REDEFINING DIVINITY
I went everywhere with longing
in my eyes, until here
in my own house
I felt truth
filling my sight.
LALLA
After reading the last chapter, you might be thinking a lot of things, but perhaps this in particular: “No shit, Sherlock! It’s been crystal clear from page one of this hefty tome that you are Red!” I hear ya, but funny thing about humans — we’re often the last ones to see our own truth. And there was something else I needed to receive in order to know the Red Lady as my Self — a radical redefinition of divinity.
Spiritual author Caroline Myss once admitted in an interview that it’s easy on the spiritual path to “go the mental route, [saying] ‘I’ll create the God I want, with my own thoughts’ … a mystical experience slaps me to my knees and says, ‘Don’t you dare create Me, I created you!”1 What I experienced in front of my potty-mouthed parrot’s cage wasn’t a mental construct, or just a psychological realization of Self (my Red Lady isn’t a product of my psyche; my psyche is a product of Her), or owning my positive or “golden” shadow, or purely a metaphysical meeting of my higher self, or a classical mystical experience of soul illumination, or becoming One with God/dess. No, I experienced (and am still experiencing) Redvelations that slap me to my knees and make my master’s degree in Comparative Religion from Harvard University barf all over itself.
You see, when I asked the Red Lady if She was my higher self, She laughed joyfully and said She was more like my higher self’s Higher Self. She then proceeded to introduce me to my self on each dimension of this Universe, finishing with Her. This was the most extraordinary experience of all my lifetimes. The image and feeling was a bit like those wooden Russian dolls:
One
Inside
The Other
Inside
The Other
Inside
The Other …
Human Sera, inside my Soul, inside my Higher Selves,
inside The Red Lady.
Each dimension felt palpably different from the previous dimension, yet my soul and each of my distinct higher selves felt profoundly familiar. I knew them all, intimately. In fact, I exhibit facets of all of them in my human form, because we each make up Her Body as It stretches through the multiple dimensions of this Universe.
Although in terms of dimensions, my higher selves are “higher” (or deeper) than me (and each other), no one is “ruling over” the other. We work together. Each of us offers a particular perspective, specific skills, guidance, and agency, and thus, each displays an integral facet of Our Lady. We’re like a Spiritual Swiss Army knife. But the part of us that definitely gets the most praise (she received a standing ovation from my higher selves) is the soul, who incarnates (or tries to) over and over again in various physical forms. That’s by far the toughest gig.
Interestingly enough, although my form changes, and I eventually become formless, I have a distinctly feminine essence throughout each dimension. I realize this contradicts many spiritual beliefs and experiences, which relay that out of the body or on higher dimensions, we’re neither masculine nor feminine or we’re both, merged together as One. But what can I tell you, except my own experience?
However, the most mind-blowing Redvelation I experienced in that Mama of All Moments in front of my parrot’s cage was this:
I am the Red Lady’s only current human incarnation.
While others can be in relationship with the Red Lady (She gets around, if ya know what I’m sayin’) and can learn from Her and love Her (just as I can relate to, learn from, and love their distinct Divine Selves), and while others might share heretical mystico-erotic qualities and have similar past-life traumas and dramas and be part of the same lineage and experience part of their physical womanhood and Divine Feminine nature as red and resonate strongly with the color red, they are not an actual extension of my Red Lady.
Red isn’t just a set of divine feminine qualities or a mystico-erotic path or a heretical lineage or even a color.
It is the Essence of me reflected through all of the above.
Bottom line: Just like our fingerprints are unique, our soulSelf is irreducibly unique, and the Red Lady that I AM is for me to embody and transmit, and for me alone.
This Full-Bodied Recognition
This Conscious Re-Connection
This Righteous Reclamation
felt like the Key to Our Queendom.
Now, in order to get that “All This” is not pathological spiritual narcissism, I’m gonna break It down, Red style.
THROUGH RED’S PERSPECTIVE
The Red Lady is not the Goddess of this Universe (what I’ve called the Divine Feminine in this book). She is a Goddess In Love with this Universe. The Red Lady works in harmony with God/dess (particularly, with the D.F.) and is “one with” this Universe — but She is also individuated, an ever-evolving Goddess in Her own right.
In Red’s words:
I AM a sovereign Divine Being
(and so are you).
