to the status quo. It is possible to become holy, wise and spiritual, and to improve our lives and the lives of those about us without taking on the outer world head-on. It really depends upon our particular goals in life. Sometimes we may feel the need to step into the public spotlight and say, "This is wrong!" and take an active opposition to things in the world. Other times, we may keep a lower profile, and quietly help people in a quiet, almost-unnoticed manner.

When we are in love, life is different. Everything is seen and experienced in a new, different way. In a black depression, the world darkens, and our lives are again turned around. There are many qualities of consciousness. Some are dark, negative, and destructive in nature. Others are ennobling, uplifting, and worthy of being sought after.

In order to experience a quality of consciousness, we first have to have it within ourselves. We need to have the seeds of a black depression, and an inner life that nurtures them, in order for them to sprout forth when outer circumstances push us in the right way. The outer, though, is an expression of what is within, and not the cause.

To approach the spiritual, we look within. We change ourselves and the outer circumstances adjust of their own accord, as past karmic responsibilities are worked out and we are freed to outwardly change in ways true to our new inner natures. Inner changes do not automatically come by doing the reverse, by piously adopting an outer lifestyle that is untrue to what we feel in our hearts and minds. We accomplish little when we grow our hair long, give up material possessions and try to become wandering holy men. We still must effect changes to our inner natures, changes that never required us to leave behind our former homes and families.

It is not necessary to visit Tibet, to live in a beautiful desert retreat center, to fine-tune the purity of our physical bodies with an exacting diet, nor to faithfully meditate from three a.m. to seven a.m. for the balance of our lives! All these things are nice and helpful in their own ways, but do not represent our taking significant steps in the direction of the spiritual.

What, then, is spiritual consciousness? How would we describe it? Granted we cannot encompass it completely with words, but we certainly can say something. There is a feeling of being rooted in the spiritual, held in a loving embrace by the totality of life. This feeling could be compared to the secure, firm grip of the parachute straps that hold, envelop, and raise us high above all, and that otherwise save us from guaranteed death. This "holding up" is done by our higher natures on a continual basis, with or without our awareness and recognition.

The biggest change in our lives is a new, firm grasp of an inner reality, an inner change rather than any particular outer event. We appreciate and experience life differently, and we just wake up one morning and notice that things in life are different. This change in our lives comes quietly, gently, and it is rare for it to come with violent, traumatic, explosive outer circumstances. It is more akin to the gentle process of waking up in the morning, rather than the painful process of childbirth. We open our eyes to life in a different way, and the world is a different place.

It is possible, depending upon how we present ourselves to others, that we might be mistaken for fanatics, zealots or cultists. Some might believe we need to be deprogrammed, brought back to normal, and taken out of our "delusional" state. Were that to happen, we would find our previous "spiritual" state to be odd. Having lost something and being unable to recreate it within our consciousness, we may picture it as unworthy in some way. This, however, is "sour grapes," and we would have lost something of incredible value.

Someone else outside the experience might describe it in psychological terms, and use such words as "inflation" from Jungian psychology. The state might be described as one of being possessed by an archetype, a form of psychological intoxication, drunkenness on the divine energy of archetypal materials that never belonged in the personal consciousness. This is psychological materialism, where nothing is real unless it is interpreted in terms of the human personality. It is an example of yet another thing to unlearn in seeking the heart of the spiritual nature.

It is true that the personality can become deformed in various ways if we try to do things from it that are inappropriate. It is not true, however, that we must limit ourselves to only doing things that are appropriate for the personality. Rather, we are learning to shift our center of consciousness to a higher center of consciousness, above the personality. The personality, looking upwards, experiences a sense of magic, of divinity. Looking downward, the personality experiences a sense of temptation, of being drawn into corruption and self-destruction.

The personality can grow in one direction or the other, but when we seek the spiritual, we're not talking about staying in the personality and growing it. Instead, we're talking about leaving the personality, and not having it as the seat of our consciousness anymore. It functions, it exists as a form of self-expression, but we have become something deeper within.

