Why are we here?

Everybody has at one time in their life contemplated the following questions:

1. Who and what are we?
2. Why are we here?
3. What is our destiny?

These questions flow through the mind for some people more often than for others. Some have taken a position that there is nothing to be learned from these questions and have moved toward a more comfortable state of mind that uses patterns and consistency to generate a manageable reality. It is interesting that these questions need to be asked, as if existence appears incomplete to our awareness. Someone that has lost consciousness and is moved to another location would wake up and ask, why am I hear and where am I because they had a break in the continuity of their consciousness and their memory has not regained any clarity. Are we having a temporary break in our stream of consciousness while here on this plant in this three-dimensional material world?

Spirit is defined as “the nonphysical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character; the soul.” Spirituality is the intentional focus on one’s emotions and character. Spirituality is soul building. Early human development starts out with mysticism, before man had the ability to measure and test using instruments and a body of knowledge that became known as science. Mysticism is that which cannot yet be explained by science, but even though science has explained a lot of the physical world, it has been unable to explain the most fundamental of each human’s personal experience, such as time, space, matter, energy, and consciousness. Science cannot prove that consciousness comes from matter, nor can it prove the reverse. The belief in science as the core answers to questions of why we exist leaves the believer with some significant gaps, especially when it comes to the soul.

If one takes the view that it is all a random accident and life meaning is consistent with the limited explanations that science can currently provide, then one is likely out of balance. Everyone has a belief system whether they chose to realize that or not. It may involve science, materialism, religion, or spirituality. For some it involves confusion, anger, and fatalism. Most likely it is a combination of these various beliefs. Scientific fanaticism is one extreme, just like religious fanaticism is another extreme. Most people that don’t engage with their personal soul-spirit are living in a mechanical patterned reality where they feel comfortable, and thus not engaging with their higher spiritual creative power. Engagement with one’s emotional being is the path to happiness, joy, contentment, peace, and love, for oneself as well as for fellow man, nature, and planet.

Persona

Persona is the Latin word for “mask”.

The “person” that you are is the mask that you wear. The role that you play in life. It is only as real as you make it, and you are only as attached to it as you allow yourself.

Recognition of this is a step toward a more spiritual life. One that is not overly attached to the roles that we think that we all need to be playing. Judging each other and ourselves.

Belief

Everybody has belief in equal amounts. Where one places those beliefs is something that one should have or develop awareness toward. It is easy to ridicule those that have faith in something that is unknown and unprovable, but at a fundamental level nothing is truly known or provable. Is your faith based in fear? Do you believe in something specific because it is to frightening not to believe? This could be in the structure of science, religion, fatalism, or any variety of things. Nevertheless, you have faith in something. Is that something providing a fulfilling and meaningful life for yourself? Is your belief system a collection of unintentional components that might have been put there by family, community, country, or education? Moving into an intentional and more clear set of beliefs where you specifically identify interpersonal developmental growth is spiritual growth. Goals toward how you relate to yourself, others around you, strangers, co-workers, traffic, wildlife, nature, and the cosmos.

Is it possible that you are willfully disconnecting from connecting with an intentional belief system? Choosing to engage fully in the material world with all its superficial entertainment capacity? Living in the shallows until you die. Thinking that the accumulation of material badges along the way is the meaning and purpose of life? The material world has a very important role, which is to provide a means to creativity and experience. It is available to us for the purpose of having a framework in which to grow interpersonally. To develop and expand one’s soul.

Religion, which is very often associated with spirituality, quickly morphs into the opposite of spirituality. The major components of most religions, no matter how large or small, includes fear, greed, coercion, and control. All antithetical to spirituality and soul building. The originating core philosophy of most of the major religions all have a spiritual message that is indisputable, loving, kind, and open to all. But the core message is often distorted by the daily administration and participation in those religions, especially as they attempt to influence individuals and community, becoming the arbiter of right and wrong in the image of their core view of religiosity.

A Case for Belief in the Unbelievable

Do our souls live on beyond our earthly body? This is the gazillion-dollar question, and nobody can ever have a definitive answer. There is anecdotal personal evidence that indicates that something greater is happening than we realize. Maybe some energetic piece of you exists in a field that is intersecting with your physical fields and isn’t disbursed when your physical particles stop working together and entropy takes over. Nevertheless, everyone at some point in their life actively or passively considers this on some level.

It is far better to believe that our soul lives on in different forms beyond our physical body. If you actively live from this point of view, then life will feel full and meaningful. Your experiences and relationships will be deeper and more fulfilling. Things will seem brighter and more colorful. Your sense of life, creativity, love, and the higher emotions will all become more accessible and expansive. Subtle coincidences (aka cosmic messages) that float by you will be more noticeable. The lives of people (and pets) lost won’t feel finite, rather they can be seen as the brief iteration of their soulful spirit having this momentary journey on this plant for which you got to participate.

