How to Obtain a Spirit Identity
I will try to convey the various steps to becoming a Spirit identity. This is not a process that happens overnight. It requires a series of steps to be taken in order to accomplish the final goal. This is a work in progress and I will continue to add to it as I learn more and go further myself.
In high school, in my junior year I think, I would walk home every day and during that time I started to practice visualization exercises. Because I was walking, I had to learn to visualize with my eyes open. This turned out to be a very helpful aspect of my future spiritual development.
Visualization is seeing with the mind’s eye. I would see as well as I could various colored shapes over blue sky backgrounds in my mind. At first I had a terrible time of it. Everything I saw was gray or mostly gray and I had trouble keeping shapes intact. But, after a few weeks of practice I noticed that I was able to start fleshing out more and more shapes and colors. Beyond that, I was also able to start to hold those shapes in my mind for longer periods of time.
The next step was to have a pre-set arrangement of shapes that I would fully visualize and then pass through like a gateway. The final shape led to a completely black space full of white star-like emanations. Floating in this space, I noticed that I would receive guidance from a voice that was speaking to me in my mind. However, the odd thing was that it was my own voice.
I then started spending more time with a friend of mine who had a mutual interest in the supernatural and spiritual. I started doing channelings for him. Eventually, I started seeing events from his past and described them to him. We found that I could describe events so accurately that I even was able to tell him about conversations he had with people word-for-word.
As this evidence piled up, it became clear that something real was happening. I gained confidence in this ability. I found that I could read photographs of people, entering into them at the time they were photographed and telling people about them. I had many accurate readings this way.
During this time, it became clear to me that this was not a special gift, but simply an innate ability that everyone had. However, I didn’t have much luck in convincing people of this. They chose to see it as a “gift” and to leave it at that. But, the more I learned about the mind, the more clear it became that A) all minds are simply part of one single mind and B) everything is somehow made of consciousness, including matter.
So, with visualization being such a large part of my spiritual life, explored different paths and approaches, but lacked a clear and central aim. I felt that my approach was experimental and the final form of my practice eluded me. Visualization taught me about the relationships between reality and metaphors, past and future, subconscious and conscious minds and so forth.
In December of 2000 I started writing a web site dedicated to visualization practice as an approach to spirituality. I had a lot of information from my past experiences to convey and I was excited about the project, but it was going to take me years to get all the information out.
In about April of 2001, I had a spiritual experience that changed my life. I was at the time working with God, but the feeling was one of constantly being ground down and tested and refined. Although I appreciated the necessity of self-improvement, I was frankly worn out. I needed a new set of ideas about God in order to continue.
Three beings came to me and presented themselves as being from a place called Spirit. They told me that Spirit was a world of mind, made entirely by the minds of those living in it, but also completely real. In fact, it was a more primary level of reality than the physical world, which they compared to the tip of a fingernail on a much larger body. They said that in their view of existence from Spirit, the physical world was like a pet project someone was working on in their garage, somewhere on earth, compared to all activity everywhere on earth in general. This was the level of importance it was given.
They said that all things exist in their idealized forms in Spirit. There was no suffering or fear, no guilt nor pain. This was made possible because each person lived entirely inside their own mind. They only had the experiences that they wanted to have, when the wanted to have them. There was no anger, abuse or malice in Spirit whatsoever.
They had a lively sense of humor and were not above poking fun at me for my seriousness. They said that Spirit beings were eternal and had all of eternity to do as they wished. They also said that Spirit beings each had the ability to look at the lives of other Spirit beings freely and to use their experiences, sharing them, learning from them or using them in their own creations. There was no privacy, in a sense, as each being’s experiences were an open book for others to share in at will. However, a Spirit being could be alone and experience privacy as a feeling as much as they wished. They would simply not have any actual privacy from other Spirit beings. However, no Spirit being wanted to selfishly withhold their experiences from others.
I was surprised to learn that Spirit beings were using my physical life in the same manner. They told me that uncountable numbers of Spirit beings were always using a particular person’s experiences. I found it strange that anyone would have any real interest in my life. They pointed out that it was not a normal sense of interest that propelled them, but that each person’s individual experiences were full of “meaning,” and that this meaning was what was being culled from a person’s experiences.