Although we are (or, to be more exact, a part of us is) currently inside
this Universe and therefore experiencing and expressing our Self through this Universe’s consciousness and matter (for example, our physical body is created from Its elements), we do not originate from what we have traditionally called God/dess or this Universe. Much like how our human parents created our body but did not create our soul, our “God parents” created our Body but they did not create our Essence. From Red’s perspective, our Essence comes from outside this Universe. We are eternal, infinite. We have always existed. In fact, we are each our own evolving Universe, just like this one. Another way to look at it: We’re not just different expressions of the same Being; we are also different Beings currently expressing through the same Universal Medium. We are united, yet distinct. Interdependent, yet independent. Different, but equal. One, but many.
That’s right, through Red’s eyes, we are all Gods and Goddesses undercover, currently choosing to take the epic ride through this Universe’s dimensions via countless “incarnations” (not just on planet Earth) in order to experience the full spectrum of life in this particular Universe, while also sharing our unique perspectives and gifts with one another, learning “new skills,” and evolving this Universe and our own Universe. To facilitate this Grand Co-Creative Experience, we play roles for each other — both light and dark and everything in between. We’ve made this Grand Experience so effective and real by agreeing, prior to taking the plunge to the lower dimensions, to forget our own Godliness. Call it “chosen cosmic amnesia.” This was very brave of us to do. In my opinion, it makes us pretty hardcore Beings. While the forgetting was useful, it’s time, really time, for many of us to Remember.
Re-member
It’s time to Come Home to Our Selves
while in human form and while not forsaking this beloved planet.
However, as you’ve witnessed in this book and perhaps in your own life, this journey Home while keeping our feet planted on terra firma ain’t exactly a piece of cosmic cake or a blissful day at the beach. Knowing you are a sovereign Divine Being and living as this truth as an ordinary, imperfect human is the most radical and dangerous spiritual practice, ripe with mistakes and miracles. So, while our spiritualized egos might get excited over this notion, in reality, most of us do our best to avoid what this reclamation actually requires. Also, many of us don’t know or believe we are Something to “claim” in the first place.
Yep, many of us have grown accustomed to our self-prescribed, self-perceived “lower” spiritual status in this Universe, and unfortunately, there are those who do not want us to wake up to our Divine sovereignty. Through Red’s lens, some “false gods” (and “false goddesses”) in the “cosmic matrix” have benefitted and grown accustomed to keeping us small and disempowered and, well, I’ll just say it: under their control — “worship/follow/obey ME, not your own soulSelf!” (Reread my distinctions between true light beings and false light beings in Chapter 6.)
The cosmic matrix infuses our third-dimensional matrix. Together, they have imprinted us with information that supports our fragmenting and forgetting. And this is not just via the social, media, political, and economic arenas, but also through religious and spiritual arenas, which often teach (in some form or another) that we should lose not only our false self but also our Unique Identity … perhaps by blindly following or mimicking an enlightened spiritual figure or by “getting out of the way” so another Being can come through us or by surrendering our sovereignty to The “God/dess” or by blending into “Oneness” or by merging back into “Source” or by dissolving into “No Self.”
From Red’s Perspective, while within this incomprehensibly vast Universe, our Beings have chosen to taste all kinds of “enlightened states” and explore all types of “afterlifes” and heavenly realms and participate in colossal multidimensional spiritual paradigms for epochs of soul time. However, most of these spiritual states, systems, realms, realities, and Beings don’t point us to our unique and sovereign Essence, because they are fulfilling important roles and/or have become co-opted or infected by too much “false” light.
(Sharp inhale.)
Hold up. My inner patriarch is going berserk:
“What in God’s name are you writing, Sera!!!!!”
(Pause. Feel. My Heart.)
I’m Here, Sera.
As Real as your heartbeat.
As Necessary as your breath.
I’m Here.
I know you wonder if you can hack This,
but you can, you’re not alone.
Sera. I’m Here.
(Deep exhale.)
Onward.
From Red’s perspective, if I ignore or “skip over” my soul, higher selves, and distinct Divine Self to attain a transcendent state or to “be with” God, which most spiritual systems directly or indirectly promote as “The Ultimate Goal,” I’m participating in a kind of multidimensional bypassing. Govert Schuller shares a related view given by the nineteenth-century theosophist Madame Blavatsky:
She writes that certain [religious] doctrines … have the effect of disconnecting the soul or the personal self from its higher source, the higher self. This in turn might cause the “second death” of the soul, which is like an implosion of consciousness into nothingness, as opposed to the “second birth” of the soul when she expands into divinity by first uniting with the higher self and ultimately with the divine self. These differences are not just philosophical and void of spiritual relevance. From an esoteric point of view they are of great significance.2
This is part of the reason that participating in traditional religion and New Age spiritualities often felt like I was abandoning Something Essential. What I was abandoning included, but was more than, my femaleness, my ego/personality, my modern lifestyle, my Western individualism, my sexuality, my body, my shadow, my psychological Self, my soul and higher self, and even the Divine Feminine. I was also abandoning my very Divine Essence HERSELF, the Red Lady. The confusion, self-doubt, and self-harm I’ve gone through as a result are staggering and should not be quickly dismissed. I know I’m not the only one who has suppressed her inner reality if it did not match more commonly agreed upon spiritual realities. While the original forgetting of our Godliness had a sacred point, we have become overly attached to that point.