Who cares if it is not true or cannot be proven. It cannot be disproven. The upside to this perspective is infinite. The downside is cynical and depressing. There is nothing to be gained from the view that life is short-lived, one-off, and generally meaningless. In some respects, it is a cop-out to take this approach, for it means that no effort is worth the energy and that self-improvement and development has no benefit except in a short fleeting way. Not sure if it is necessary to discuss the downsides deeply but living as though we are random accidents waiting to die provides no meaning. Even if this was true, one has no way to prove it and living life in case this is the truth is no life at all. It may be a feature of self-awareness, but the fact that all humans across all of time have maintained that a human life is but one part of the journey speaks to the intuitive nature of this topic. Spending a lifetime competing with people and nature, fighting for scraps, and seeking pleasure, entertainment and thrills is nothing more than animalistic at a basic level. Having this self-awareness is definitely a challenge, but it is also a privilege and an incredible benefit if one works on how to best activate and use it.

Human Spiritual Evolution

• …Be more Patient.
• …Be more Loving.
• …Be more Connected.
• …Be more Accepting.
• …Be more Forgiving.

Toward Others and Oneself as one provides Service to Others.

You are entangled with everyone in the quantum field…like it or not. Fight with others if you are in denial of this. Accept it if you will and create resonance with all, as best you possibly can. You will feel whole…it is an unavoidable outcome.

Mind – Body – Soul

This is a concept that most everyone can get around. We all identify with the mind and the body, and most people acknowledge an intuition that there is something more. It is this something more that is the challenge. Most people do not identify as being soulless, but also do not stop to ponder what it means to have a soul. Many identify with the mind-body-soul trinity, but few have worked on balancing them, let alone developing a daily practice. There are some that focus on one of these elements with deep intensity, which can often lead them to a realization of the importance of all three. There are others that do not engage with any meaningful contemplation of the three and have developed a self-sustained deep intention of active avoidance that has become systemic in our culture. Connecting and balancing mind, body, and soul results in the natural generation of a deep meaningful life without the need for external inputs other than the natural earthly environment.

Body

I start here because this is the physical material connection that we all have to life. We can all agree that birth and death denote the existence of life. Life clearly begins and ends with the body. What role does the body really play? In one sense the body is a transport vessel for the mind to engage with both the material world and the non-material world of feeling, thoughts, ideas, and creativity. The brain is a part of the physical body, while the mind is the non-physical organization of thoughts, ideas and meaning.

Science has been very clear that time and space are relative constructs of the mind, and that there is no physical evidence to prove that they exist or not. Added to that, science has come to the present position that all particles exist in both wave and solid form and fluctuate between these two states. Our body is made up of particles. The human body is made up of constantly fluctuating fields, quantum and electromagnetic (light, sound, and energy) as described by current scientific observations. Science cannot explain gravity nor consciousness, which could very well be additional fields yet undiscovered. What about subtle energy fields? Why does someone sense when they are being looked at from behind? Why do dogs know when their owners are approaching the home, even off schedule? Why do people have intuitive feelings? Why do people think of a friend and see their name on caller ID a few seconds later as the phone is ringing? “Wow, I was just thinking about you,” is such a common statement. Could the human body be sensitive to more than to just the 5 main senses? Do we have other senses tuned into subtle energy fields that are unrealized and thus not honed? These questions are posed to illustrate that science doesn’t know what we are, why we are here, or what we might even fully be capable of.

Science is amazing. It can create a mechanical framework that leads to mobile telephones, medical knowledge, air and space travel and many other elements of modern life. Science cannot address the hard philosophical questions. It is not a substitute for soul-spirit. Scientists themselves must tap their higher-power and ask difficult philosophical questions while activating deep creativity in order to arrive at theories and hypotheses to study. For those of us that are not scientists, we must work on our creative exploration from another angle. Relying upon science that we don’t really understand to guide us is misguided at best and is no different than going to Catholic mass where the bishop is preaching in a language that the congregation doesn’t even speak. Back when early humans had to rely upon religion to provide an explanation of who we are and why we are here, we now have science to explain some of these elements. Science however is not the answer to the archaic religiosity that screwed with human development. The middle ground is to acknowledge that you are far more than you realize and accept that there is space for exploration of your creative spiritual existence.

