THE NEW MYSTERIES
I have long used the term mystery to describe strange yet dramatic episodes in my life that cannot be adequately described or intellectually understood. I came to associate these encounters with a phenomenon that I have referred to earlier as “the Mystery.” For me, these encounters were life changing, and in my Spiritwalker series, as well as in this book, I’ve shared some of them. Looking back, I sense today that the Mystery, an elusive presence that is always there, may both attract and intrigue us, and possibly draw us forward toward that which we are destined to become. Perhaps this is its function.
One of the most well-known mystery schools of the pre-Christian world was in the Greek village of Eleusis, near Athens, which was dedicated to the earth goddess Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, who became the part-time wife of Hades, the lord of the Lower Worlds. There exists a plethora of writings about the spiritual trainings, rites, and initiations performed at Eleusis, and John Lamb Lash, in Not in His Image, has described much of what went on there in the classical period. In his words, “Initiates of the mysteries realized that the goddess requires of those to whom she reveals herself the humility to admit that they cannot fully know what it means to be human without the inspired guidance of non-human beings.”1
This is an important insight and probably could be applied to most of the mystery schools that existed in the past. The shamans’ visionary methodology lay right at the heart of all their spiritual practices. Many of these great schools of philosophic thought (Egypt, for example) lasted for thousands of years, and yet all were systemically destroyed in very short order with the emergence of the monotheist religious complex of Christianity seventeen hundred years ago.
As I have said in the preceding chapters, I believe that the essence of the ancient mysteries may be re-emerging in our own time in a new form in response to our need for them, in the process morphing to reflect who we are today. At the center of this new spiritual complex lies the realization that each one of us can make the direct, transpersonal connection with the hidden realms of spirit. Once we do, we can become our own priest or priestess, our own guru or teacher, our own prophet, receiving revelations directly from the hidden inner worlds without the intrusion of any intermediary religious organization, priesthood, or cult, in confirmation of Lash’s statement above.
As mentioned earlier, I am not a theologian or a therapist, nor am I a priest. Rather, I am a scientist whose research drew me more than forty years ago into the arid, eroded landscapes of southwestern Ethiopia, where I began to have spontaneous and unsought visionary experiences that would expand my awareness into regions of consciousness largely unexplored by either the academic world or our mainstream religious traditions. And how was I to talk about these experiences with my academic colleagues—or with anyone else, for that matter?
I was aware that my fellow scientists were not ready to consider, let alone discuss, what I had to share, and so I eventually decided to write about my explorations into the “forbidden zones” that reside beyond the horizons of both organized religion and science. The books in my Spiritwalker series are quite different from my scientific publications, to say the least. And now, at more than seventy-five years of age, I feel an inner stirring, a response perhaps from my soul source that resides within my heart as I turn my attention toward the New Mysteries, toward the possibility of a new spiritual operating system available to us all.
The visionary path of the shamanist is inclusive. It is intensely democratic and potentially available to everyone rather than exclusive for some. It is intuitive and experiential and interactive in direct contrast to the unquestionable doctrine trumpeted by the dogmatized priests of our increasingly outdated monotheist religions, which are exclusionist. I might observe once again (and dispassionately) that the moment has truly come for us to create a new cultural mythos—a new story that will redefine who we are, who we can be, and who and what we wish to become. This new mythos is essential in creating a new world that we wish to pass on to our grandchildren and to their grandchildren.
If I were to draw upon the observations of the Hawaiian elder Hale Makua, this new world order will be determined by where we, as individuals and as a culture, choose to sink our anchor. From his perspective, most of us have been firmly anchored in the “negative polarity” over the past several decades. But what does that mean? In his words, recorded in The Bowl of Light, “When love moves out, fear moves in.”2 And in response, we have experienced the negative polarity at its worst: economic bondage and enslavement, political deception and coercion, mendacity from our business leadership and from the media, massive and collective greed from the wealthy, misguided religious zeal and terrorist attacks, and tyranny from our political and military leaders who have been controlling the populace through manipulation and fear. How would this all change if we as individuals and as a culture were to lift anchor and re-sink it into the positive polarity? How would this affect the quality of our lives as well as the quality of our leadership at all levels?
Spirituality in our time is being redefined as something quite distinct from what has historically been offered from our organized religions. It is through direct mystical experience that we may establish an ongoing and intimate contact with our spirit guardians and with our immortal spiritual aspect: our oversoul, or higher self.
THE OVERSOUL AND THE SPIRIT GUIDE
I often wonder whether our political problems have political solutions, whether our economic problems have economic solutions, if our social problems have social solutions, and if our religious divisions have religious solutions, and so forth. If so, it is hard to see them, but I do see the possibility for spiritual problems having spiritual solutions, and among these solutions rests the transformationals’ awareness of and relationship with the transpersonal forces (spirits) who are supporting us and want the best for us.
It is generally understood and accepted in the modern mystical movement that each of us has a higher self. Some, like the visionary Thomas Moore, refer to it as our spirit, as the immortal aspect of ourselves who lives forever in the dreaming. Some refer to it as our soul. Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to it as the oversoul. The Hawaiian elder Hale Makua called it ‘Aumakua (with a capital A), our utterly trustworthy ancestral spirit. Many indigenous people and modern mystics alike understand it to be our spiritual soul from whom we are sourced into each life. As such, it is one of our three souls, a triune complex we shall consider shortly. At this point, let us observe also that the oversoul is not our Spirit Guide.
Understood correctly, our Spirit Guide is a member of that grand company of spiritual beings that many visionaries call “the higher organizing intelligences.” I and many others think of them in this way because of our collective experience that the outstanding characteristic of the spirit worlds is a continuous feeling of a powerful mental force that is directing everything and creating a state of harmony. The Guides (who can be considered as members of the angelic forces) seem to be the ones responsible for generating this sense of balance and tranquility.
From the shamanist perspective, each one of us has a Spirit Guide (with a big G) who is a figure of grace, a godlike being who resides in the Upper Worlds and who is involved in our immortal oversoul’s continuing evolution and growth. The Guide is part of the fulfillment of our personal and collective destiny as we continue to travel across time, growing, increasing, and becoming more in response to each life. The Guide is our oversoul’s caretaker and teacher to whom we were assigned when we came into being as a soul.
In my experience, my Spirit Guide rarely gets involved in the mundane details of my everyday life although it sometimes does step in. Through meditation, through spontaneous insight and through dreaming, some of us discover the existence of our Guide as well as its interest in us, and we often learn that we have more than one Guide. For example, our senior Guide may have a younger junior Guide in training. We may also discover through direct experience and through comparing notes with others that the Guides’ teaching styles may vary considerably, yet they appear to support and interface beautifully with our permanent oversoul matrix. Some of us also have established relationships with the oversoul fields of ascended masters, such as Yogananda or Merlin. Hale Makua had a relationship with Metatron, the chief of the angelic forces.
