MAN AS ONION

This planet Earth is a series of concentric circles: core, mantle, crust, surface, atmosphere. Each layer can be further layered and distinguished: The atmosphere is divided into tropo-, strato-, meso-, thermo-, exospheres; the ionosphere is part of the thermosphere, and the ozone layer is an element of the stratosphere. Even the surface of the planet, the thinnest layer of all, is land and water, and the layers of each of those can be distinguished by levels of depth or altitude.

A human being, likewise, as Hermann Hesse observed, is an onion.  But for here, now, let's keep it simple.

The innermost circle is the Body level: The level of physical reality, of manifestation, of embodiment.  In terms of awareness, it's the layer whose center is "I," the conscious center of the Self that observes and decides:  It weighs and balances the information it perceives from outside, with the influences of beliefs stored within, and makes the choices that propel us through our lives. 

If a human being is a planet where the first level belongs to the body, the physical reality, then the second layer, the atmospheric layer belongs to the mind: It is the level of the unconcious aspects of the self. I call this one the level of "We." The Unconscious is the warehouse, like that one in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK,  that holds the bazillions of crates and boxes that hold our beliefs, our truths. Each container is a part of the Self. (I'll get to the "Parts Model.) Spiritually speaking, this is the level of the "astral Self,"  as thought-form.  In this layer, thoughts are real, rather than physical things.

The outer layer, like the Earth's most outer edge of the most outer layer, where atmosphere meets space, is the layer of a human being that is the most "being."  It is the layer of the Self as Spirit, closest to Universal Consciousness, God, First Cause, or whatever name you know it by....  It is the  level of intent, the idea before the blue-print/thought-form is sorted out, before the thing is manifested physically.

Someone who enjoys sorting and stacking can have hours of fun identifying what the more detailed layers are and how they all relate to one another.  The boundaries of these circles are not firm lines, either, but more like zones of confluence. And you can probably define layers withing those zones, too.

I've had tons of fun with this model!  It has a place in it for just about every aspect of being human.

GOD AND THE CLEVELAND RAIN

I used to believe in Old Man God, the Patriarch of Everything...

But somehow, the image didn't ring true and I kept asking, "Come on, what is God, really?"  I was trying to convince my sister once, when she declared herself an atheist, that God has to exist.  She was 13, I think, and I was 11. I wanted the magic of Because God Wants It That Way to explain all the mysteries of my world, which, at 11, were many!  She had given up on the mysteries, and authority, and trusted no one but herself to see her through life. 

The point is, we were the offspring of a couple of scientists, one of whom was also a mystic, and though she had died when I was 3, somehow, the theme continued quietly in the back of my life-experience... It blossomed when I was 18, but that's another story. The point of this one is that neither magic nor science was sufficient to comprehend the Mystery of Life, the Universe and Everything... (a hat-tip to Douglas Adams!)

At 12, I had a wonderful epiphany that God was Nature!  An impersonal Divine, all-powerful, all-pervasive...  Everything is Nature, even that which seems to be artificial--but  artifice is human nature , and  we make the most of owning opposible thumbs! Everything is God, because, well, that's God, all about being Everything...  This notion sustained me and my need to know, for a time.

But around the time the Mystical re-entered my life, and I quit ignoring it, I was in college in Cleveland, Ohio. I had begun to understand that there were things, persons, even, around me that I could not see with physical eyes: I had begun to witness evidence and  had to revisit the notion of a personal God, rather than God as simply a Force.

It was February in Cleveland.  

It rains in Cleveland in every month of the year.  It snows in the winter, but it also rains.  It was dreary, and I was always wet.  And I was wondering hard about that other thing.  So as I was slogging to class one day,  I said, sincerely, as if Someone might actually be there, "Okay, God, give me three days of sunshine, and I will never doubt again."  Contrary to all forecasts, the weather cleared that afternoon, stayed bright for three days after, and the rains recommenced on the next day. 

I have kept my side of the bargain.

All I had to do next, was sort out the details. 

PAST LIVES, "OVERSOUL SEVEN" and THE BIBLE

Seeing as time is experienced  as a linear thing by the Body, and more as a gestalt sort of thing by Spirit (Notice how time moves about and is perceived in dreams) then to describe Past Lives as a linear kind of thing is probably not how it works. That is just a body's interpretation of a spiritual reality. Spirit isn't bound to time and space as the physical world is.

I have considered the phenomenon of multiple lives, existing like the seperate fingers attached to a single hand (like the "Oversoul Seven" concept, to any who are familiar with Jane Roberts's Seth material). Each life and its consciousness and personality, belongs to itself, and its Now is accessible from the Now of any other life to which it is connected. 

Lately, though, I am thinking of how all humanity, broken down into individual points of life, consciousness and experience, is still a single net, a complex of connected energies. This implies that we are all potentially connected to any other human life (across time and space, because it is a spiritual reality, not a physical one).  This idea of a network of lives clicks neatly into place with other pieces of the Past-Life part of my puzzle. 