The body has its own mysteries. Science has never been able to find the location of memories, nor the source point of thoughts. The heart beats, the lungs breath and all the systems of the body work without our participation. Thoughts arise without our involvement; we only have the choice to engage with them or let them dissipate. Are we really the masters of our bodily domain? Or are we a collection of emotions, thoughts, memories, wants and needs trapped in the body on a planet that seems confusing and complicated? Our emotions and thoughts can cause our body to become ill, and conversely we have the ability to heal ourselves with just our intention and energy.

Mind

Life actually takes place inside our minds. We have 5 senses: hearing, tasting, sense-touch, seeing and smelling. Our body picks up information from these five points and sends signals to our brain that makes interpretations. The brain then uses that information to make judgements. We then translate that into our subjective experience as we attach memory, thoughts, and feelings to that information. We have free-will, in that we get to influence our subjective response by choosing to attach to certain thoughts, feelings and emotions. No matter how much one participates in justifying to themselves and to others why they have the right to be angry or upset, that is their choice of course, but they should become more aware that they are making that choice. They should also note that justifying is a low-level consciousness emotional feeling. We also use this information to develop a perspective of reality, and we should grow to understand that the reality that we envision is surely not correct, it is only our perspective given the limitations of our hardware and software.

Emotion is the chemical response to a change brought on by an experience.

Feeling is the response to that emotion. Feelings create thought. Some emotions may even cause a subconscious impact, that don’t result in a conscious feeling.

Thought is the contemplation of the feeling that one experiences, and this usually results in a feedback loop, generating more emotion, thus more feeling, thus more thought.

Emotion – feeling – thought is an illness that most people suffer from. Learning and accepting that you are not the collection of your emotions, feelings and thoughts is an important part of personal development, and the core to initiating a spiritual experience. If spirit is the nonphysical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character, the soul, then the practice of engagement is spirituality. Spirituality is not religious. Religion can be used as a practice of spirituality, but it is just one of an infinite number of tools available for the development of one’s soul.

Your thoughts are random events that bubble up within your mind, unless of course they are intentional, as in what time to leave for the airport or what route to take, but 90% of our thoughts have nothing to do with achieving a specific goal, and they appear outside of your free-will. Thought generates emotion. Emotion generates feeling. Your free-will comes into action when you choose at this point to attach to or detach from that thought. One fundamental component of Buddhism is to see these random thoughts are bubbles that you can let float by if you practice awareness and mindfulness. This is one path toward spirituality. When you attach to your thoughts, it only means that you haven’t mastered interpersonal development. We all need to work on ourselves, this is part of the challenge of the human experience. If you tell yourself that you want to think, that you feel alive when you think, that you live through your thoughts…well that is your brain chemistry getting the best of you. You are mostly just addicted to the effects of modulating between the main chemicals that include dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins.

The Mind’s Map of Consciousness

Consciousness from the point of view of self-awareness, character and soul has these main fundamental factors: what are you thinking, how are you feeling about your thoughts and what are you doing about it? Are you participating in negative thought? Do you realize that you are in negative thought? Can you activate awareness?

Following is set of emotional feelings that represent levels of consciousness and are in order of highest spiritual at the top to lowest survival at the bottom. The concept is built from David Hawkins, MD/PHD who wrote a series of books that dig into this topic deeply.

Each of these feelings has a very useful and valid purpose. All of those in the survival category are directly connected to survival. Shame, guilt, and blame help to create community. Community is critical for our species to both survive and thrive. Apathy and despair provide motivation to connect with others, maybe joining a tribe when yours has been dissolved. Grief, regret, fear, and anxiety generate a higher level of motivation to make a change. Craving and desire are useful in activating certain levels of creativity. Anger and justice are yet higher levels of motivation to effect change. Pride is in the highest position of the survival feelings because it elevates one toward courage while at the same time represents for some a state of mind where they remain stagnant, boastful, and generally self-centered and self-serving. As previously stated, the survival section is very useful for survival, but in our modern world are we really seeking survival? Maintaining survivability in this current era does not take nearly the amount of emotional resources that most people are currently putting into that level of consciousness. Spirituality is the development of one’s consciousness by directly participating in the choices of attaching one’s character to these emotions.

We all participate in the lower emotions. They are unavoidable. How long we choose to remain in these specific emotions is the key issue. On a global scale, most people live in the Craving & Desire category and below. The majority of Americans live in the Anger & Justice category and below, with a fair number bumping up into the Pride category. These are of course averages. Everyone experiences the higher emotions on a periodic basis. In fact, “getting high” specifically and directly relates to these levels of emotion. When we consume alcohol or other mind-altering substances, including coffee, and we experience a level of euphoria, that is due to the temporary masking of the lower emotions. We forget the thoughts that we attach to them for a period of time.