It has also been my experience that most spiritual seekers who use the terms guide or guides are actually referring to their helping spirits, those earthbound beings who provide us with power, protection, support, and information. These spirit helpers function more as guardians and are often perceived as power animals, nature spirits, elementals, or plant teachers. However, they can also appear to us in human form, sometimes as an ancestor, sometimes as someone else. These spirit helpers are lower in the spiritual hierarchy and are not Guides, per se, although shamanists discover that they can and will provide teachings to us, especially in the early stages of our relationship with them.
The Spirit Guides, correctly understood, are high-level spiritual beings who have great and enduring compassion for their oversoul charges. In this perspective, our Spirit Guide is a master teacher with whom our personal and immortal higher self/oversoul is in relationship as its “student.” The Guide’s teachings enhance the life lessons that we as embodied manifestations of our oversoul are here to learn. And the goal? When we have learned those lessons, there is no repeat, and both our mortal incarnational self and our immortal oversoul self are enhanced in response to what we have done and become in this life. Then we move on to more lessons.
It has been my experience that our Guides are not judgmental; this is an important point because this is not, nor has it ever been, a punitive system. There are no lords of karma who judge and condemn us. That is a myth designed to control people. However, we learn through visionary experience that each of us does have a Council of Wise Elder Spirits. These are higher beings who reside in the Upper Worlds, a kind of “cosmic committee” that debriefs us when we return from a life just lived and briefs us again before we return to the next. They are the ones who hold our “cosmic contract,” the agreement that extends out to each of us the path of our destiny, including, of course, our life lessons upon which we are currently working. They are exalted Guides who have great respect for who we are, as well as the soul age at which we currently exist, and we will be given many second chances if at first we do not succeed in learning our lessons. We meet with them between lives several times to discuss our progress and to explore how we might do better. They also help us to decide on the shape of our next life and how this life will interface with the lessons on which we are currently working. They help build morale by foreseeing great things for us.
The excellent books of Michael Newton, PhD, and those of his colleague Linda Backman, PhD, reveal much about the interlife state and how some Guides constantly help their students’ embodiments on earth, while others take the hands-off approach, insisting that we work on our life lessons with little or no encouragement. Both Newton and Backman point out that graduate students—those of us who are older in our soul age—seem to get less help than freshmen, those who are younger souls.3
And here is something curious. I have been shown that when Spirit Guides choose to reveal themselves to us, they may often appear as figures in our faith—a Christian seeing Jesus, a Jew meeting with Moses, or a Muslim encountering the prophet Mohammed or the archangel Gabriel. This well-documented phenomenon may explain why many in the Christian community who have had a near-death experience have had a visionary connection with a being whom they interpret as Jesus. The Guides do not have bodies; they are energetic in nature. Yet they know that if they appear to us as spiritual beings with whom we are already familiar, we may be more inclined to come into relationship with them. Thus, those who encounter Jesus or Moses or Mohammed may actually be in the presence of their Guide who has taken this form to make an impression. Sometimes, however, the Spirit Guides appear to us as they really are—as the light beyond the form, and the formless beyond the light, infused with a vast intelligence tempered by an omnipresent compassion for us. We discover through direct experience that they are in relationship with us to help us, but we also learn that correct protocol requires that we ask them for that help.
More than two hundred years ago, the well-known Seneca Indian medicine man Handsome Lake had a spiritual encounter with what he described as a blue being surrounded by a halo of light who told him that the spirits had decided to help the Indians survive the genocide being inflicted upon them by the colonials. This blue being was his Spirit Guide who gave him a new code of laws for his people that became known as the Code of Handsome Lake. In response, the Seneca, as well as other nations in the Iroquois Confederacy, survived and flourished.4
One of the key functions performed by these wise beings has traditionally been to provide humans with teachings and initiations of various kinds, some of which can be quite challenging. Ethnographic literature reveals that they are involved with the transference of knowledge to those spiritual seekers who are deemed ready to receive it. They may also bring us into connection with others in the spiritual hierarchy, so we may discover that we have more than one teacher. This is the shaman’s path and practice in every sense.
This is a summary of what is actually a complex topic and reveals that there are two primary gateways into the spiritual worlds: the practice of Nature Mysticism—which connects us with the elementals, the spirits of nature and other earthbound forces—and the practice of Deity Mysticism, through which each one of us is involved with two primary and immanent levels of “deity,” our oversoul and our Guide, and all the time.
The Spirit Guide is a higher level of deity, the one who draws us up and into the higher levels of the spiritual hierarchy where we may connect with other higher beings when we are deemed ready. We are all going in this direction, no matter who we are and what we are engaged with during our current life or what our religious belief systems may be. This passage of ascent, of growth upward into who and what we are destined to become as we travel across eternity as souls, is always and forever a readiness issue.
The second but foremost level of deity is our own immortal higher self, our oversoul, our god-self who serves us as the source of our intuition and inspiration and from whom we receive dreams and visions and ideas. Sometimes we experience connection with it as that still small voice within that may function as a companion, an adviser, and a spiritual companion who provides us with information in response to our need to know. It is often the one with whom we converse when we are “talking to ourselves.” This reveals that our oversoul serves us during life as our primary spirit teacher. When you establish an ongoing and intimate relationship with your oversoul and with your Spirit Guide, they become your two best friends, far above and beyond any other relationships in your current life.
And by the way, both your personal oversoul and your Spirit Guide have names. These names are something for you to discover. In response to having visionary connections with them, you will learn that they cherish and love you unconditionally and that there is nothing to fear. And they will provide you with teaching and information and guidance about your personal destiny as a soul, about the life lessons upon which you are currently working, about the world’s problems and your personal responsibilities, and so forth. But only if you ask.
THE NEW PERSPECTIVE OF GOD
In contrast to the archaic and mythic monotheist view of a father-god who lives off-planet and who has good days and bad days, the direct experience of the modern visionary reveals that our oversoul is, in fact, our personal “God in Heaven,” the one who actually listens to our prayers, works in mysterious ways, and sends us to Earth as occasional messengers who sometimes get treated badly.
Several years ago, Wayne Dyer said to Oprah Winfrey on her daytime talk show SuperSoul Sunday, “The soul is the deathless part of us—the part that looks out from behind our eyes and has no form.” And when Oprah asked him for his definition of God, Wayne replied, “God is the highest place within each and every one of us. It’s our divine self.”5 Dyer realized that the true self within each one of us is God. It is wise and powerful. It is also good. He also knew something that Carolyn Boyes-Watson and Kay Pranis have revealed in their book Heart of Hope: A Guide for Using Peacemaking Circles to Develop Emotional Literacy, Promote Healing & Build Healthy Relationships—that to live from this core self, which represents the best in us, requires practice.6
Dyer’s insights reveal an eternal truth—that our oversoul is our own immortal wise spirit being, our divine self, the god who loves us unconditionally and who is always in connection with us. The noble Emerson understood that our oversoul is, and forever will be, our guardian angel, our personal god who increases, grows, and becomes more in response to what we, its embodiments, do and become here on the physical plane of action through countless lives on our long journey across time.