They mentioned God almost as an afterthought. This was not out of disrespect, but to underline that this was not a system with God on a throne while beings cowered at His feet, doing His bidding. God was there and all beings had access to God and were in fact connected to God at all times. But God had made all Spirit beings equal to Him in terms of their abilities. He had made all Spirit beings as equal creators, and this was a new concept for me.
Here, in Spirit, God didn’t punish or test anyone. Instead, all beings lived without fear and suffering and God took joy in their joy. So, I was introduced to God in an entirely different light than I was used to thinking of Him.
The Spirit beings also said that there was no free will. They refused to promise to help me with my life, saying that my life was planned out from beginning to end and that was that. This approach actually helped me in the long run. However, later in my relationship with Spirit I found them to be very helpful. I just had to change how I related to Spirit internally.
The lack of free will meant that there was no guilt or blame. This meant that each person was doing the only thing that they could do with their life. They couldn’t really choose, except as a thought-process that went through their head. This process of “choice” was itself predetermined, but a necessary part of the equation.
Spirit beings likewise had no free will, but like humans they had the illusion of free will. In fact, for Spirit beings, the illusion of free will was perfected so that it couldn’t be improved upon. However, all Spirit beings knew that on an absolute level they had no free will. This was because there was only one will, God’s Will, in existence.
Spirit was defined as both a plane and a state of consciousness, although technically it was not a place in the sense that it was in no way physical. No being in Spirit was subjected to an “external” reality with which they had to contend, they simply manifested all the experiences that they wanted at will.
I was told that there was no passage of time in Spirit. However, each individual in Spirit has their own personal timeline. A truly timeless world would be in stasis. However, in Spirit, beings engage in activity and thought freely for eternity. Individuals can meet and then depart from each other and then meet again, one having spent years away while the other only minutes. There was no absolute timeline against which all events were set.
I was told that the only limitation in Spirit was the individual’s attachments to the various aspects of their identity. The aspects of their identity limited them. Their evolutionary movement in Spirit was to gain an increasing elasticity and flexibility in their self-identification so that they could explore more worlds.
In Spirit, beings manifest their physical lifetimes. This is done through a process of thought. That is to say that the person is a Spirit being who is “thinking” their physical identity into existence. When the physical identity becomes advanced enough, the person switches to a Spirit identity by various degrees until they become completely identified with their Spirit identity.
In Spirit, thoughts are things, beings, animals, events, surroundings, homes and even whole new worlds to explore. For example, the idea of “vision” and the idea of “abstraction” could be overlapped. You could explore this realm of vision and abstraction as an entire universe, a whole world of experience. This was possible for all concepts.
I was told that in reverse of physical thinking, the abstract is more real because at more abstract levels of thought one attains a vast freedom to explore all creation. The higher into abstraction you can reach, the more vast and all-encompassing your range of experience becomes. Freedom in Spirit is defined by the mental comfort level with abstraction.
So, let’s take the first step to attaining a Spirit identity. Please go to http://geocities.com/visualizenews/inde2.html to see the material on visualization. Please read the materials in chronological order, beginning with the December 2000 issue on how to visualize. Spend at least two to three weeks minimum just doing these exercises on a daily basis.
Once you have mastered visualization, you will have the basic abilities to move forwards in pursuing your Spirit identity. However, if you have difficulty with visualization, start by mastering shapes and disregard the color information. Focus on attaining a good mastery of visualization in black and white. This will be sufficient to get you started.
After this, we will want to spend a few minutes each day practicing our visualization for the rest of our life. This is necessary to build that inner muscle and to master it as a spiritual tool. You will soon find that you enjoy using it. A word of caution: often people who begin meditation or visualization for the first time will hear voices. I didn’t experience this, but I have run into quite a few people who have. Simply ignore them and continue. I believe that this is a latent psychic ability that rises to the surface. If the voices become bothersome, you might want to abandon visualization and practice with more conventional methods. In my experiences, what we are hearing is actually internal to our mind and we can control it by gaining a sense of ownership over our mental space. Simply repeatedly affirming that your mind is yours to control and that you don’t allow these voices to come through may be all you need to do to stop them.
After having mastered basic visualization, begin following the Visualization News material in chronological order. Give each new piece of information and the exercises at least a few days to a week before moving forwards.
