So often I am asked "What is the purpose of having incarnated in this world so fraught with error? If we came from Perfection, why did we ever leave?" From my thirty-years of working year after year in "a living laboratory" guiding hundreds through processes of personal transformation, I believe I’ve found our purpose – and one that’s been staring us right in the face: The human psyche is our incarnated soul, a spiritual being who lives in our minds and hearts, designed to be the mirrored reflection of Spirit. Your psyche is therefore is both human and divine, a hybrid species made of both spirit and matter. Once we realize our human nature is both human and divine, there’s no way we can ever really feel separate from Spirit, nor can we disavow our purpose for coming here. We are here to bring Spirit into all our human activities, and when we fail, we suffer and feel lost. With no knowledge or respect of psyche as our human soul, who serves as the bridge between Spirit and matter, we live in a "disconnect," lost to the true workings of the human soul.
Many spiritual paths teach that to be spiritual we are to stamp out our humanness, that being human is somehow unclean. We’re told to kill off our ego, or advised to live out-of-body, or warned that we are sinful creatures who fell from grace. Then, when we have a natural human feeling or desire, such as wanting good food, good sex, or to just have a little fun, we feel ashamed. Sadly, these misguided teachings bring us harm, for they violate our very nature, which is both human and divine. When our nature is violated, like a hothouse violet left in a snowstorm, we begin to wither and die.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO?...
Millions of people today are seeking to deepen their spiritual practice to find a way out of their problems in living. They try meditation or sign up for yoga classes or sit at the feet of one or another of the many spiritual teachers because these paths seem to promise something that really works. Often they are disappointed, however, and move to some new spiritual discipline, certain that the next one they try will be the right one.
Our unresolved needs and fears trick us into false beliefs that actually lead to more suffering. Some believe being spiritual means they must always be positive. This is inauthentic. Others, that their particular path to Spirit is the only path. A needy ego trapped in its wounds is how the shadow dances in all relationships. We call this condition "spiritual by-pass," a term coined by psychologist John Welwood. We’ve seen that a premature transcendence is no transcendence at all, and will eventually fail us.
These folk are not mistaken in thinking that authentic spirituality is the answer to human suffering. But many are forgetting one thing. Carl Gustav Jung said the human psyche gives us our knowledge of the world and the picture we make of it – our perceiver of what we call real. Without psyche we wouldn’t be conscious of anything at all. Since psyche is our perceiver of reality, everything we think or feel must come through our psyche, even our ways of defining the Divine or what it means to be spiritual.
While living in a human body, it is impossible to be "just spiritual." Psychological health goes hand-in-hand with our spiritual unfoldment. A healthy human psyche is the foundation upon which any authentic spiritual life is built. There is no escaping this fact , that without a healthy psyche, we can create a bogus spirituality. The laws of both psyche and Spirit must be honored for us to be healthy and whole. Like anything else in creation, we must honor the fundamental principles of our entire nature if we are to thrive. Otherwise, like a hothouse violet left in a snowstorm, we will wither and die.
How could God have left us out of His divine plan? Why would our Creator think of human beings as some big mistake? Your human psyche, correctly understood, is a messenger from "on high," created to teach us how to be spiritual in individual bodies. We are to bring divine love and beauty into every personal relationship.
To individuate, we stepped out of "the Garden," where all our thinking was done for us, and took on the responsibility of becoming conscious individuals. Just as the goddess Psyche consciously chose to fall from Mt. Olympus and became a human girl. And in so doing, the human psyche was born, your individual soul who comes straight from Source. Perhaps we’ve never realized that God or Spirit is capable of being universal only. Even gods and goddesses – the archetypes that reside closer to our Source – have only universal consciousness and know nothing of how an individual thinks or feels. This is the purpose of the human kingdom. And to complete the human kingdom, we are to blossom into the fully-realized human/divine beings that we are.
Our religions and psychologies have failed to tell us who we really are and why we’re here. We’ve not known that psyche is a divine being living right inside our own minds and hearts! Vaguely, we’ve thought of psyche as our psychological self who sometimes needs therapy. Though the word psyche means soul or spirit in Greek, most Western psychologists treat us as only egos needing correction. Your psyche is so much more than this – the vital the link between Spirit and matter, the mirrored reflection of your soul. Your soul is twinned: when it "looks up" it relates to Spirit; when it "looks down" it becomes psyche who takes on the worldly life to make it conscious. Here is the poetic reality of who you are, written ages ago by a Russian mystic:
The soul once turned toward matter,
Fell in love with it,
And burning with desire to experience bodily pleasures
Was no longer willing to tear herself away from it.
And so the world was born.
(Daniel Chwolsohn, Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus)
The reason we’ve never made psyche fully conscious is because we are her. Like standing in the middle of our own picture, we do not see ourselves. If you think about it, you need a mirror to even see your own face! Perhaps God also needed a mirror to see and experience His creation.
But herein lies the problem: As the mirrored reflection of the spiritual soul, psyche’s mirror has become "fogged" by human ignorance, society’s unexamined beliefs, and by each individual’s psychic woundings we’ve collected and never cleared as we’ve traveled here on earth. Spiritual we already are; it’s human we are learning how to be, through trial and error. So just naturally, we have made mistakes. But psyche will not allow us to stay in misalignment with Spirit for long. She brings us symptoms of distress anytime we get off the mark, relentless in bringing us the lessons in love we need to be clear representatives of Spirit. Psyche’s task is to take on the human predicament, with all its delightful pleasures, problems, and sorrows, then guide us through our gradual awakening to our divinity.
To individuate means to become an indivisible whole, to grow into our full blossoming as a unique person able to stand on our own, separated from our parents’ or even Gods’ identities, able to claim our divinity for ourselves. We become the paradoxical "Unity in diversity," agents of free thought. Here, we accept the mantle of our destiny as a demonstrator of the divine. Called to give back to the world that which we know best how to give, we commit to making this a new and better world.
In my book, Psyche’s Seeds, I’ve described the Twelve Sacred Principles of A Soul-Based Psychology that the Goddess Psyche learned when she fell to earth and became a human girl. These Seed Thoughts track with what we’ve learned in our work with hundreds undergoing personal transformation, and will help keep you moving in a sound and true direction toward your unfoldment as a spiritual being in human form. You can examine these Principles spelled out in this newsletter, and hopefully come visit me the evening of July 10th here at Book People where we can share from our direct knowing how to better serve our sacred purpose here.