When we have become rooted in the spiritual and awakened our spiritual-intellectual natures, we don't take public opinion seriously anymore. We are not dependent on external validation, nor do we need a guru or Theosophical Society or admiring peers to feel that we have something real. (This is not to say that we don't need Teachers, but that is an entirely different topic!) We know with certainty that there is a spiritual reality behind life, because we have a firm sense of its presence and participation in our lives.

How do we experience this presence? It is an undertone or background to everything that happens, to everything that we experience. It starts when we open our eyes in the morning, and lasts until they shut at night. There are no dark, depressed moments where we question or doubt it, because it is not a delusion, a pretense, or a facade that we have built up. This presence is a real, solid quality of our lives, not something that we "are trying to do."

Consider an angry, explosive person. Little things that happen during the day can tap into his reservoir of anger and bring him to erupt in rage. This anger is part of his personality, a background quality that he carries with him, though it may not find itself expressed in everything that he does. It colors his consciousness and makes the world seem to him to be a certain kind of place. The spiritual is likewise a possible content of consciousness. It can be alive and active, a quality that readily rises to express itself in the actions of our day-to-day lives.

Now consider a devotional person, someone with considerable Bhakti energy. In his foreground consciousness, there may come periods of intense feeling with incredible energy. These waves of devotion are expensive; they drain his life energies, and he finds himself exhausted. He is left tired; the feelings quiet down and go away; their effects can even disappear from the activities of daily life until the next time for devotions.

This energy of love that he carries with himself can remain slightly submerged but still color his life. We may be able to tell, to feel his devotional energy when we meet him. As he carries this quality with him, it is continually experienced as "background consciousness," as compared to the "foreground consciousness" of what he is doing at this particular moment in time.

The background consciousness is the higher side, and consists of the active talents, capabilities, and types of awareness that we have acquired and built up in this lifetime. This is the result of our emanation of innate abilities from previous lives, from our karmic treasury. We go through life with this as a form of experience, of awareness, of enjoyment of life, in addition to that experience of the ephemeral, moment-to-moment activities of the foreground consciousness.

The foreground consciousness is the more ephemeral. It relates to the mayavic changes of physical life, the extremely tiny portion of ourselves that finds expression in the very lowest realm, the physical. The background consciousness is a deeper part of ourselves, that part of our natures that includes the totality of who we are in this lifetime. The background consciousness is the "unmanifest" portion of the personality, that part of it that watches in the silence and out of which our actions spontaneously arise.

When our spiritual-intellectual natures are awakened, there is a presence that hovers about us, deep in the silence, acting almost as a "background deity." There is a sense of anticipation, excitement, of unfulfilled promise. (Imagine a child's feeling the night before Christmas!) This feeling comes from our being in touch with and having awakened a type of consciousness in ourselves that goes beyond what is possible to express. We have awakened in ourselves something too grand to come out in Fifth Race Humanity, on Globe D Earth, at this time in our evolution. Outer circumstances do not permit its expression in the moment-to-moment experience of life. It cannot yet reach physical plane expression, but it can still be experienced in the background consciousness; it still can be richly enjoyed in the silence.

There is a sense of anticipation to this spiritual faculty. We will enjoy it in its own place, on its own terms, in the after-death experiences. There are some experiences that are simply too high, too grand. They're meant to be awaited, to be experienced in their own realms.

The spiritual nature comes out in life as a living presence. We know and feel it. It surrounds us. It fills us. It makes the world an entirely different place for us. We do not need to periodically long for it, to send out waves of desire, of Bhakti, of aspiration to attain it. It is here. It is part of us. We have it as a rock-solid part of our experience of life. Our higher principles are awake and active, and provide us with an enriched personal life.

When the highest in our constitution is active, it does not come out in passion, in intensity of thought, feeling, or action, but rather is felt for what it is, in its own right. It is appreciated as an additional quality behind all the rest, a quality that adds its own unique contribution to our total experience. It is not the clearest of psychical sight, the sweetest of feelings, the holiest of aspiration or desires, nor the highest of reason and intellectual thought. It is just different, but important and enriching in its own right. What is it? It's there, part of our natures. Embrace it and just know.