The modern shamanist discovers through direct revelation that this extraordinary dynamic is a co-creative relationship between Heaven (our oversoul spirit self) and Earth (our embodied physical self). And it has been the experience of countless workshop participants that our personal oversoul exists as a composite etheric field made up of all of our former selves who lived former lives in former embodiments. Each of these “selves” continues to exist within our oversoul matrix, preserving a record, an energetic template of everything that we did and became during those lives as we worked on our life lessons here on the physical plane of planet Earth across eons of time.
When fully understood and accepted, this eternal truth reveals that the oversoul is our personal ancestral god-being to which we all may have access, whether through our dreaming, meditation, past-life regression therapies, hypnosis, or goal-oriented shamanic journeywork while very much awake. This revelation provides us with a new perception of God.
On July 14, 1930, the Indian mystic and poet Rabindranath Tagore visited Albert Einstein in Germany. During their talk, Tagore commented to Einstein, “My religion is in the reconciliation of the superpersonal self, the universal spirit, in my own individual being.”7 This superpersonal self is the oversoul and it is not human, by the way. It is simply a soul. It is the physical body we inhabit that is human.
To give you a visual image from my own experience, you might imagine your oversoul to be organized much like a child’s Slinky toy laid out on its side on a flat surface with the ends of the coiled column joined. As such, the higher self takes the form of a tightly woven basket of circular energy strands, which appears to the mystic eye like a brilliant doughnut, or torus, made of light, one that may be laterally compressed, making it taller and forming a sphere, a (huge) orb-like ball of light.
The hole in the doughnut runs from top to bottom of the sphere and sometimes (but not always) creates a dense vertical shaft of light within the comparatively dimmer radiance of the basket itself. Each strand of the Slinky, each circular line or coil of light around the periphery and through the hole of the doughnut, represents an energetic disc somewhat like a DVD that records everything from the lifetime of a former self. Inside the torus is an energetic core that contains the distinct shape of our immortal character that we have developed through our embodiments across time, one that continually grows and changes as we become more (or less) during each life. The visionary artist Alex Grey has created a striking image of it in his book Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey. He calls it the Universal Life Lattice.8
Through visionary perception, our oversoul is revealed to be the creative god-source from which we come into each life, and the central, vertical shaft of light within its field is often seen in deep meditation by mystics as a prominent landmark within the sphere. This may suggest why the Hawaiians and the Andean peoples, for example, have often used the vertical symbol of the standing stone for the creative god-principle—the mythic Kane in Hawai’i and the lord of light, Wirakocha, in South America. And since standing stones are found all over the world, perhaps this reveals what the symbol actually meant to those who placed these monoliths upright in antiquity.
A vertical shaft of light within a globe of dimmer radiance—this is what I have been shown in my own meditative journeywork to be the energetic morphology of my immortal spirit self-aspect—a field report, if you will, and I share this percept with you in order to give you a greater sense of it, extending as always a gentle invitation for you to engage in your own visionary fieldwork. This being is the immortal god who loves you. Unconditionally.
And the dreaming? Dreaming is a verb, implying a continuous flow of an ongoing process. This is a good way to describe the spirit world, which, in fact, dreaming is. In The Bowl of Light, I write that our heart appears to be the portal that gives us access to our oversoul field, which resides within the dreaming. So the question comes up for our consideration: Who is dreaming? As Hawaiian elder Hale Makua so wisely pointed out to me, it is none other than our oversoul who serves us our personal creator at the beginning of life and the repository to which our soul complex returns at the end of each reincarnational cycle. It is our oversoul who lives forever in the Dreamtime and who dreams, and who is dreaming right now, even as I write these words where I am, and you read them wherever you are. And there is more.
THE THREE SOULS
In most of my books I have addressed the reincarnation cycle and the indigenous perception that each one of us possesses not one but three distinct souls. Ultimately, all three souls originate from the same source, but they exist in very different states of quality. The spiritual traditions of the Hawaiians, the Inuit, the Lakota, the Cherokee, the Vodou peoples, and even the Shuar of the Amazon confirm this. How widely these percepts were once held among the indigenous peoples cannot be ascertained today, as so much has been lost due to the invasive and destructive influence of Christian missionary activity.
As I shared in The Bowl of Light, the kahuna tradition of Polynesia holds that prior to life, our oversoul divides itself, expressing a seed of its light (the bowl of light) that enters its new embodiment for a new life when we emerge from our mother’s body and draw our first breath that the Hawaiians call the Hā—the divine breath of life.
The breath is the vehicle of transfer for this immortal soul seed and this principle is in complete alignment with the beliefs of all three of our monotheistic religions that proclaim “God breathes life into form.” In fact, the word for breath and the word for spirit is the same in Latin (spiritus) as well as in Hebrew and Arabic (ruach). Yet when we walk on the mystic road, we discover that the one who breathes life into us is not some fatherly mono-god. It is actually our personal oversoul, our god-self in the Upper Worlds of spirit.
When our spirit soul seed arrives within us from that source with that first breath, it encounters a distinct and separate soul already in residence. This is our physical body soul that was sourced to us by our mother through her egg and by our father through his sperm. In the same manner that these gametes, these sex cells, carry a genetic template that comes together to form the new and unique personal pattern of our DNA (half from the mother and half from the father), they also carry a psychic energetic template. This template is the initial source of our energy body with which the divine spark from the spirit soul now merges to create a unity. In other words, our energy body is derived from three sources, or ancestral lineages: our mother’s lineage, our father’s lineage (containing all maternal and paternal ancestral imprints), and our personal spiritual oversoul (containing all our spiritual ancestral imprints from past lives).
The physical soul functions as the source of our emotions and feelings, which is why some call it the emotional body. It is the human animal soul template within which our memories are recorded. It expresses our collective personality. It also carries the evolutionary software to operate, maintain, restore, and heal the physical body, and it is the aspect of ourselves that perceives both that which is seen in the objective outer world and that which is thought, felt, or dreamed in the subjective inner worlds.
The body soul is the interface between our “personal self” and “the other,” revealing that the visionary portal into the spiritual worlds lies within it. The body soul is thus the sender and receiver of all psychic, shamanic, and mystic experiences, including those connections with our higher self. It takes everything literally, and like a good servant or personal computer, the body soul does what it is told.
And who tells it what to do?
This is our third soul who comes into existence in response to life as we lead it. We literally create a new one in each life. This is our mental soul, or egoic intellectual self, who will grow into wisdom as we mature, the one who will guide us successfully or unsuccessfully through life according to the beliefs and convictions that it holds to be true. As our inner director, the mental soul thinks, analyzes, assigns meaning to, practices discernment, makes decisions, and serves as the source of our intentionality and our creative imagination. It is through this last function that it can create thought-forms of things or achievements that it wishes to acquire. And through its will, it directs the activities of the body soul to enable the manifestation of these goals. The mental egoic soul is our inner CEO.