Eventually you will reach the material that talks about Spirit. When you run into this material, please go to http://geocities.com/visualizenews/spiritindex.html and begin to read the material on Spirit. Start with the introductory material and then read the material forwards from A1 through L6. There are twelve sections (A - L) and six sub-sections (i.e. A1, A2, …A6, B1, …) per section. It is a lot of material and most sub-sections include exercises. Please take the time to do the exercises, as they are part of the learning process.
At this point, when you begin reading about Spirit, the exercises will guide you to do various visualization exercises. When you feel ready, you will want to create a home in Spirit Plane that will be where you meet and speak with your Spirit identity. This is “you” at the Spirit level. This person will give you information about any topic regarding reality or Spirit that you have questions about.
Meeting your Spirit identity in your Spirit Home and speaking with them is what I call Level One Spirit identity. At this level, you are in communication with the aspect of yourself that exists above your conscious awareness but is part of you at a fundamental level. And so, even though they appear to be outside of you, you are still experience the first degree of identification with them.
The next development is that you will find it much easier to ask questions and receive answers from your Spirit identity if you identify with them and see through their eyes, talking to yourself seated across the room. You will mentally be both people at once, yourself sitting across the room answering questions and your Spirit identity answering them.
This will seem odd at first but the advantages will become very clear immediately. You can go beyond verbal answers and share (to a degree) in the understanding of what is being said that your Spirit identity has. In other words, you can partake in the understanding of your Spirit identity directly, beyond the limits of mere words. You can get right to the heart of the understanding itself.
This will speed up your progress in understanding Spirit tremendously, and is what I call Level Two Spirit Identity. Now you can share directly in identification with your Spirit identity.
The next step is not so much something you do as something that happens to you over time. As you continue to practice seeing through your Spirit Identity’s eyes, you will one day come to the realization that the difference in your mind between “you” and your Spirit identity have become unreal, just a matter of semantics. Without realizing it you have come to identify with you Spirit identity as a facet of your own personality, part of who you are.
This is Level Three Spirit Identity. It cannot be forced but only learned through practice at Level Two Spirit Identity. When it comes, it comes as a realization and you can own it. This then opens up an entirely new way of thinking about yourself. Yes, you are still in a physical body, but you have a major aspect of your own mind that is not physical, but spiritual in nature.
You will have openly noticed by now that your Spirit identity doesn’t get angry, nor does it feel any guilt or fear about anything. You will likely overlook this as standard for spiritual beings and not pay it much attention. However, when you realize that you are your Spirit Identity, it will matter a great deal. Now you are, to some degree, completely free of guilt, anger and fear. You are at peace, as discussed in the Course.
I should interject at this point that when I first came into contact with the Course in Miracles, I had been working with Spirit for several years. A friend insisted that I had to read the book. Reading it became a turning point for me, because I made an astonishing discovery, that the Course and what Spirit had taught me were dovetailing perfectly.
While the Spirit material gave me a way of imagining what the Course was talking about as a more fundamental level of reality than physicality, the Course was likewise talking about the same ideas, but using different language. Although I found the Course’s “Bible language” a bit hard to navigate at first, I quickly realized that the Course and Spirit were talking about the same thing. Furthermore, I realized that Spirit was actually the same thing as “Holy Spirit” as referenced in the Course!
This was not only a great way of feeling supported in my belief in Spirit, but also helped me to understand that I was dealing with a level of reality that was trying to speak to the entire human race and was doing so in various forms. I saw that by combining the Course and Spirit teachings, I could create a much stronger and more solid understanding of this reality. Spirit had answered many questions for me, but often left God out of the answers. The Course brought God into the picture and helped me understand how God fit into the broader picture of reality in Spirit.
As much as Spirit’s message was straightforward, it was also sometimes difficult to grasp because it was so radically different from physical thinking. My friend who introduced me to the Course shared with me some channeling he had experienced spontaneously years earlier. They reemphasized that the Truth was very different from physical thought and contrary to what we have been trained to believe, that everything was fundamentally meaningful and served a larger purpose that we were not yet aware of. This helped me as well.
Ever since I first experienced Spirit, I have wanted to find a way to come home to the wonderful feelings that it brought to me. Bliss and happiness are poor words to describe what it felt like. I knew that beyond guilt and condemnation there was a world waiting that is ours already, waiting for us to return to us. It is a state of consciousness and a way of being that is full of bliss.
