Understanding Consciousness
1. Soul consciousness
2. Spiritual connection / awakening
3. Receiving light and growing enlightenment
4. Integrating with the ONE
Soul gives life to the body – it is the force that enables the body to breathe, the heart to beat, the brain to think. When we sleep, soul enables the body to awaken. Without soul, the body is an inanimate object.
I also believe that the ability for the body to have soul comes from something our Fallen creators enabled when they first created humans (without true wisdom as to why or how they could do it – they had the power which they inherited from the ONE as they were offspring from the ONE, but they had no appreciation of the power; they simply abused it). The Fallen “breathed soul” into our genetic code so that when new humans are born, they are generally born with soul.
I believe soul to be a “blunt instrument” – that is, it makes the body live, but does not give the body wisdom or enlightenment. Soul desires a body so that the soul can live a material life and experience worldly things; body desires soul so that the body can have life in the material world. As such, soul and body tend to be seen as inseparable parts of a unified material whole.
The material whole (of soul and body) can exist without having any spirit in it – that is, the unified material whole may go through entire lifetimes without ever accessing the spirit of the ONE.
Connecting with and accessing the spirit of the ONE is something we must consciously choose to do. Spiritual connection is not a foregone “right of passage” that automatically happens to all humans at some specific point in their lifetime. Spiritual connection arises from a very personal choice that we must individually make for ourselves. That choice can be made any time in our life. This is what Jesus alludes to when he says: “Be eager to be saved without being urged. Rather, be fervent on your own…” (The Secret Book of James).
Every one of us has access to the spirit of the ONE. After the human body and soul was created by the Fallen, through the mercy of the ONE, humans were given access to the spirit of the ONE so that they might know themselves and understand that they ultimately – through their soul – emanate from the ONE (albeit via the Fallen). This is described in the ancient text known as the Apocryphon of John. This is also what Jesus means when he says: “…you for whom the spirit is a wall surrounding you” (The Secret Book of James).
Each of us is surrounded by the protective spirit (“wall”) of the ONE, but we will not benefit from it unless we – through our own personal choice – access that spirit and allow it to fill our souls. This is why I believe that the ONE true God does not directly intervene in the material earthly lives of us human mortals – the best example I can find of this is how the ONE true God did not intervene in the earthly life of Jesus. When Jesus lived on earth as a human – in a human body – he was left to endure the sufferings of evil on earth (just as any human has to) until he died after being crucified. Upon his death, the soul in his body departed from that body and was accepted into the kingdom of the ONE true God, because Jesus, during his life as a human had personally accepted the spirit of the ONE into his soul. The ONE did not intervene during Jesus’s earthly life, but did directly intervene as soon as the soul from Jesus’s body departed the earth and sought the kingdom of the ONE. In other words, the soul from Jesus had received the spirit while Jesus lived as a human, and through that personal acceptance of spirit by Jesus, his soul was earmarked for saving by the ONE as soon as that soul died from this world of the Fallen.
This is what Jesus tells us when he says: “He (the ONE) knows about desire and what the flesh needs. Does it not desire the soul? The body does not sin apart from the soul, just as the soul is not saved apart from the spirit. But if the soul is saved from evil and the spirit too is saved, the body becomes sinless. The spirit animates the soul but the body kills it. The soul kills itself” (The Secret Book of James).
The soul is saved from evil when it accepts the spirit of the ONE into itself – the soul is animated by the spirit. The soul cannot be saved without accepting the spirit into itself. If the soul does not accept the spirit, the body is prone to evil because the soul is devoid of spirit and is ignorant of how to recognize and avoid evil.
But there is an important piece of information we must not overlook. The spirit of the ONE also needs saving. Simply because our soul accepts the spirit does not mean that we are saved and ordained to enter the kingdom of the ONE. As we live in our material body on the earth, the soul in us can still be infected with evil through the choices we make, which can taint the spirit, or compel us to “lose our grip” on the spirit. This is what is meant by “the spirit animates the soul but the body kills it”. As the body and soul are unified, the poor choices made by the body infect the soul, and in turn the soul can affect our connection with the spirit.
The spirit can be saved through the soul receiving and growing enlightenment, which is recognizing that the soul and spirit are unified in the ONE (and not in the body). This is where transcendence starts to truly happen – when the human realizes that the body is just a shell carrying the soul, and the soul unifies with the spirit so that it becomes a living force from the ONE. When the human starts to realize that he / she is actually a part of the ONE – like grains of sand are part of a beach, or droplets of water are part of all the oceans – he / she will begin to transcend this earthly prison.
Full transcendence from this earthly kingdom and the bodily prison that keeps us bound to this material world occurs when our spirit-endowed soul is filled with enlightenment and we die from this material world. At that point we are saved into the kingdom of the ONE – we achieve full transcendence from this domain of the Fallen. This is the purpose of our life as we exist on this earth. Jesus gave us the best example of this through his life as a human on this earth and through his resurrection from this earth into the kingdom of the ONE.
Jesus’s soul consciousness, spiritual connection, enlightenment, and transcendence was so complete that his body was saved too. That is why Jesus ascended (transcended) into heaven spirit, soul, and body.
So, when we talk of consciousness we must understand that we are not talking about “superficial consciousness” – that is a basic understanding that I breathe, see, think, eat, make decisions and live from one day to the next – but rather of “mystical consciousness”, which is a full understanding that we are more than flesh; we are soul endowed with spirit and filled with enlightenment that enables us to transcend this meaningless earthly domain of the Fallen (or at least we are souls with this potential and choice to realize the potential).
Image: The Sanctuary of Fatima, Ourem, Portugal. Copyright - Michael Beaton
NOTE: The photo accompanying this article is of the Sacred Heart of Jesus statue (in the foreground), and the colonnade of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary (in the background) in the Sanctuary of Fatima. It was at this place - Fatima - where an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to three children in 1917, near an oak tree that still stands on the site. I believe the children, through their conscious connection with the spirit of the ONE, were able to see and interact with the spirit of the Blessed Virgin Mary. That level of spiritual consciousness is available to all of us, but very few of us accept it, seek it, and use it.
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