“Don’t you know, ye are Gods?” — Jesus
To be clearer than the Buddha’s bathwater: My Red perspective isn’t some metaphysical variation of the psychospiritual platitude, “You have to find your self in order to lose your self.” The highest dimension of my Being is, and will always be, Red. She is the only thing “solid” about me. Red will never eventually or ultimately merge “back” into God/dess. The Ultimate ride for me isn’t about losing any part of my Self; rather, it’s about coming into conscious alignment with every part of my Self.
I found my Red Lady through dualisms — God/Goddess, spirit/soul, masculine/feminine, light/dark, positive/negative, true/false — and over my soul’s cosmic trajectory, I have experienced being both sides of the One (and every in-between); however, Wholeness happens when I surrender to Her distinct Nature. It is submerged in Her unique Being that all dualities collapse their purpose into One. And She is left standing, well, dancing.
On foot
I had to walk through the solar systems,
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself.
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air,
to other reckless hearts.3
— Edith Sodergran
What I’m sharing also isn’t just an extreme case of Western individualism. However, it does expand the popular motto “Stay true to yourself” way beyond our egos (and this third dimension) into a Sacred Imperative to stay true to our multidimensional Divine Self. When I follow Her will (not my ego’s or someone else’s will), I’m in harmony with the will of the God/dess of this entire Universe, because the highest dimension of me — the Red Lady — is one with this Universe as a uniquely integral piece. Aligning with my Divine Self aligns me with God/dess. Surrendering to my Divine Self surrenders me to God/dess. In fact, it is only through Her that I can totally relate with God/dess. It is only through Her that I can Receive All of what I AM Here to Receive and Give All of what I AM Here to Give.
The Red Lady is both the God of me and my Way of “worshipping” the God of this Universe. As the Gandharva Tantra says, “One should worship a divinity by becoming oneself a divinity. One who has not become a divinity should not worship a divinity. Anyone worshipping a divinity without becoming a divinity will not reap the fruits of that worship.”4 Claiming my Self as a Divinity does not inflate me. It directly Relates me. To Life. To You. To God.
That’s right, my divine sovereignty doesn’t separate me from you or diminish my devotion to the God/dess of this Universe one bit. Instead, this re-experienced truth continually deepens my intimacy with, and heightens my reverence, respect, and love for, each Divine Being who is taking this valorous ride of creation with me, and most especially, for the God/dess of this Universe who is allowing us to experience our Selves through ItSelf.
Through Red’s eyes, this entire Universe is about Relationship — between the most minute particles and the grandest galaxies, between the chicken and the egg, between the ocean and the sand, between this book and the Energy that inspired this book, between the light and the dark, between the masculine and the feminine, between spirit and soul, between everything and no-thing, between true and false, between inner and outer, between friend and foe, between that dimension and this dimension, between my hand and your heart, between your foot and the ground, and most important, between you and You, you (You) and God/dess, you (You) and “Them,” and well, you get the gist. Essentially, this makes everyone and everything our Lovers.
And like the Ultimate Intimate Spiritual Partner, the God/dess of this (and as this) Universe helps us Remember our own Divinity, no matter how far our consciousness strays or how fragmented we’ve become or how many wounds we have incurred. When I open to this truth, when I allow myself to really feel this Universe’s determination — naw, Its dedication; naw, Its devotion — to us … well, there are no words; only sobs.
The way Home isn’t just through Self Knowledge, but also through Self Love. The old adage is true: We cannot truly love another (or the God/dess of this Universe) until we love ourselves. And the Love we long to experience most, above and beyond all else, is with our Selves. So this Universe kindly sets us up for the Fall … and then,
We are romanced into our own Remembrance.
We are seduced by our own soul.
We are serenaded (and, okay, sometimes spanked) by our Divine Self
until we come to Realize that
We are the Ones we’ve been waiting for, searching for, praying for.
In other words, You’ve been calling yourself back into Your own arms from the moment you swallowed the belief that you’ve been separated.
You were tagged
(a long, long time ago)
and
You
Are
It!
