Spirit Main Pages
This is a breakdown and explanation of the twelve main ideas and six sub-ideas of each main idea (72 total) of Spirit.
A) Everyone Makes a Unique Contribution
This first main heading of twelve has to do with the unique nature of the experiences that we have as individual beings.
Imagine that you can look up in the sky and see a laser show of multi-colored lights, which are all the contributions to consciousness made by all beings throughout time. Every experience that makes up this light show is unique and adds to the completeness of the whole. The negative or positive nature of these experiences is not at issue, any more than the contents of works of fiction would be morally judged. Their contribution is in what they can teach, the information they carry, the part of the whole picture of reality they convey. Imagine that as you see this, you know that your own experience is part of this fabric and is unique and important, while appreciating the beauty of the experiences that others have added to this creation as well.
To fully appreciate this fabric of beauty as one would from a Spirit perspective means that you must understand that all experiences whether pleasant or painful have tremendous value. All consciousness is full of meaning that can be harvested by any being as they need or desire for any part of the encyclopedic array of experiences in physical and other levels of existence arises. Their interest could be anywhere from sensual to a psychological curiosity to the pursuit of a very advanced and abstract understanding of being. The criteria would be invisible to us and the value is lost on us but it is there nonetheless.
In Spirit, a person knows that their accomplishments will never fade. You realize that consciousness is endlessly in motion, always manifesting in some new form and never resting. You share your painful and joyful memories to be experienced by others. You experience simultaneously, looking at this fabric of evolving consciousness, both true humility and complete pride in who you are as well as whom you thought you were. This is true perspective.
A1) Each Self in Time is a Unique Person
Each identity that you have held at any moment in time is a unique person. That person that you were in the past is gone, and your identity changes moment by moment. Beliefs change, states of mind and emotion change, identity changes and outlook and circumstances change. Although you may think that you are the same person moment-to-moment, in fact you different in each moment and there is an imagined thread of identity that you experience as being your reality.
Circumstances that you are facing right now are part of your consciousness and therefore part of your identity. Although events and people may appear to be external to you, they are in fact part of an internal process of consciousness unfolding. As consciousness unfolds, it takes the form of many different things, both those that rise up internally and those that appear as external events.
To explain this further, it is helpful to understand that there is no �internal� or �external� reality. Reality is consciousness; there is no �environment� in which consciousness exists, it simply exists. Consciousness can generate identities by imagining them. This is what we are, imagined beings. Our own reality is hidden from us by the design of our being. When a being is imagined they have a body and identity as well as an environment that seems to be external to them to some degree. This is the foundation of being.
In order for a being to share a world with others, all beings in that world must see each other as in some manner external to each other. This is rooted in the singularity of identity. When an individual sees another, the other person is a symbol of what is going on in the mind of the first person. External reality can only occur as symbolic metaphor for the individual experiencing it, because reality is entirely �internal� to consciousness.
Your consciousness is part of other peoples� consciousnesses as well. To them, you are the embodiment of a certain kind of awareness and attitude that they are internally involved with in some way. Who you are and what you do, including what you seem to do �to� them reflect their internal relationship with themselves being played out as an external interaction with you. You are as symbol of something that they feel.
A good model for this reflective process of internal and external consciousness is the dream state. In a dream, you come into the state with certain emotions that could not find an outlet during your daily experience. The emotions generate scenes, dramas and even a different identity for you to live in. During your experiences in this different identity you might be suffering, happy, have superpowers, use magic, fly, be imprisoned and so forth. Each event is created specifically by your mind to fulfill the feelings you need to release. By creating this or that scenario, the event is induced artificially and you are forced to fully feel that emotion.
Physical experience is generated in exactly the same way. However, because physical experience has certain set characteristics, it stands to reason that only certain feelings can be expressed in the physical form. But just as it happens in your dreams, you are living out scenes and an identity that are artificially created to force you to feel emotions that you are holding subconsciously or consciously.
For example, if you dream that you are flying and you feel euphoric, that expresses your unexpressed need and desire for euphoria emotionally. If you are waiting in a long line at the grocery store, you might experience impatience and aggravation. This is the expression of your hidden emotional aggravation that created this scene in order to be fully felt.
