It begins and ends within.
Please discuss. How does this play out in life?
I’ll start us out. We enter life aware of stimuli—hot, cold, hungry, tired. Our physical experiences arise from what goes on in our infant bodies. As we grow, our senses develop and we learn to identify familiar faces, smells, sounds. Our world expands to include our primary caregivers.
With a little more time, we know and interact with siblings and perhaps a family pet. Our world view arises from our experiences in this intimate circle. As we grow toward school age, our society includes neighbors and friends. Throughout school years, our network of friends grows. We now look to them increasingly to form our beliefs and preferences.
As young adults, we create our own lives, establish households, find partners, and may have children. Our values and though patterns are largely set and we begin the process of transmitting them to others through our middle years.
In later years, our children are grown and forging their own families. We’re less busy and more prone to reflect. Our bodies demand more care and tending. Awareness of physical needs again becomes more important. We’ve cycled back toward a more inward focus.
Our spiritual lives follow the same evolution. We begin our incarnations intimately aware of the divine interconnection residing inside us. As we become increasingly involved in social interactions in our growth years, separations consciousness begins to color our beliefs and thoughts. The us versus them mentality is reflected clearly in many of our interchanges. It is harder to sense the intrinsic divinity in ourselves and others.
This separation tends to prevail until later in life, we we are more likely to look back, evaluate, and explore new ways of thought and perception. Eventually, at the end of life as our bodies fade, the existence of and strength of our divine interconnection becomes apparent again. At death, our bodies fall away, revealing us as part of a divine whole, interconnected in loving consciousness. We have returned to our starting point.
Today’s message reminds me that the human voyage is an interlude of limited perception bracketed on either end by understanding of our true, divine nature. I can enhance my human life experience along the way by stretching my awareness out of separation consciousness and into connection consciousness. In this way, I can attempt to lead my life in conscious cooperation with and appreciation of the divine.
How about you? Where do you feel you’re at in your life’s cycle of awareness?
For more on how to effect a personal spiritual evolution, please see my book, “The Sharing: The Owner’s Manual for Being Human.”