You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.5
— Rilke
This isn’t narcissistic delusion; It’s Beloved Inclusion. As Bourgeault wrote in The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, “To discover myself as a divine being is certainly a spiritual attainment, but to discover myself as the divine beloved is to discover something even more intimate and profound about the hidden treasure that God longs to make known.”6
The prevailing view of many spiritual traditions is that there is a further step beyond the Lover–Beloved relationship, and that is to merge into oneness with the divinity of our devotion. However, Bourgeault tells us that the inner teachings of Jesus and Magdalene point to an even greater step, and that is:
The discovery that deeper than at-one-ment lies comm-union, love come full in the act of giving itself away … “a not one, not two, but both one and two,” in which the continuous exchange of twoness and oneness in the dance of self-giving love captures the very dynamism of the divine life itself.7
This dance Between Us is what I live for and as. Sometimes my Lady and I are so Together, there’s no difference, while at other times, we’re so different that we long to be together. I am Beloved to Her; I am Her. She is Beloved to me; She is me. We are In Relationship not only with each other, but also with this entire Universe, as Red Hot and Holy Love.
Through a Red perspective, this reciprocal exchange of Divine Love is our Universal Birthright … as “ordinary” humans. Knowing we are Beloved changes everything. We stop covertly or overtly seeking to be loved outside of our self, through our external relationships, our careers, our outfits, our Facebook statuses, and even our “spirituality.” Statistics show that when a human knows that she is loved unconditionally, she is able to shift unhealthy habits easier and experience wider ranges of intimacy, generosity, and creativity. She is able to relax into her Self. And she is able to spread this belovedness like the sun spreads its shine. Effortlessly. Fact is, when we accept our distinct Divine Self’s love for us, and return it with gusto, we begin to radiate and attract a whole new reality for this planet.
Be. Loved.
Not only are we here to Know and Love our Selves, but we’re also here to Be our Selves. We’re here to unleash our distinct divinity into divinity. I serve the evolution of this Universe by expressing my unique Essence. This Universe realizes Its potential as each of us realizes our own. Like countless colors in a painting, we all have to Be What We Are in order to create the whole picture.
Be Your Self
Through a Red perspective, this prodigious process of forgetting and remembering, of hiding and revealing, of seeking and finding, of leaving and coming Home, of falling and rising in Love with our Selves and this entire Universe, is “God” and, in my opinion, the greatest Love Story ever co-created, starring each and every one of us.
LADY LOVE
As you’ve read, in my particular journey, the feminine face of God has guided me to my soul and my Red Goddess Self. I had to create a more intimate relationship with the feminine expression of this Universe to even begin to recognize, relate to, and reclaim my own unique Divine Feminine embodiment. In Passionate Enlightenment, Miranda Shaw wrote:
To know oneself as an embodiment of the divine is to gain access to the ultimate source of spiritual authority within…. Women must discover the divine female essence within themselves. This should inspire self-respect, confidence, and the “divine pride” that is necessary. … Divine pride, or remembering one’s ultimate identity as a deity, is qualitatively different from arrogance, for it is not motivated by a sense of deficiency or compensatory self-aggrandisement…. When a woman reclaims her divine identity, she does not seek outer sources of approval, for a firm, unshakable basis for self-esteem emanates from the depths of her own being.8
The Divine Feminine has been my Ultimate Life Coach, teaching me to accept and celebrate the sanctity of this earth, my body, my femininity, my soul, my Distinct Self. It has been through and with the Divine Feminine of this Universe that my Red Lady has come back to life in and as me. And it is through my Red Lady that I am now able to more fully participate in the Divine Feminine expression and experience of Life. They have both birthed me Alive. While I am in an evolving relationship with the Divine Masculine of this Universe (since I am also “in” Him and “of” Him), my Red heart beats clear: I am here to be of specific Service to the Divine Feminine.
And part of my Divine Feminine Service is to incarnate the Red Lady, who, on this dimension, prefers to hang out on dance floors and in warm oceans, roses, and the soft, gooey space between “right” and “wrong.” She smells like new beginnings. She loves to laugh, wink, and shake her ass. She tickles tradition and spanks stagnancy. She plays with fire. She speaks a demanding language that you can only understand if you are naked, drunk, and willing to let go of everything you’ve been told God is or isn’t. And Oh Yes, She is deeply, madly, passionately in love with you. Yes, you. And She will go to any and all lengths to remind you of this truth. Of your truth. Of our truth.