All emotions desire one thing, to be fully felt. It is through the act of being felt that emotions are released and can then shift forms and take on their next form. All emotions have a lifespan, are felt and then through this act of being felt they �die� and are reincarnated in a more evolved form. We are full of uncountable numbers of feelings that demand to be felt.
There is another level of understanding to this process. The emotions that we are subjected to in this manner, being lived out in one after another scenario, are all expressions in turn of ideas. That is to say that emotions are generated from an even higher level, above emotions, of abstract ideas. Beliefs fall into this category. Any belief, idea or so forth generates emotions that express it. It is through the person being forced to experience these emotions that they work out their beliefs as well. The totality of the belief is ultimately expressed as a large number of emotional scenes that are lived out.
Your consciousness at any point in time is made up of everything you have ever thought and done. Even if you do not consciously remember everything that you have ever thought, felt and done, it is all within you and is never lost. This is because you are in reality an idea, made of consciousness and nothing else. Consciousness does not forget, it can only imagine that it is a person and that this person forgets. Consciousness itself is not subject to time and therefore it is not subject to loss of memory; it�s only time interaction is the flow of events that it participates in, not a timeline that is forced on it. All your thoughts, feelings, actions and experiences are accumulated in you and embodied by you.
Exercise: Understanding Consciousness Evolution
At any moment in your life, you are made up of all of your accumulated life experiences, thoughts and feelings as well as many other elements that go beyond this life and many that are not conscious.
At any particular moment, you are coming in contact with some set of external conditions to deal with. Everything that you do to become that next person that you are in time is determined by whom you have been, coming in contact with a certain set of external circumstances. In simpler terms, you are X +Y => Z, where X is who you are in that moment, Y is your experience in that moment and Z is who you are in the next moment. The clincher is that Y is not really external, but the internal experience being experienced as an external reality to be dealt with.
So, that leap in time is not random, but comes about when your self is altered in the process of dealing with life, but more fundamentally, the whole thing happens entirely internally. This being the case, there is nothing causing the experience except the internal nature of the experiencer him or herself. There is no �doer� in the process, no self pushing buttons or making things happen. It is an automatic process like water flowing in a stream. There is no free will or will at all in the situation.
Evolution allows for the illusion of personal free will in that you can make choices and think about options and act on them. However, this sense of free will does not exempt the self from the endless process of consciousness evolution. That is to say that there is no free will in reality and that sooner or later the individual will figure that out. We are bound to only one will, evolution of consciousness.
Each aspect of consciousness has an evolutionary path that is unique. The thread that holds the beads of different selves through time together is consciousness evolution. This process does not involve free will. However, subjective free will choices can be involved. Knowing this allows you to understand that each person is evolving at his or her own rate. They are getting what they need out of life.
Each moment in life is made out of consciousness rather than matter, although it has the appearance of being �physical�. The illusion of physicality forces consciousness to deal with fear, danger and conflict at a very high level. Under this extreme duress, consciousness becomes involved in very extreme suffering and is forced to change when that suffering becomes unbearable. It can be compared to a complicated mathematical formula where illogical elements are filtered out by deduction, until the truth of the final equation is arrived at. So, we can eliminate guilt and anger from our thinking, because we are always doing the best that we can, given what we are at any moment.
Guilt and anger serve their purposes within consciousness, but if we are starting to think at this level, it allows us to give them up. People often wonder how, without personal accountability, anything can function. There is still personal accountability; in fact, there is a very absolute kind of personal accountability. Just as you may express your consciousness today by hurting someone, so will that same consciousness go through a process of conscious or subconscious �guilt� and suffering until it evolves to the point that it can understand freedom from guilt.
Understanding that you contain many different consciousnesses at various stages of evolution is important, because it allows you to let yourself off the hook as you realize that you are a automatic process rather than a result of free will. You can�t disrupt the process of your own consciousness evolution, and you cannot have that process be stopped by any other person or external event.
Furthermore, you can die and not be filled with fear and remorse when you look at what you did with your life during your life review. You can understand and accept that you are an organism made up of many evolving consciousnesses that are all in the process of becoming more highly evolved.