There is a strongly held and popular belief among New Agers that we have to drop or get rid of our ego. This, in my opinion, is an error of truly epic proportions, and no spiritual teacher who has experienced authentic initiation would ever make such a proclamation. Seen in the truth of its functions as listed in the previous paragraph, should we really get rid of our egos? The answer is obvious. Absolutely not!
Our egoic mental soul is our creative aspect, our inner chief, and it is the key to having a successful life as well as making the necessary decisions that enable us to achieve the life lessons we are here to experience and learn. When fully aware, our mental soul may also respond to messages sent from our oversoul. While being creative, it can also create a “default ego,” the aspect of ourselves that can lie and create false selves and personalities with their own agendas. This is always a challenge, and it may be why some feel the need to demonize the ego.
Our immortal higher self, on the other hand, is the wise spiritual being (the first level of deity) who serves us as the source of our intuition and inspiration, the one who sends us dreams and visions as well as ideas and impulses in response to our need to know. Thomas Moore, in his seminal book A Religion of One’s Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World, reveals that the word intuition comes from a Latin word that means “to keep watch over.” He observes, “Intuitions come and go quickly. You have to watch for them. They are like subtle messages coming at you, but so delicate and thin that you might easily let them go by. You have to learn to sort them out and eventually trust them.”9
The word trust reaffirms that our oversoul is the one who is in service to us as our spirit teacher, and like its own teacher, the Spirit Guide, it may assume forms meaningful to us in our dreams and visions. This also suggests that our own best teacher, as the Hawaiian mystic Hale Makua always affirmed, is ourselves. The oversoul connects with our mental soul through the interface of the body soul. Our egoic intellect may then consider those impulses coming in because as the decision maker it serves us as our “chooser.” It can choose to respond to spiritual insight or not. This is always and forever a readiness issue involving our capacity for free will.
It is generally known that the classical Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras was the first in the Western tradition to offer his thoughts about these three principias—the three principle levels of body, mind, and spirit. His percepts then affected the thoughts of countless philosophers and visionaries across the centuries and take form in our own time as Sigmund Freud’s id, ego, and superego, and Carl Jung’s subconscious, conscious, and super-conscious minds. The Greeks subsumed two of these souls into one: the psyche, which they considered from their perspective to be the organ of both thought and emotion. From the indigenous perspective, however, these two quite separate functions are clearly products of two quite separate souls.
At life’s end, the physical body dies. But what happens to your energy body? Nothing! The laws of thermodynamics reveal that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can shift to a new state. Energy is immortal, and the research of Michael Newton and Linda Backman, as well as the experiential knowledge of countless shamans, reveal that your personal triune soul complex—spiritual, mental, and physical—survives the death of the body and travels into the transitional dimensional level of the Middle World of dream carried by your energy body. This is what “in transition” means. During its stay in the Middle World, the soul complex may maintain its integration as a personal pattern, and many things may transpire. At the culmination of this period, it ascends in the company of your Spirit Guide and remerges with its source, your oversoul field, your great sphere of light that resides forever in the dreaming of the Upper Worlds of spirit. When this occurs, the oversoul enfolds into itself everything that you have ever thought, felt, done, and endured in the life just led, in response to which it grows, increases, and becomes more.
I have discussed the Originator, the ultimate Source of all being, including ourselves (see chapter 3). The Taoists understand that the Originator, which they call the Tao, continuously emanates parts of itself outward and downward through the various dimensional densities, and in response, a great game comes into being, one in which we are all players. This is the Master Game. It begins with our having forgotten who we really are, yet there exists an impulse within us, a yearning for something ineffable. We thus discover that our task, part of our mission as players of the game, is to remember and to know ourselves once again as aspects of the Originator who are growing and becoming more on our long journey home across space and time, bearing the gifts of everything that we have become.
From the visionary perspective, pain and suffering are just aspects of the game. They feel extremely real while we are playing, and indeed they have to in order to make us understand that the game is real. Our purpose in the game is to grow, develop, and transform ourselves into more positive and loving beings. We all have certain goals that we always plan to achieve before incarnating here on earth, which is why we pass through the veil of forgetfulness in returning to life. If we already knew what our goals were, the game would be too easy and there would be no growth.
Many spiritual teachers encourage us to look at the things in our life that we most love, those that make us happy. It is good for us to experience these as often as possible, as they will reveal some of the things that are included on our soul contract for this life. It is also important to look at the negative experiences that often seem to recur during our lifetime. It is likely that these are also life lessons on which we chose to come here to work.
All manner of circumstances in life will test us. Once we have successfully identified these issues and used them as the tools of transformation to improve the quality of our character, we notice that negative things seem to disappear from our life. We will still be presented with them at varying intervals to check and see that we have not forgotten that which we have learned, but they will be fewer and farther in between.
At the end of physical life, the visionaries among us know that no one really dies. My spirit teacher once said to me that at death, the matter of human form is shed, much like the chrysalis of a caterpillar, and then the butterfly, the spirit being that we really are, re-emerges to resume residence in the worlds of things hidden, where it eventually ascends and remerges with our spiritual oversoul in the “higher densities” (Hale Makua’s term) of the afterlife state.
These insights reveal that we are truly immortals traveling across time. This includes all of us, and one thing is for sure: nobody fails. At the end of all our life cycles, both physical and nonphysical, all of us will eventually find our way Home to become one with the Originator once again. We will all get there and when we do, we will know what it knows and feel what it feels. We will become gods, and in this sense the Originator could be considered as a God being, I suppose. Yet there is so much political diatribe around the God word, and about who and what God is, says, or isn’t, that a better term might simply be Source, which it is—the Source of all the dimensional levels of the spirit worlds and the Dreamtime, causal and subtle, the physical and nonphysical worlds, and everything that is found within them. When one considers the immensity of the universes infused everywhere with the life force, this is quite something, don’t you think?
NATURE MYSTICISM AND DEITY MYSTICISM
In our time and in response to such insights, spirituality is changing and shifting away from how our mainstream monotheist traditions have previously defined it. Having taught a university and college-level course in the anthropology of religion for many years, I’ve examined many of the world’s mystical traditions and have come to the conclusion that there are many gateways into the spiritual worlds, though there appears to be two primary windows—Nature Mysticism and Deity Mysticism.
Many, if not most, of the world’s indigenous people and Western people alike use the gateway of Nature Mysticism. For example, among the pre-Christian tribal peoples of Britain and Europe, there lived a shamanist priesthood who the Gauls called the Druides. In the classical period they came to be known as the Druids, and history reveals that they were highly organized into a hierarchy that included both men and women.