Our default mind state is happiness, that region of the list that floats between peace, joy, and compassion. The key with navigating these levels of consciousness is not to try to be happy, although there is some serious evidence that faking-it-till-we-make-it does move the needle, but rather to detach from the lower emotions. When this detachment takes place and one can neutralize their thoughts, feelings, and emotions by non-attachment, we begin to feel contentment. Spirituality is the practice of detachment from lower emotions. The development of awareness on multiple levels that allow expansion into new realms of existence that present organically as you move up this ladder of consciousness. Imagine living in a state of mind where joy, love and compassion is your normal and consistent state of awareness. Where your response to someone’s anger is to have compassion for whatever is frightening them enough to be angry. Offering yourself (within reason) toward how you might help them. To learn not to take their fear personally by not engaging on the level that they are expressing themselves. Diffusion, compassion, and service to others. We often hear that it is far better to give than to receive, as this is known to cause those same brain chemicals to express from a healthy perspective, both mentally and physically for mind and body. This is spirituality.

Happiness does not come from anything in the external environment. Not from another person and not from any material thing. Happiness is a state of mind that one achieves naturally when one develops soulful skills of awareness and detachment from the lower emotions. When one clear’s their mind and focuses on their breath, just like our teacher or parent would tell us when we skinned a knee, got into a fight, or fell into a bout of stress…just look at me and breath slowly. These are simple and core methods for adjusting one’s mind focus just enough to detach from a complicated emotion. Not gonna lie, it takes some deep soulful energy to practice this on a regular basis. Thought is only as useful as its direct outcome. If I need to make a phone call, then I need to engage my thought toward the location of the number and placement of the call. Then I need to focus my intention on the goal of the call. Thoughts that generate and keep replaying various versions of how the call might go in advance or guessing the outcome of the call often results in some form of anxiety and procrastination. Worry and fear are not useful emotions unless they are protecting you from starvation or danger. They are not useful emotions for making plans with another person. If you are telling yourself that all that thinking is useful, then you are choosing to associate with the endorphins and other brain chemistry that is generated in a mild state of anger or panic which usually manifests over time into both mental and physical health problems. It also generates thought patterns that yield brain chemistry that feeds an addiction to that brain chemistry. It is well known that fear, anxiety, and anger generate much needed brain chemistry to help one run away from an attacking lion. This might happen to a person occasionally back in the days on the savannah, but we are now activating these emotions many times a day in this modern world, and that brain chemistry can take hours or days to dissipate from the body. Some people get a rush participating in a stressed situation and actually believe that they enjoy and thrive in those situations, but what they are enjoying is the rush of brain chemistry that comes with the stress.

Our ancestors have passed down to us a belief that the higher emotions represent weakness. We don’t align ourselves with the higher emotions. We were taught to choose the lower emotions. The lower emotions are critical for survival, and we have the perception that we won’t survive in this modern world without associating with the characteristics that result from the lower emotions. On the sports field we are shamed into activating our primal instincts to compete and win and a level of humiliation is thrust upon us if we do not. Winning is the only option and once we have won, we have both team and individual pride. Shame and humiliation are the lowest of emotions, so we naturally seek to avoid them as much as possible. Pride is the highest of the lower survival emotions. The sports field is designed to achieve only the highest stage of these low emotions, and only for a very short period of time, as it must be repeated during the next game and for season after season. There is no steppingstone out of the state of pride in competitive interaction on this level.

Soul

The soul is your connection to spirit. Spirit is your higher power. A subtle energy for which you are the observer. Soul is your spirit in motion as it interacts with the material world. Soul is the product of your free will and its connection to spirit.

You are not responsible for your thoughts, and you cannot control your thoughts. You are however responsible for what you do with those thoughts. Thoughts arise within all of us from the 95% of our mind that we do not control, the unconscious part of our wiring that developed so that we might survive in this semi-harsh environment of planet Earth. Your free-will sits in the 5% of our mind where we connect with our awareness of consciousness. Which of those thoughts do we chose to align with? Which emotions and feelings will we choose to attach with? What actions, if any, are we going to take from the thoughts that arise? If you are stuck in a stream of thoughts for which you choose not to align, then be aware of that and employ methods of reducing your thought. Most people turn on the television, but clearly that has very limited benefit to building the soul…not that there aren’t some amazing things to learn from other humans on the television, just like there is from other media, but that is not how most people are using the television. Alternatively work on building a belief system, learning skills that support those goals and practicing those skills to support soul-building and a deeper connection with the spirit energies that make up your existence.