You can forgive, likewise, anyone that has hurt you during your life, by realizing that they were there as part of your consciousness working itself out. And, they were in evolution working through lower, more violent or negative aspects of their consciousness, and that this consciousness will evolve into something better in the future. They could only enter your life as part of your own consciousness evolution process, a symbol of what you were working through. They did not impose themselves artificially on your life. Your �life� was your consciousness, and it needed that person�s cruelty to create a scene that elicited certain emotions within you. And, as you worked through your emotions, you worked through your beliefs and they also evolved just as your emotions evolved by being felt and released.
So, for this exercise, I would like you to re-read this paragraph above, then go through a �mock� near-death experience. Lie down and get comfortable. Imagine that you are on the threshold of death, but will return to life soon. You see a brilliant light that engulfs you in pure love. You see your whole life unfold very quickly in front of you, from birth to the present moment.
How do you feel about your whole life? What are the chief feelings you have about it in review? Don�t worry if you can�t imagine this experience perfectly, just work with what you see and feel. In areas where you feel guilt, examine them again mentally and see how your consciousness was in a process of evolution. Although you seemed to hurt others, you were doing the best you could given who you were at that moment. You never really hurt anyone, because you only existed as a symbol in their minds to create scenarios that expressed their feelings.
Who did you feel the most anger toward? See how those people entered your life to catalyze your own consciousness at exactly the right moment. You were ready for a change of consciousness and they created the pain that pushed your consciousness forward. See if you can forgive them for the hurt they caused you by seeing how they themselves were in a state of evolution, and were doing the best they could. Make a promise to yourself that at the time of your actual death you will remember this exercise clearly and forgive yourself and others as completely as possible in realizing that there is only subjective, not real, free will.
Also, recognize that evolution of the parts of your self demands that your consciousness will not always be in a positive place. From time to time, you must deal with some of the darkest and most un-evolved aspects of your identity. To imagine that you will never recede into negative emotions or behaviors is unrealistic. When you have these dark times, however, you should in turn be aware that they do not mean that you are unevolved, rotten and negative. You are just dealing with your own dirty laundry.
Because you cannot prevent negative behaviors does not mean, on the one hand, that you should strain to be perfect all the time, not does it mean that you should give up and indulge in negative behavior. There will be future pain for your past wrongdoing. But, be aware that you cannot stop evolution of being and do the best you can within reason. To evolve the intention to not hurt others is a very high idea that will shed a great deal of light on your life. To help others is even more beneficial. To understand yourself as an evolving being is the greatest gift you can give to the world and the most highly rewarded, because it is the doorway to total forgiveness.
A2) Every Experience Belongs to Everyone:
At Spirit level, no experience is private property. A sunset walk along the beach with your lover is not private. That does not mean that in Spirit you cannot create a situation of feeling and appearing to be alone with another person, because you can as much as you mutually desire to do so. But wherever you are and whatever you are doing, there are millions upon millions of Spirit beings that are able to access your experiences and live them through your eyes, feel what you felt, and use that information in any way that they see fit.
The issue of when that observation takes place is a bit more complex. Because there is not a timeline for all of Spirit and time is only experienced by individuals as they move from one experience to another, you cannot say that at the moment you and another person are sharing an experience that you are or are not alone. But it absolutely certain that like a snow-globe sitting on the shelf in gift shop, your experience will be handled and observed by many people over their personal timelines.
Identity is a construct of consciousness. In a world made of consciousnesses, all identities are equal in their abilities to access all experiences in Spirit. So, beings can access all information in any person�s consciousness. The construction of identities is performed by a Spirit being, allowing them be able to explore reality through exploring various personal vantage points. As identities are constructed, however, consciousness also places no barriers to other consciousnesses using the information in that experience in any way they see fit.
In a conscious community such as Sprit Plane, where everyone is seeking to explore new states of consciousness, no piece of experiential information goes to waste. Any possible use for any information is exploited by beings in Spirit. There, uncountable Spirit beings can use your life experiences, pleasant or painful, in a variety of ways. They do not feel our pain, however, because pain does not exist in Spirit. However, they can imagine that they have physical experiences including pain, but after these experiences, upon returning to Spirit experience, the pain cannot be remembered as it would flow through memory and be experienced. In Spirit, the person sees that they never really suffered at all; it was all a trick of the mind as it sought to create physicality.