The Druids believed passionately in reincarnation and our personal immortality as a soul, percepts that lay right at the heart of their practices and teachings. Like most of the world’s traditional tribal peoples, they were also keen observers of nature, and their knowledge of natural and universal processes was unequaled in the Roman and classical Greek worlds. They understood that the universe itself is indestructible. They also knew from direct revelation that what monotheists call “God” is not some supernatural god-father but rather a process that is densely concentrated in all living beings and thus within all of nature. In this sense, they knew that God is not a noun; it is a verb, a pantheistic revelation in which God is literally within everything everywhere as the life force, affirming that the shamanic tradition is the heritage of all those descended from the Anglo-Saxon-Gaulish-Celtic-Germanic-Norse peoples of Britain and Europe.
The Druids also served their tribal societies as judiciaries, as mediators who had the power to stop conflicts between competing tribes, families, or powerful individuals, and who dispensed justice from their vast knowledge of tribal and natural law, affirming the important role shamans traditionally held in tribal societies. Unlike our current judiciary in the United States today, the Druids were said to be immune to political or economic influence of any kind or at any level.
The Druids were the counselors of kings, respected visionaries and prophets, and supervisors of important religious rituals. Noble children were instructed by them, and oaths sworn before them. They were the wisdom keepers of their peoples, and for them the gateway into the transpersonal realms lay in the practice of Nature Mysticism, with the many aspects of nature itself, including their own bodies, serving as the doorways into the other worlds. Their teachings included knowledge of the motion of the stars, the size of the earth and the whole universe, the ordering of nature as well as the cosmic order, the power and nature of the gods, and why the universe behaves the way it does. In other words, they were highly educated people.10
It was through Nature Mysticism that I was able to find a spirit helper for my friend Mark, bringing him into relationship with a power animal who will continue to provide him with power, protection, and support . . . as well as information, for it has been my experience that the great serpent is the personification of superior wisdom and learning, quite in opposition to the demonism of the serpent archetype propounded by and through fundamentalist Christianity.
Another window into the spiritual worlds is the practice of Deity Mysticism. Deity Mysticism is different from Nature Mysticism in that it deals with a higher dimensional level from the dreaming of nature and the Middle Worlds of dream. An example of Deity Mysticism can found in the spiritual practices of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that, by the way, are quite different from those of the older Hinayana or later Mahayana Buddhist traditions of India, the Theravada traditions of Southeast Asia, as well as the traditions of Ch’an Buddhism in China and Zen Buddhism in Japan.
The Tibetan tradition combines Indian Buddhist thought and practices introduced from the south with the ancient Bon Po shamanistic practices that already existed in Central Asia to the north. Buddhism plus shamanism: this provides an interesting combination of mystical contemplation and visionary experience. The merger of the two, often referred to as the Vajrayana tradition, is thus unique.
The shamanist influence can be clearly seen in some of the spiritual practices in which the Tibetans engage and especially with Deity yoga, or what could be called Deity Mysticism. In these practices, the yogi (the practitioner) in deep meditation (contemplation) creates a mental image or thought-form (visioning) of a powerful deity such as Avalokiteshvara, the Himalayan bodhisattva of compassion, also known as Kwannon in Japan and Kwan Yin in China. Through ongoing and committed meditative practice, the yogi conjures up this deity day after day, projecting it outward, whereupon he or she then visualizes stepping forward and intentionally merging with the deity.
In Deity yoga, the practitioner becomes one with the deity, speaking, thinking, emoting, acting, and behaving as if they are embodying that powerful archetypal force. In the process, they find themselves accessing profound wisdom, expressing boundless compassion, and behaving with endless virtue in every thought and feeling, action and reaction, as they pass through their daily life. This practice is similar to shamanism in which the shaman, in trance, may merge with a power animal or spirit teacher, embodying that transpersonal force and in the process acquiring that being’s abilities and knowledge.
It is understood by both the shaman and the yogi that these immortal transpersonal forces (deities), who have always been in relationship with us, are willing to constellate within and through us as vehicles in response to our invitation for them to do so, enabling them to manifest effects into our world that can be truly startling as well as life changing. The Tibetans say that through the practice of Deity yoga, an individual can become a Buddha, an awakened one, in a single lifetime instead of the three countless eons that this process would ordinarily take.11
I have been told that His Holiness the Dalai Lama practices Deity yoga daily, merging with the Himalayan deity of compassion, Avalokiteshvara. This means that should you ever have the honor to meet with His Holiness face to face, you will be in the presence of Avalokiteshvara. It will be this godlike being who speaks to you on his breath and who looks into your soul through his eyes.
As modern visionaries, we can adapt this practice, intentionally connecting with and becoming one with our oversoul, and we can do this at any time, any place. In other words, each of us has the ability to become one with and behave like a godlike being. This is what some spiritual seekers call “ascension,” a process that becomes inevitable for us as we grow up and into the spiritual hierarchy of the higher worlds.
Allow me to share with you an account of an encounter with one such higher being from my own life, one that was both spontaneous and quite unexpected, an example of Deity Mysticism that did not happen in a church or temple or zendo or any other holy place. It happened in an airport.
Early one morning many years ago, I was sitting at a boarding gate watching the constant stream of my fellow travelers parading by, all like me on their way to somewhere. Some looked worried, preoccupied, or depressed while others appeared alert, determined, or excited. Many seemed tired, as though they were carrying burdens.
I glanced at the woman sitting next to me in the long row of seats near my gate. She was dressed in a black pantsuit and red blouse, black low-heeled shoes, and wearing subdued yet expensive gold jewelry, including a Patek-Phillipe watch. Her coifed and frosted hair was cut short, controlled and chic, and she was completely oblivious to my presence. She was scanning that day’s copy of The Wall Street Journal with professional intensity through miniature folding reading glasses. Her carry-ons consisted of a laptop, an attaché case, and a small purse, suggesting that she was an attorney or businesswoman, perhaps. She was dressed for success and around her neck was a small Christian cross on a thin gold chain.
By comparison, I was wearing a black turtle-neck pullover, wrinkled khaki slacks, a dark olive green corduroy coat, and comfortable slip-on shoes. My hair under my soft tan safari-type hat was thinning on top but long and curly on the sides and in the back, and I was sporting a drooping moustache connected to a graying goatee. I was wearing Johnny Depp–type glasses, and my jewelry consisted of my three gold wedding rings and my father’s gold signet ring. Around one wrist I wore the brass tribal bracelet given to me by the indigenous tribal man in the early 1970s complemented by a cheap Swiss Army watch around the other. Around my neck hung an old Maasai bead of warthog ivory on a black leather thong that came to me down in the Rift Valley on a blazing afternoon in Kenya. My carry-on was a weathered shoulder bag stuffed with books and papers, chocolate bars, and a cell phone I rarely used, with a collapsible umbrella stuck in a sleeve on one end and a water bottle in the sleeve on the other. I also had my portable office, a roller bag with a laptop and scripts for the upcoming workshop.