CLEARING MY THROAT
You certainly don’t have to swallow my Red pill about Who We Are and What this Universe Is. Trust your own experiences and inner knowings, which may be vastly different from my own. After what I’ve experienced — the unprecedented uniqueness of each Being, the soul’s specific trajectory, and the precise timing of our flowering — I’m no longer interested in turning you into my Red Self (yep, I created a whole career out of my disowned Self) or persuading you to join my Redvolution. That would be bitch-slapping the entire point of our existence. I offer my ever-evolving experiences and ever-widening Red perspective to the altar of our outrageous Mystery. As Robert Rabbin stated:
Here it is, my opinion: existence, creation, the cosmos, whatever the hell you want to call this incomprehensible mystery in which we live and of which we are a part, this thing is so huge, so vast, so complex and multi-dimensional that no one, no one, not even the latest guru du jour, not any scientist, saint, or sage, not any writer or artist, not any one who ever lived at any time in any place — no one knows nor can say the whole truth of the whole thing. They can only say, Hey, I’ve got my hand on one cell of this enormo-gigan-tic beast of being and it feels like such and so.9
Something else I want to be as straight as a divine arrow to your heart about: You can find your God/dess Self anywhere and everywhere. If a tradition or teacher or practice feels in alignment with your soul, then trust it. All paths lead Home … eventually. Essentially, anything “true” out there isn’t attempting to fill you up with more information or exercises or philosophies or paradigms or belief systems or techniques or “how-to’s”; it is actually pointing its metaphorical finger right back at you: What Do You Know?
Always we hope
Someone else has the answer …
At the center of your being
You have the answer,
You know who you are
And you know what you want.
There is no need
To run outside
For better seeing.
Nor to peer from a window.
Rather abide at the center of your being;
For the more you leave it, the less you learn.
Search your heart
And see
The way to do
Is to be.10
— Lao Tzu
An interesting side effect of living more and more from the Center of my own Being: I can sense when others are not living from them Selves, but rather from someone else’s Self or from a belief system they’ve learned or a tradition they were born into or a theory they studied or a “channeled doctrine” from disincarnate beings or a paradigm they are promoting or an external “god” or “goddess” or simply the wide Universe Itself. And as wonderful as some of these things may be (and as much as we might resonate with them and receive authentic help from them), it still bums me out a little — OK, a lot — because I also want to know Them.
I want to know You.
I hope this goes without saying, but you don’t need to have visions or cosmic experiences, you don’t have to pop past-life pimples or go through a dark night of the soul in order to realize your Self. Your distinct Divine Self is dropping hints of Itself all over your life. You just gotta pay attention. And in my opinion and experience, the healthiest way to engage your Divine Self is through creating a more conscious and intimate relationship with your soul. She is the part of your Divine Self who incarnates; she is the bridge, the link to your Everything. She knows your past, present, and future better than any book or teacher or psychic or spiritual tradition. She knows what you should read, who you should hang with, and where you should go, now. In other words, she knows how and when your unique Being unfolds organically. You don’t want to force this rose to bloom or follow someone else’s seven steps. If you relax, if you trust your soul, she will lead you to your Self. It will be a crazy journey — as unique as a snowflake, as transformative as a fire, as freaky as a fruitcake, as mysterious as a Universe.
So, please. Become your favorite subject. Study your Self. Sit at the feet of the Teacher inside you. Cop a feel of your Divine Body. Live your Love Story. And share what you are learning with the rest of us.
If you’ve read any self-help or mainstream spiritual book in the past fifty years, you’ve been told you have something invaluable to offer this planet. But I’m guessing you might not have realized just how much you have to share and just how invaluable your own perspective and Love Story actually are. You are, quite literally, not only a soul who’s had countless experiences and expressions, but also an entire Universe of Wisdom here to Offer your Self In and As Service.
While yes, Re-membering our Divinity doesn’t happen overnight or even in one lifetime, the path itself is an honest (and often the most helpful) place to share from. Sure, sharing and living our truth might make others think we’re coming back in our next life as a toad (or worse) — but to heaven with ’em. We hafta walk our inner talk, toad-doomed or not.
This is what it means to be a heretic …
When I turn in my own Divine direction.
When I stop worrying about what others think of me, and I just
like tight pieces of clothing that were never created for me, but rather from someone else’s idea of what I should be.
And I’m naked.
Alone.
And yet, with Her.
And I yell with all my womanly might, “Yo! Red Hot Mama! I’m Here! I’m Yours! For Real! So, now, You clothe me, You guide me, You show me who I am and what the hell I’m really made of!” And She comes forward, laughing and holding this ridiculously gaudy two-way mirror, which allows me to see myself and to see Her at the same time. Our images merge and overlap. We point and chuckle and high-five. We lean in, allowing our breath to fog the mirror, and we draw “I (heart) you” with our fingers. And I turn around,
Revealed.