Seeing life through the eyes of others gives Spirit beings the experiences that they want They would never re-experience anything in exactly the same way it was initially experienced. It need not be a literal reliving of a scene from a life that contains the needed information, but rather some small aspect, such as a single thought or feeling, that is needed. If a true reliving of the experience is desired, it can be experienced, but to some small degree it will be different for each person who experiences it. Experiences are truly personal.
It may be a blending together of many different peoples� experiences through comparison or contrast that might fulfill someone�s need in Spirit. It might be a replay of a life from a particular moment when a certain thought or feeling moved an identity in one direction or another. There are a vast number of possible permutations. The ideas that are explored could be very abstract and mental, or emotional. The needs and desires of Spirit beings could vastly differ from what we are capable imagining. Whatever those needs are, they will be met perfectly in Spirit.
In any scenario where one being explores another�s experiences, it could be a case of using that consciousness as a test subject, attempting to examine previous psychological wounds, or examining motivations under a �microscope�. Whatever the case is, the information in this identity�s experiences will be used freely and often by Spirit beings, and there isn�t anything they can do to prevent that from happening. And more to the point, any being in Spirit wouldn�t want to withhold those experiences from any other Spirit being.
All distinctions between people are illusions, so in a place that overcomes that illusion to various degrees, those distinctions must fall away. This is not to say that individuals do not keep their individualities in Spirit, but that the ability to play with information is unlimited, including the information of one�s own identity. One�s previous experiences are personal property in Spirit, but property to be shared with everyone for the glorification of the whole.
Think of it this way, that if you had a friend call you and tell you about a great concert they saw, you might want to be able to download their memory of the concert and re-experience it. Some degree of your own identity would remain in re-experiencing it, but you could capture the essence of their experience. Or, you could download the mind of an ex-president to get an insider understanding of some important historical event. The possibilities would be limitless.
In the physical world we lie, cheat and steal from each other, compete for resources and destroy the very planet we live on in our quest for greedy acquisition. We give birth to large families even as the world cracks under the weight of overpopulation. If we couldn�t hide from the reality of the suffering of others, what a better world it would have to be out of necessity!
Exercise: I Have Found the Key
In this exercise, you will learn to use the consciousness of others to solve a problem. Begin by sitting down in a large conference room (in your imagination) and place a small wooden box in front of you on the conference room table. See three other people sit down with you. These are people with different economic, ethnic and perhaps even historical backgrounds than your own.
Open the box and pull out a piece of paper and a gold key. The paper has a description of a problem that you have written on it. Hold the paper and close your eyes, and see the problem playing out as a scene in front of you. This problem can involve yourself or another person. Pass the paper around the circle and have everyone examine the problem in the same fashion.
Now, take the key and place it inside a key-shaped hole in your chest. This charges the key with all the information in your life experience that could be helpful in solving this problem. Now, pass the key around to the other people in the circle and have them do the same thing to the key.
Now comes the interesting part. Place the key in the hole in your chest a second time and turn the key. At this point, the scene fades and you see a �movie� of how to best solve the problem, based on all the information from yourself and the three other people. You may see different scenes tied together. Watch the whole thing and then see how this compares with the solution you would have come up with off the top of your head.
Try, more than anything, to not take other peoples� input too literally. Instead, ask yourself how you can filter it through your personal experience and make it useful to yourself. For example, in one case a person simply might suggest �have faith in times of trouble�, and this is not helpful to you, but you can reword it or use it in a certain way that is more in context with how you think, and then it becomes useful. Don�t reject advice based on the source, or take it too literally, but use semantics to your advantage to make it more practical. If you need to, rephrase the suggestion in your own words, as if you were giving yourself advice.