I did a quick scan of the businesswoman’s newspaper. The column headlines revealed that we live in a time of extremes. On the one hand, we have the overarching embrace of Western civilization, with all its glittering gadgets and staggering achievements enabled by a high-tech worldwide communication system unlike anything ever seen before. On the other, we have the poor and the disenfranchised, all those human beings who are outside the system, including most of the “third world.” As an anthropologist, I know this world well, as I’ve lived and worked in it for much of my life. I glanced again at the woman next to me and wondered if she had ever seen the world of need up close and personal.
On this particular morning, I was considering these two opposing polarities and something completely unexpected appeared in my mind—the words attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, taken from one of his sermons: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
I considered this revolutionary statement, utterly at odds with Western economic theory, and I was very much aware that the meek are not doing well, not well at all. I was also aware that many in the international community consider Americans to be the Romans of our time, as our corporations and our banks backed by our military complex relentlessly despoil and plunder the world. I glanced again at the professional next to me and directed a brief but intense surge of focused attention toward her. No contact. She couldn’t feel it, or if she could, she was purposefully ignoring me.
I took a couple of deep breaths, and since I had some time, I intentionally relaxed my body, slipping into a light meditative trance. As I settled, I created a thought-form within my mind of Jesus of Nazareth, producing a culturally determined image of a tall Semitic man with long tied-back shaggy hair, a hawk nose, and a scraggly beard, dressed in period clothing with scuffed worn sandals on his bare brown feet. As I held my focused attention on the mental image, something quite startling occurred. A brilliant curved line of light appeared in the air before me about eight feet above the carpeted floor, a shimmering golden crescent somewhat like the new moon with the points up. Amazed, I watched it widen and open so that light began to spill out of it almost like a waterfall.
I risked a quick glance to my right and to my left. Apparently, nobody else could see it. I refocused on the brilliant field and held my breath, enthralled, as a large bubble of light separated from that curtain of radiance. I directed all of my concentration onto this sphere and watched as it darkened and took on density until it transformed into a human shape, fleshed out with those details I had just conjured up based on my knowledge of the classical world.
My mind was reeling. I was aware that I was practicing what the Tibetans call Deity yoga and from the shamanist perspective Deity Mysticism, a discipline in which I had mentally created a thought-form and then projected it outward. But as the image continued to darken and solidify, surrounded by that shimmering golden curtain, I wasn’t sure if I had created it or whether I had summoned it.
I claim nothing, yet I understood with certainty in those moments that I had used my own mind and body to create a bridge across which I may have accessed the oversoul field of some great being to bring him through from the worlds of things hidden. To say I was in awe would be an understatement of vast proportions. There I was in the airport, and I was mind-blown.
For long moments, the spirit simply stood still before me and took in his surroundings. Then he turned and observed me thoughtfully, locking his eyes with mine and holding my attention with his gaze. He was not quite solid, but rather somewhat luminous and almost transparent. Those who have read my book Visionseeker will remember that we had made contact before, and as the sense of recognition grew between us, a smile appeared on his face and he opened his hands, turning his palms toward me in greeting.
My body became warm, and light flowed into me like water poured into a bottle. My blood began to sparkle, producing a hissing sound like rushing water in my ears. I felt my heart opening as the vibration of absolute and unconditional love began to permeate my being. During this moment of immanence and enchantment, his smile deepened, crinkling the edges of his dark eyes under his tangled mop of hair. I knew then that he could perceive my opened heart, and he looked so real to me in those moments that I could almost smell him.
Part of me wondered idly if anyone else would notice him. Perhaps in response to my thoughts, he turned his head and glanced at the crowds flowing by us like a river. As my gaze followed his, I wondered if anyone would be receptive to a sermon from a spirit who looked like (and could be) Jesus of Nazareth right here, right now, in the airport. Not very likely, I concluded. Anyone who could see him clothed in what appeared to be several layers of long white homespun bathrobes would immediately wonder how this striking and yet decidedly ungroomed figure ever got by airport security. He continued to scan the crowd, his attention resting on the restless multitudes surging by, and nobody noticed him. Nobody.
Abruptly, his attention shifted to a tired and distraught mother dealing with an upset child nearby, pulling my own focus in her direction as well. My heart was overflowing with love in those moments, and being a father myself, I extended my feelings of compassion toward the mother and her child. Amazingly, the little girl stopped crying, allowing herself to be comforted by her mother. The crisis seemed to be over. The tall spirit glanced at me and nodded with . . . with what? Satisfaction? Approval?
My thinking mind slowly began to operate once again, and as my sense of self restabilized, thoughts appeared. Who was this spirit? Was he my Spirit Guide who had chosen to make an appearance as the thought-form I had created? Was he an angel? Was he an expression of an oversoul field that included the historical Jesus? I focused my attention on the spirit—or the angel (he had no wings)—standing before me as these questions moved through my mind and he simply looked at me and into my soul.
Then he smiled . . . and his image slowly became more and more transparent until all that remained was the large shimmering bubble tinged by a deep bluish purple and surrounded by a radiant outline of light. The sphere faded from my sight as it merged back into that curtain of light that was now flowing back up into the brilliant arc, and then it too disappeared as though someone had closed it from the other side. I was left with the resonance of his smile and the warmth of his eyes. That, for me, was his sermon, his message from the field of good.
As I wiped the tears from my eyes and reviewed what had just happened, I glanced at the woman next to me. She was still studying the stock market page and had noticed nothing. I wondered if she knew anything about shamans. Twenty years ago, I would have said probably not. Today, I could not be so sure. Interest in the shaman’s path is growing, and as a shamanist, I know that although such experiences are not exactly commonplace for all of us, they do happen, often unexpectedly, like this one.
As I have already noted, the difference between a shaman and a yogi practicing Deity yoga lies in the yogi’s conviction that the deity is simply a thought-form and thus an illusion created by their own mind. A shaman, in contrast, would be equally as convinced that the deity was indeed a spirit with its own separate agenda and being-hood, quite distinct from the one who perceived it. I had not presumed to step forward and merge with the exalted being who had spiritwalked through the gateway created by my mind, yet when I considered the incredible surge of unconditional love I had just experienced, I suspected that he had merged with me.
I continued to sit in my airport seat and marvel at the wonder of it. Then the moment passed as my flight was announced and I rose to shuffle onto the plane with the others. I noted in passing that the businesswoman was in first class. I was flying coach. I stowed my gear in the overhead compartment above my seat and dug out a book to read while we rode the winds to our distant destination.
THE PAGAN CHRIST
I was thinking about this extraordinary encounter upon awakening at 4:00 a.m. one day. I lay still in the darkness, watching my thoughts, and after the usual suspects had passed through my mind, I suddenly wondered how many of our religious specialists—our rabbis, priests, ministers, and imams—have had visionary revelations themselves or have made important discoveries through their theological or historical research. And for those who have, I wondered further, how do they manage to incorporate their revelations into their teachings to enlighten their spiritual communities? Here’s an interesting example from one who has experienced both, one who chose, like me, to publish.