For the purposes of discussion, I have invented a world that I use to describe all negative states of consciousness. These would include: guilt, blame, anger, fear, jealousy, paranoia, loneliness, shame and so forth. Spirit has explained that all these negative states of being are multiple manifestations of one state of mind. The Course refers to it as “grievances” while my term is Nanti. Ananti is my term for the state of consciousness that generates all happiness, love, fulfillment and so forth in all its various forms. Spirit state of consciousness is entirely made up of Ananti and defined by the absence of Nanti state of consciousness, the absence of grievances.
The overall process of becoming a Spirit identity is one of shedding identification with Nanti while taking on identification with Ananti. This process is gradual because identity has been created gradually over many lifetimes and is defined by our attachment to various beliefs, ideas and states of feeling and consciousness.
In spiritual terms, however, the process we are going through is relatively fast. In fast, it is a breakneck speed of change from a spiritual level of understanding. It just seems slow to us because we are not aware of the complex internal organization of our own identity and its many levels of attachment.
Therefore, your consciousness will express its attachment to Nanti, to grievances, in various ways. It will fight for that state of consciousness, even though it is painful, hurtful and undesirable. It believes that it will lose something of value by becoming Ananti and so it fights for Nanti. But your experiences that you have during this time will push you to abandon Nanti consciousness and to come to identify with Ananti consciousness willingly.
I have to warn you that to go through this course of identity shift is a rough ride, or at least it has been for me. You have to undergo not only a radical internal transformation but an external one as well. However, like surgery, this is a means to save our lives from lifetimes of suffering. Whatever discomfort we may have to go through, it is worth the risk.
Spirit will meet all your needs more and more and you will begin to withdraw from various forms of self-sacrifice. However, this will be like walking without crutches for the first time, awkward and scary. Therefore it is important that you realize that you are safe, that Spirit and God will take care of you, but like a roller-coaster ride you will sometimes feel threatened and scared. But I don’t believe that there is any real risk. Our psychological being is threatened because our mind must be convinced to give up its attachment to Nanti.
To clarify, it is often said that God tests spiritual people. This, however, is not my belief at all. Rather, the Nanti consciousness within us becomes increasingly threatened and runs out of temptations and psychological tricks to sway us. As it is obviously fighting a losing battle, it will pull out all the stops and try to crush us.
However, from our own vantage point, these challenges are in fact the perfect way to convince ourselves that we are ready to move on. When Nanti shows its fangs, it makes it clear to us that we have made the right choice. When we dislike what we see in our life, rather than just in the world in general, it ceases to be personal and we must face the hateful nature of physical existence fully and completely, as well as our internal complicity in manufacturing it.
The process of changing your identity from a physical identity to a Spirit identity is really a simple one. You are in physical identity and feel fine, but then something happens and you feel disturbed, either with anger or fear, shame or guilt, depression or anxiety. You recognize from these negative feelings that you have slipped back into physical identity. You rush to get yourself back into Spirit identity. In time you slip back out of it and back into your physical identity, which you don’t notice until you have disturbing thoughts or feelings and then you adjust again.
This hardly seems like a real shift in identity. It seems that you are forcing yourself to be something that you then slip right out of again. Some days you will find it easy to maintain a Spirit identity while on other days it seems nearly impossible. You adjust and then seconds or minutes later you fall back into physical identity again.
This is just par for the course. Your identity shift is a complex process. Although it seems like you are forcing an artificial change on your identity, in fact it is in your shifts that you are exploring various desires. It is your desire to escape physicality that expresses itself as the time spent successfully shifted into a Spirit identity. It is the time spend in your physical identity that is the expression of your desire to be still involved in the physical.
There is, in a sense, no battle at all, just a shifting of gears, mentally. One desire and then the other takes its turn at the front of your mind. However, the significant change is that by degrees your desire to be a Spirit being is increasing and your desire to be involved in the physical is decreasing steadily. This is simply due to the fact that you are running on empty, in terms of your remaining desire to be a physical being. It is almost exhausted.
Many people claim to want to be free of physicality, but would be uncomfortable with Spirit reality. That is because they are not so much fed up with physicality as a whole, so much as they are actually frustrated and angry because they want certain physical things and they are out of their reach.