I hope this exercise has been interesting and helpful. Obviously, you can use this type of technique to troubleshoot your own problems. It can be interesting to see how historical figures responded to life, and how they dealt with problems and stress. Beyond that, it is helpful in appreciating how hard life is for everyone across the board, which can lessen your sense of isolation and suffering. The people we find so annoying can turn out to be repositories of great wisdom and experience, if we can get past our own bias. Everyone has many great stories to tell.
A3) Every Experience is Etched in Time, Immutable and Unchanging:
It might be more accurate to say that everything exists in Spirit and because Spirit is beyond time and space limitations, everything is available to all beings as conscious experience. So, there is no force of time or matter to destroy any experience. Furthermore, the experience could be re-experienced by any being in Spirit at any time.
All experiences permanently reside in Spirit as they were, for all time. This is because they are ideas and because Spirit has no single timeline; time is personal to each person in Spirit. Experiences remain unchanging and always accessible by others. In this way, experiences are not �lost�, but saved to be used as needed by all Spirit beings. All experiences are repositories of knowledge, and as such, have infinite possible value in building future realities.
Not just pleasant experiences are valuable. Even moments of tremendous suffering are important for they contain the information that make up the answers to questions of a certain nature. Those beings who are seeking out those answers must access your painful life experience for the knowledge it contains. Your suffering is part of many larger threads of consciousness development. How that moment in time changed your consciousness is also important.
All your successes, pleasures and joys are important. In Spirit, all consciousness has value and no experience is �valueless,� because consciousness is something wholly positive in Spirit and so it must always be of value. Even if we, in our physical world do not see the value of moments of pain or weakness of judgment, those moments of consciousness look very different from a Spirit vantage point. They contain no loss or suffering or anything negative, not through denial but by seeing more than we see of reality. And what they see is pure meaning and value.
Imagine if you will that there are millions of lines of people waiting for different meals in a huge cafeteria. Some people want pizza, some want chicken and some want salad and so forth. Each line represents a different need, a different desire. There are many more lines in Spirit than in physicality, where all our needs and desires tend to fall within a certain limited range. So, while we might see no value in our suffering, another being might find in it exactly what they need. Nothing goes to waste in Spirit.
Exercise: Capture a Moment in Time
In this exercise we will capture the idea of a moment in time. To begin with, choose a moment in time that you would like to work with. This would probably be a particularly pleasant memory that you cherish. It could be a time of great happiness, great peace or great love.
Once you have selected this experience, decide on a form that you will give it. It should be in the form of a small object, like a statue, a picture on a stamp, a snow globe, a coin, etc. Imagine yourself sitting at home in your bedroom, and placing the object/memory near your bed. Lying on your bed, how does this moment in time feel to you now?
You should feel emotional impressions coming from the object. How does it feel in the context of your present life?
Now, imagine a blank white space with no boundaries. Place the object in the middle of that space, but make the object huge. Walk up to the enlarged object until you can touch it. How does it feel from this perspective? Run your hand along the surface of the object. What details of the experience are you now remembering that you may have forgotten? Does it seem very vivid or very distant?
Now, imagine the object is a portal into the experience itself. Step into the object and through it into a hidden enclosed room. You are now inside the experience. How does this feel for you? Are details now coming back to you about how the experience felt? It this uncomfortable? Take notes in your journal on your experience.
Part of making peace with your life is making peace with your past. When a person has a disturbing past full of emotional turmoil, or pain, or illness, there may be difficulty in finding your voice in the present if you can�t own your past. Sometimes pain just needs attention and sympathy, and you have the capacity to give this to yourself, bit by bit. Rather than waiting for a lover, hero or so forth to come along and fix your pain, you can fix it yourself by revisiting it and accepting that it happened.
At the time, you may not have had the internal resources to successfully handle the situation. You may have needed a few years or even a few decades to turn your back on it and heal. But, ultimately, you have to integrate this pain into higher understanding, or it can block you from having faith, feeling joy, and truly living. So, find the difficult experiences in your past and give them some attention, and they will shift from being blockages to being medals of honor.
A4) Every Person has a Unique Identity, Despite the Huge Number of Beings in Existence
All consciousness has an internal organization of some sort. What makes any being unique is their identity, the internal structure of their consciousness. If that structure wasn�t unique, then it would be identical to another structure of consciousness and in seeing the two there would only be one. So uniqueness is always a quality of identity.