In 2004, Tom Harpur, a Canadian theologian and Anglican priest, published a book titled The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light. His discourse begins with his revelation that Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess of love and the archetypal mother, had a second name, a nickname, four thousand years ago—Mery, which means “beloved” in the Egyptian language. And her son Horus, immaculately conceived after the death of his father, the god Osiris, had a second name too—Iusa.12 Sound familiar?
Grounded in relentless scholarship, perhaps encouraged by spiritual insight, Harpur’s book reveals that the Christos myth was alive and well in Egypt more than two thousand years before the story of Jesus of Nazareth appeared in the Middle East. And his discovery? The Egyptian god Horus was and is the pagan Christ. Harper documents how his myth was “borrowed” part and parcel from the Egyptian mystery schools by the early Christian theologians who then created a figurative flesh-and-blood Jesus—an embodied god-human hybrid on earth for the common people to believe in as the son of God and a divine messiah and redeemer.13
Harpur describes this blatantly political act as “the shadow of the Third Century” because once the Christian church had taken the Christos myth from the Egyptians and made it their own, they did everything they could to destroy any evidence of their mythos’s pagan roots.14 In Not in His Image, John Lamb Lash writes that this included the systematic destruction of the Egyptian and Greek mystery schools as well as the extermination of the Gnostics who called themselves telestai (those who are aimed). The telestai were the university professors and wisdom keepers of the ancient world for more than a thousand years.15
Lash reveals that the Gnostics’ practice of telestics was the art of interpreting the mystical and supernatural elements of human experience in a sober and rational manner but without dismissing or denying the authenticity of such experience.16 Gnosis itself was an ancient form of noetics, the science of relating mind to phenomena through direct experience, natural and supernatural. In telestics, the insights of noetic science can be brought to focus specifically on issues of human purpose, cosmic order, and so forth. Fortunately, some of the Gnostics’ wisdom survived by chance in the fourth-century Nag Hammadi scriptures recovered from a cave in Egypt in 1945. Lash has summarized much of this knowledge.
There are parts of Harpur’s book that some readers may find challenging, such as his conclusion that it is questionable, even doubtful, that a flesh-and-blood Jesus ever lived. He suggests that the entire story of Jesus, from his immaculate conception right up to his sacrifice and his resurrection, was completely fictional and was a reworking of the myth of Horus of Egypt.
Harpur is not alone in his assertions. In fact, the list of scholars, historians, and independent researchers who have detailed evidence that it is unlikely that Jesus ever existed is extensive. For example, Acharya S, writing under the pen name D. M. Murdock, goes into great detail in her book Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection about the stunning similarities between Jesus and the ancient Egyptian god Horus. The sources she cites are anything but marginal or questionable and are entirely within the mainstream of Egyptology.17 Her books The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold and Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha, and Christ Unveiled examine Jesus as a deity fabricated by ancient people as a personification of the sun.18 She maintains that Jesus did not, in fact, exist as a person but only as a myth and an idea.
In addition, Michael Paulkovich, a biblical historian, has come forward with the book No Meek Messiah: Christianity’s Lies, Laws, and Legacy, which suggests that Christ was a myth fabricated by the gospel writers.19 To come to this conclusion, Paulkovich examined the writings of 126 ancient historians who he says should have mentioned Jesus in their documents. In fact, no ancient historian mentions Jesus at all. Paulkovich’s research was originally published in the journal Free Inquiry, and in it, Paulkovich claims that the only mention of Jesus comes from the Bible itself.
Many additional historians have written numerous books making the same claim. Joseph Atwill, a biblical scholar, has posited that the myth of Jesus was fabricated to unite the Roman kingdom under a singular leader—Constantine. His book, Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus, details his claims.20 John G. Jackson’s Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth explores how ancient pagan religions are reflected in the Jesus myth.21 There are numerous identical stories that exist in paganism and the gospels, such as the miracle of a deity changing water into wine. Countless scholars and historians have noted the parallels between the story of Jesus and earlier gods. There are many deities who were born of a virgin, for example, and many who performed miracles identical to those of Jesus.
Yet what about all those who have had visionary connections or near-death experiences in which they encountered a being they believed to be Jesus, including my lady Jill’s encounter in the chapel in Minnesota? I myself have had a transpersonal connection with a being I interpreted as Jesus of Nazareth, which is recorded in my book Visionseeker and in the account detailed above.
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, when Spirit Guides choose to reveal themselves to us, they may often appear to us as figures in our faith—a Christian seeing Jesus, a Jew meeting with Moses, a Muslim encountering the prophet Mohammed, a Hindu encountering Krishna, a Tibetan Buddhist merging with Avalokiteshvara, a Taoist chatting with an immortal who resembles Lao-Tzu. It is also possible that the “Jesus icon” may be an expression of one of the higher organizing intelligences in service to humanity who chooses this symbolic form to make an impression. Could it be that the impression Jill had of Jesus was, in fact, the Spirit Guide of that little boy who took that form to be of service to him? Or was it perhaps an expression of an oversoul field that incarnated as Yeshua Ben Josephus two millennia ago? We must be open to the possibility that the Jesus myth, which took form in the third century, may have been based upon dim memories of a charismatic rabbi who came to a bad end at the hands of the Romans, a man who was a shaman in every sense, a man who could communicate with spirits, journey to the other worlds, and perform miracles. Such personages exist in the Judaic tradition and are known as the Ba’al Shem, the Master of the Name.22
HUMANITY DIVINITIZED
Harpur also reveals something in his book that converges directly upon the New Mysteries reappearing in our time. He presents us with a central teaching found at the heart of all the world’s religions and in every culture—the incarnation of the divine into human form. This is familiar territory in Christianity, in which this teaching takes the form of Jesus being the son of God. Yet in considering the nature of divinity, Harpur observes that the solar being we call the sun is the Source and thus the actual creator of everything in our solar system.23 For example, all the carbon in our body (as a carbon-based life-form) was forged at the heart of our star. It is also by its light alone that we are able to know and see everything that exists. Therefore, Harpur posits, the sun was a natural symbol in antiquity for the ultimate Source of all being, for God.
This divine Source of all life was mythically manifested across time in countless accounts as the radiant figure of the humanized sun god, a symbolic representative of both the divine and also humanity divinitized. Such solarized beings included Apollo in Greece, Horus in Egypt, Mithras among the Persians, Jesus of Nazareth of the Middle East, and others. The list is long and through the myths and stories about these archetypal heroes, humankind could see pictured their own history, their own destiny to become heroes themselves, and their own eventual conversion (ascension) to become godlike beings of light. Seen in this perspective, each of us is an embodied seed of soul light sourced into us by our oversoul, who is, in fact, a being of light. This reveals that each one of us is a son or a daughter of God and that each of us is a manifestation of the light of our oversoul, our god-self embodied.
Harpur also reiterates a fact well known to mythologists: myths such as those that make up much of the Bible were never intended to be taken as factual.24 Myths are fictions; they are traditional symbolic stories dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that inform and shape the worldview of a people. Yet every myth and every fairy tale embodies timeless truths that are real. These myths are not to be taken literally; they are meant to be understood. Even children can understand that they are not literal.