We are each born to a set of parents, family unit or some sort of community that learned from their ancestors how to be human, and those people taught us what we know. Belief systems passed along, with minor modifications, generation after generation, to the point where we believe completely and fully in what we think that we are. How could the people before us know any better or any different? How could they impart wisdom to us for topics that are unknown to themselves? Which of us along this paradigm is going to break the chain of thought and look deeper to connect the known dots in a different way?

If you look at what science has uncovered thus far, everything growing on the planet Earth, including humans, is made up of substances that exist presently on the Earth and form into what we have defined as life or inanimate material objects for some period of time. We know that the universe is an ever changing medium where everything that exists today will be altered into a different form at some point in the future through entropy. Science tells us that everything is made up of atoms that are made up of what they call sub-atomic particles that are actually waves of some yet-unknown subtle energy fields interacting in an organized way in order to express as human, rock or tree, but only for a brief period of time. We know that time does not exist, and that the substance of space is unknown and that everything that we believe is a reality that our minds have created. Cognitive research suggests that the brain is a reducing valve that slows the amount of information coming in so that we may have the opportunity to focus on a specific thing for a given amount of time.

If one flipped the script of the human experience from the generally practiced version that we were all taught from birth to one that matches the above bits of scientific discovery, we could quickly arrive at a metaphysical explanation. Consciousness may be the fundamental element in the universe and crawling out of the soil of the planet Earth our molecules formed life in order to generate a conscious experience. That our purpose is to develop, learn and grow that experience beyond what we are presently capable of imagining.

Matter appears to our senses to be solid but underneath it all, it is energy vibrating at various frequencies to form patterns. These patterns reflect the underlying order of the Universe. This is what really happens when we bang our toe on a rock. Our physical energy patterns interact with the different energy patterns of the rock. Our vibrations are not resonating with the rocks vibrations and that causes a conflict. This produces a pain frequency of vibration, interpreted by the brain, which is operating at its own vibrational frequency. Each person’s mind likewise operates at various vibrational patterns. It changes its vibrational frequencies from moment to moment. When you come up against someone that is operating in a low frequency vibrational pattern, then conflict is possible. If you are also operating at a low vibrational pattern than conflict is likely. Rising above, which is literally where we all envision spirit to reside, is the awareness to let go of negative thought patterns and as they dissipate, your vibrational frequency changes, bringing the conflict back to only a possibility and probably unlikely. If you can vibrate at a frequency that is even higher on the map of consciousness, then the likely result is that the person or situation that is challenging quickly evolves to one that is unobtrusive and maybe even pleasant, if you allow it. When you interact with another human that is less than pleasant, or an immovable screw that is keeping you from fixing a gadget…this is where the vibration of your mind pattern matters the most. You have free will. You have the option of activating awareness and detaching from the negative lower emotions that may arise. As you let that emotion dissipate without letting it generate a feeling or a thought, other than awareness that in the end nothing actually matters to the degree that your negative emotion is trying to suggest. You have the free will to rise above, let the unpleasant interaction work itself out to its natural end without your having infused lower emotional energy into the situation. This is the path to spirituality.

Our heart beats and our lungs breath for the purpose of keeping us alive and our body functions for the purpose of procreation, but at a higher level these fields are likely interacting to provide mind with an experience that includes creation, discovery, and exploration. Whether or not this is an indisputable truth, living life as though it is, is far more fulfilling than living life as though we are a random event awaiting death.

We are literally fields of energy intersecting and interacting to provide this experience to another of some subtle energy-like field that we call consciousness. We each have our own individual experience within these fields, but the scientific information points to the fact that we are all made up of the exact same fields, and that while we have created a reality where we see each other as separate, that we are actually all connected and able to experience each other in subtle ways for which we are not yet aware. If we start to view ourselves as fields of interactive energy, then maybe we can take a giant leap forward in our psychic evolution. We can begin to realize that we are much more powerful beings than we ever could have imagined. Rather than competing with each other and tearing each other down, we can start to ascend to our higher selves and tap some of the capabilities that we are currently denying ourselves. This starts with the individual, for it is not possible to provide love, comfort and support to others when you do not provide this to yourself first. The learning process starts by going deep within and recognizing what you really are and how you intersect and interact with the cosmos as represented by the environment that surrounds you and the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that you experience moment by moment. Face your fears, forgive yourself and practice a loving connection with these fields of energy that make up your awareness. View life from this perspective and recognize that these fields of energy sound amazingly similar to what we might view as spirit. That the deeper look inward is your soul connection to this spirit energy. Your perception & imagination. The thoughts, emotions, and feelings that you choose to attach and align with. Your awareness of every moment and the power contained in that moment. The work that you do on your soul connection has a direct and exponential effect on how you play and interact with the spirit energy.