By the way, some of those pieces I found in reading the Bible, in both old and new Testaments.  I've never been good at memorizing scripture and verse numbers, and have not tried to much, because I always find very interesting things in searching for the one particular one I want.

Anyway, there is at least one piece to be found in one of the Books of Kings, in the stories of Elijah and Elisha, at the time of Elijah's death.  Another is in one of the Gospels in a statement by Jesus that begins, "My Father loves me because I lay down my life and pick it up again of my own will." 

If you find the Bible a useful spiritual resource, I recommend finding those passages, and consider what they might mean for you.

DEATH and PAST-LIVES

An eastern teacher taught one day, "Death is an illusion."  The next day, he taught, "Death is real."  His students tried to pin him down:  "Today you tell us Death is real, yesterday you told us it is illusion.  So which one is it?"  He said, "Death is a real illusion."

That teacher understood about the difference and the entwinement of Body and Spirit. 

As human beings, we experience the awareness of death as a real thing, suffer death of loved ones as real loss, real and final seperation--though as spirit we may know just as plainly that there is no final loss, and that death is not an end but a passage.

I experienced the difference between Body and Spirit consciousness when I was listening to something about past-lives, and though in certain circumstances I had no trouble accepting the notion as totally rational and reasonable and real, this time it seemed absurd.  I considered why that might be: How could I so easily believe it one day, and so simply disbelieve it the next?  I ran the concept by myself again, and found it still absurd.  Then I made a conscious shift from 'I am  body' to 'I am  spirit' and all of a sudden the reality of past-lives was simply obvious. 

It isn't hard to make that shift, only accept the premise that we are comprised of both, and can own either point of view.  

Everything in western culture makes it easy to identify Self with the physical.  Yet, it is not so hard to identify Self as Spirit, because we experience Self apart from Body every time we sleep and dream, or wander in our thoughts away from whatever thing our body is doing.  

Once it makes sense to us that we are not just one or the other, that shift is a matter of choice. 

I DON'T HAVE A SOUL

I am a soul; I have a body.

Body and soul each has its own needs and problems, and its own solutions, too.  Trying to solve the problems of one with the solutions of the other, simply doesn't work. When we get the roles of Body and Soul reversed, that's one of the first things that goes wrong.

A human being is a family: Parent and Child and Grandparent living in single household. 

In a family where the parent and child are in constant competition, no one thrives.

When the parent demands that the child behave like an adult, meet adult expectations, be guided by adult imperatives, that child can't be a child, can't share the creativity, amusement, the charm of childhood with the staid adult. The child is miserable, feels unloved, invalidated.

When the child demands that every meal be to the child's own tastes, no one gets past fried foods and sweets; when the child is positive he/she knows better--all the love and nurturing the parent wants to give the child is thrown back as despised and worthless, and the parent feels frustrated, unappreciated, invalidated.

There is the Grandparent in that family, one who can give good advice, but doesn't make policy.   But if the grandparent is confined to the attic, who can hear what he/she might offer? What a loss, to forget that the Grandparent is there!

It's the Parent's job to make decisions and coordinate for the family, influenced by the Child and Grandparent. The Child's job is to listen and learn the basics, and invent wonderful new possibilities, to add some charm and silliness and laughter.  The Grandparent is there, on-call, with access to information--the wisdom of much more accumulated life-experience and perspective that the Parent does not have.

We are souls; we have bodies; guidance is available, if we haven't lost the keys to the attic.

DISAPPOINTED IN GOD?

Maybe God doesn't do the kind of stuff you've been led to believe God does.  Maybe the role of God in the Universe isn't what you've been taught.  Maybe it is entirely different from the model of God which you were told was not a model, but a Reality...

As if we, with our marvelous but little human minds, can know!

If God is real, and absolute, and perfectly God, then if we are disappointed, then who do you suppose is working with the wrong equations?  Who needs to reframe the picture? 

 My father, a scientist told me, "Ask the question you really want the answer to."

And, listen to the answer, even if it seems at first to make no sense.



The Universe is, to me, a great, multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with no outside edges.  Each of us has bags of pieces collected over our lifetimes from our own experience, and from others whose experience we trust.

What I pour out here is my bag of pieces: If you see some you like, that look like they might fit into your puzzle as you've got it put together so far, take them and play with them and see what you get.  Ignore the ones that are clearly not part of the part of the puzzle you're working on.  And if you don't mind, I will paw through the pieces you spill out here, and get all giddy when I find a new one that fits mine!

I love that feeling of exhileration that comes when another piece clicks into place, and its seams disappear, and the picture is that bit more revealed...!

__________________________

This series of articles will be all about reframing traditional concepts of God, transcending the packaged goods most of us were handed in childhood, refining out the content from the packaging.

Then you can make your own decisions.