Money, power and fame can seduce any of us. Only a person who can see that the physical experience always brings an ultimate betrayal by bringing pain by what we seek for the purposes of pleasure that can resist these desires. A frustrated person who wins the lottery will suddenly become less “spiritual” if their zeal for release from the physical was based on their life of unrelenting frustration. They have to see that the having is as undesirable as the not having. Both are traps because both are part of the physical experience. The physical is a world of ultimate betrayal, rich or poor, frustrated or “fulfilled.” It can only bring an ultimate harm.
But physicality is also the perfect place to learn to love and appreciate what Spirit can give us. It is strange after a lifetime of battling “external” problems to suddenly seek an entirely internal solution to them. This is where miracles come into play. For Spirit beings, miracles are just ordinary thoughts that happen to contradict physical “laws” that we believe in out of ignorance. They are not perceived as miraculous whatsoever.
When we ask God for a miracle, we bring a thought of a problem to God. Like a mirror, God’s consciousness reflects back to us the solution, because God doesn’t see a problem at all. The forgiveness and release occur automatically within us as a process that takes time. But whenever we can internally embrace forgiveness (Ananti) fully, the “miracle” of our change in views is expressed metaphorically as a seemingly improbable or impossible change in our external circumstances.
So, in essence, God changes our mind and this changes what we see in the world that reflects our state of mind. Spirit can produce miracles, although they always come first from God. By “creating” a miracle as your own Spirit identity, you create it for your physical being. In doing so you have consciously allowed the miracle to pass through the Spirit gate and thus it is closer to your physical identity. So, it hastens the transformation of your understanding and thus it hastens the physical expression of that change in understanding as well.
In this way you can “create” miracles to replace the problems you have. These miracles will come unasked for and unbidden, but by playing a role in your own miracles you can begin to grasp what you are capable of, especially when you see them work and physical transform your life in seemingly impossible ways.
Again and again you will face seemingly “impossible” problems and again and again each miracle you create for yourself as your Spirit identity will come to bear fruit in a visible way, the impossible problem will be overcome and in your repeating astonishment the internal barriers of disbelief will fall. You will come to believe that your so-called “physical” existence is actually internal to your own mind. This is how miracles transform your thinking.
Sometimes miracles will take a long time to take effect. You will get impatient or lose faith in them. However, remember that an internal process is going on that takes as long as it takes. When the change comes, it will come unexpectedly, so looking for signs and omens of future success will be meaningless. The future outlook may remain, based purely on physical signs, bleak right up until the moment that the miracle takes its physical form. Be patient with this process, as the timing is part of the healing impact it has on your psyche. Sometimes the envelope has to be pushed in order to break one’s belief system.
Always keep a Spirit Journal, a personal journal of ideas that you come across in talking with Spirit. You don’t have to do this if it just seems to get in the way, but I found it profoundly helpful at times. A “Q and A” format is especially important in the First and Second Stages of Spirit identity.
Also, imagining that you are teaching others about Spirit, just as a mental exercise in your head or if you have an actual opportunity to do so, is a great way to learn. By teaching we teach ourselves, so imagine teaching to learn the points you have chosen to teach about Spirit. For example, if you have trouble with a particular concept, imagine that your understanding of Spirit is more advanced and that you are explaining it to a group of people or to one person. Thus you will teach yourself.
As you progress, you might run into fear-inspiring circumstances. This fear will cause you to do two things: one, to seek out a way to fix the problem that is invoking the fear in you and two, to turn the feeling of fear off. This second task can be accomplished by mastering and periodically reinforcing your Spirit identification. You will also find ways to strengthen that identification. As you embrace this new feeling of fearlessness, you will face down situations that would have destroyed you before through intimidating levels of fear. Now you can function relatively fearlessly most of the time.
This whole process is a leap of faith. But you are not responsible for building the bridge that will get you across intact, for that is God’s function and Christ’s function and even Spirit’s function. Just do the next logical thing, continue to deepen and reinforce your Spirit identity throughout the day periodically and keep a journal. Teach what you want to learn to mentally generated students and bring all questions and concerns, physical, emotional or spiritual to your Spirit identity. He or she will answer your questions more and more completely as you strengthen your Spirit identity more completely. Soon, the two of you will seem like one person.
There are higher degrees of Spirit identity to explore, but they must come from your Spirit identity and not me. By the time you reach the Third Degree of Spirit identity you will have a lively dialogue going on and you will know exactly what to do next to continue upwards. I will leave this level of teaching to your Spirit identity. God speed!