AN ETERNAL TRUTH
The myths that gave rise to our Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious traditions, correctly understood, contain an extraordinarily important eternal truth: the divine seed of light sourced into us by our personal god, our immortal oversoul, with our first breath at the beginning of our life, is the true Christos.
From my personal experiences and my own research, I know that the mystics of antiquity taught their acolytes that we received our divine seed of light when we took our first breath, revealing that the breath is the link between spirit and form. We have already observed that all three of our Abrahamic traditions agree that God breathes life into form.
We discover through spiritual vision that the teachers of the ancient mystery schools knew that this “God” is actually our own immortal spirit soul who breathes life into us. In the philosophy of Aristotle, the oversoul was known as our “entelechy” (en-TELL-e-key), our personal spiritual essence—which is already fully realized—and our immortal vital force, which continually directs us toward self-fulfillment, the condition under which a potential becomes actualized. Aristotle also understood the oversoul/entelechy to be the vital principle that guides the development and functioning of an organism. This truth, correctly understood, reveals that the Christos, known by many names in many cultures, is present within every single member of humanity as our common spiritual property.
Through our own personal visionary experience, we come to know with certainty that the accepting and embracing of this extraordinary revelation, the power of the Christos within each of us, may be activated and unleashed to spiritualize our own nature. The Gnostics taught that through direct experience (gnosis) of the sacred nature of our entelechy and its soul seed within us, we discover that each of us embodies a part of the Originator and that the presence of the Christos within us gifts each one of us with the potential to become gods ourselves.
Blasphemy? Absolutely not, and yet virtually none of our monotheistic Abrahamic traditions affirms this progression. But the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition does.
THE EASTERN ORTHODOXY AND SAINT SYMEON
While the Western Catholic Church in Rome has placed more and more power in the hands of its pope, cardinals, and bishops over the past seventeen hundred years, the guardians of spiritual truth in the Eastern Orthodoxy are considered to be the entire people of God—the populace at large. This has created a strongly democratic religious complex in the Eastern Christian world about which most in the West are largely unaware.
When I was traveling in Greece many years ago, I came across a book by Patricia Storace titled Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece. I was struck by this passage about the Eastern Orthodoxy:
Our people have followed the path that Alexander laid down for us in the pre-Christian world and Constantine in the fulfilled world—[the goal] of becoming gods. This is part of our Orthodox theology, not like your “salvation” [in the Western tradition], which puts a piece of virtue in the bank and gets back divine grace as interest. To understand us, you must understand the concept of theosis [becoming one with God]. Our [Eastern] church teaches that the goal of each Christian is deification [to become God]—Saint Athanasius wrote that the Christ says to us, “In my kingdom, I shall be God with you as gods.”25
To merge with and become one with God—now, that is a truly great adventure, don’t you think? And in the shamanist tradition, the merging and becoming one with our god-self is available to all of us and all the time, no matter what one’s spiritual beliefs or religion may be.
My favorite saint in the Eastern Orthodox tradition is a tenth-century monk who was born with the Christian name George and eventually canonized as Saint Symeon (949–1022). My Internet searches have revealed that he was one of only three given the title “New Theologian” by the church. The word theologian in the perspective of those times meant “one who has had the direct one-on-one mystical experience of God.”
Saint Symeon achieved his transpersonal connection with what he perceived as the light of the “Holy Spirit” through dedicating his life to the practice of hesychia (HESS-ick-ia)—the cultivation of a stillness or silence of the heart. Hesychia is a form of meditation that incorporates directed inner focus and control of the breath with an intention, usually expressed through prayer. This is a mystical practice much like that of the deep listening of some of the Australian Aboriginals called dadirri, which Sandra Ingerman and I described in Awakening to the Spirit World. This similarity reveals that the traditional peoples knew about this and practiced it as well. Symeon encouraged all Christians in his writings and teachings to have the direct experience of God in deep contemplation through hesychia. In one of his discourses, he defended his frequent sharing of his own inner experiences, writing that it was not presumptuous but was done to encourage others in their inner life.26
Through the discipline of hesychia, Saint Symeon and his acolytes (his hesychasts) attained visions of divine light through intentionally breathing into their hearts where they activated and merged with the Christos seed residing within it. This is authentic Deity Mysticism in every sense, a practice that will bring the spiritual seeker into direct conscious relationship with their immortal oversoul, their god-self.
Saint Symeon perceived the visionary life to be quite ordinary. He understood that to achieve the direct, transpersonal connection with that field of grace that he called the Holy Spirit is one of our natural birthrights, as I too have suggested. He is reputed to have said that only those who become aware of signs and wonders happening within themselves are truly God-bearers.27
A thousand years later, his insights confirm that any authentic spiritual practice or religion worth its salt must be about helping us achieve that direct connection with the sacred light that dwells within our hearts—the Christos seed that we received from our oversoul when we drew our first breath. Saint Symeon reveals, as have countless mystics across time, that it is through the experience of connecting directly with our oversoul that each of us can access the greater spiritual “god-field” of the human spirit in the Upper Worlds. This is a spiritual collective composed of all the human higher selves pooled into one vast holographic mosaic, one that contains within itself the composite wisdom and experience of our species that is known in many mystical traditions as the Akashic Records and that Jung knew as the collective unconscious. The Hawaiian kahuna mystics like Hale Makua called it Ka Po‘e ‘Aumakua, the great gathering, or field, of the human oversouls. We might simply think of it as “the human spirit,” of which each one of us is a manifested expression.
This is why Saint Symeon and countless other mystics have counseled that the answers to all the mysteries lie within us, answers that can be accessed through the practice of deep listening through the stillness of our heart. He knew that through this inner meditative silence, it was possible to become one with God—to actually become God—an awareness that lies outside the teachings of the Western church yet is very much part of the New Mysteries coming into being in our time.
The growing acceptance of this truth, the possibility for us to become God, has enormous implications, for it carries the potential to unify all three of our Abrahamic religious traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—into one singular, spiritual complex.
When this unification occurs, our world will change dramatically and for the better. Our understanding and acceptance that all of our Judeo-Christian-Islamic teachings are manifestations of a single, central theme will enable each of us to acquire both the power and the responsibility to become our own prophet, our own teacher, receiving our own mystical revelations from the highest spiritual sources ourselves, without the need for any mythic father-god, bureaucratic priesthood, or salvationist redeemer complex standing between us and our experience of the divine.
Does this mean that we have to abandon our churches and temples, zendos and mosques? Of course not. These are the centers of our spiritual communities and the source of much comfort and support. However, we might consider taking these thoughts into those communities for meditation and discussion. The time has come for us to live our lives and behave toward each other as though we are embodied Gods in training. And now that you know this, it is very difficult to unknow it. As I have already mentioned, the time has definitely come for an upgrade!