In the United States, I often feel as if we are drowning in people. You can imagine how countries such as Japan must make their citizens feel. The need for uniqueness and identity must be so difficult there, but it is becoming a worldwide problem. In the arena of popular music, the difficulty of coming up with one truly original song or lyric becomes more and more staggering.
If a person is driven by a need to make an unusual contribution to society, the stakes have been raised considerably. With all this pressure, the narcissistic culture we are in pushes people to further and further extremes of behavior just to reach �high level conformity�. In all this mad rush for identity, it is easy to forget that it is not necessary to stand up above the crowd in order to make great contributions.
The fact that out there, somewhere, there are other people doing things that are similar to what you have done in no way diminishes the impact of what you have accomplished. Your experiences are unique and valuable. I was initially put off in my efforts to create the visualization news site, due to the lack of feedback and the fact that I couldn�t broaden my audience. I actually avoided reading books on visualization after a while, because I had plenty of material that I had generated myself, and didn�t want to start stealing ideas.
If the need to have a thousand subscribers overwhelmed me, I would be tempted to put the whole project in the trash. But to touch the lives of forty or fifty people is a great opportunity and responsibility, especially when you are asking people to take the material and really use it.
The satisfaction of achievement comes from the doing of it, and shouldn�t be overshadowed by projection of impossible dreams onto the physical world. The greatest satisfaction is just putting the information out there. But, enough of that rant.
From a Spirit perspective, all identities are extremely valuable, as are all experiences. Regardless of the similarities of your life experience with others, you are unique in existence and your contributions are unique.
You have a unique place in historical time. That is to say that you are in a place in the physical timeline, a place in a culture that exposes you to certain global and local events. How you are impacted by these events is particular to you, even if you share these experiences with others. Your relationships with others are unique.
Beyond these obvious states of uniqueness, your thoughts and feelings are unique to you. That is not to say that you don�t share in common human emotions, but that each emotion and thought you have is unique if examined on a microscopic level. Like a piece of bark from a tree, it is similar to other bark but has its own unique properties.
The vast majority of your uniqueness is mental. How you have perceived the world, thought about problems and dealt with pain have all come from your unique experience. All of your uniqueness is a piece of a larger puzzle, the answer to a larger question and a part of the understanding of a larger idea.
Exercise: Pulling Thorns
(Reverse hands in this exercise if you are left-handed.)
Imagine you have three to ten rose thorns sticking out of the palm of your left hand. These thorns are states of mind that are blocking your ability to appreciate yourself, your value as an individual, and the value of your life from a Spirit perspective. With your right hand, pull out one of the thorns. Imagine that you are examining the thorn under a microscope and you will see a scene that explains what that thorn represents. You will also feel a shift in your energy as the blockage has been removed.
Write down what you perceive the thorn to be, and note how you feel without it blocking your self-appreciation. Continue to do this until all the thorns are removed. How do you feel now that you fully appreciate your self and your life from a Spirit perspective? Write down any further insights in your journal.
It would be a huge shame if a person who was a mother, or father, or worked in a low-skilled job felt like they had not made a contribution to the lives of others. A non-unique contribution is still very unique and valuable, even if it is lost in the crowd. Likewise, the distain or disappointment of others should in no way prevent you from fully feeling both pride and joy in your accomplishments.
The world is full of unreasonable expectations being thrown around like an out of control food fight. Stopping to clean yourself off can reveal a worthwhile self. Sometimes it is the daily process of meeting people, being pleasant and showing concern that can be the greatest contribution of all. In order to see how much you appreciate other people, you sometimes have to see what perceptual blocks are standing in the way of your feeling good about yourself. Don�t become a hate-ridden narcissist and don�t let them block your sun.
From a Spirit perspective, you are not only exceptional in your contribution, but also necessary for all existence to work. Literally everything that everyone else on earth does is dependant on your living your life. The very fabric of existence hangs on you and you are irreplaceable. Every janitor on earth is the means by which every president has ever ruled the United States. Although the connection is not obvious to our eyes, in Spirit it is clear and inescapable. We are entirely interdependent.
Page One
