The Natural World vs. the Spiritual World – A Needless Battle

Yesterday afternoon some refreshing summer storms blew through. At sunset the sun came out and created the most marvelous double rainbow I’ve ever seen, right over the property. The photo at the left doesn’t do it justice at all, but it was the most amazing thing Nature has shown me in a long time.

I’ve seen rainbows before, and usually they’re very ephemeral, lasting just a few minutes. This one formed a complete, uninterrupted arc across the sky and lasted for about fifteen minutes. I couldn’t capture the whole arc in a photo so I only managed to capture sections of it with my digital camera. And there was a tiny ghost rainbow along the right.

It was breathtaking to stand there right beneath this glorious arc that stretched in luminous light across the sky.

After the rainbows faded from view the clouds and light conspired to give us some more cool visuals.

The natural world sure can be a gorgeous and amazing thing.

No wonder humans have always been obsessed with the idea of immortality. I mean, assuming you’re in decent health, you have enough shelter and food, and you have a few people around who love you, who wouldn’t want to stick around here for a while?

The problem is all of those poisons that have filtered into society and human consciousness since ancient times. These poisons pollute our ability to enjoy life, prevent us from understanding how to properly honor other forms of life, and spur us on to engage in activities that are based on the principles of “divide and conquer” and “kill or be killed” instead of principles of loving compassion.

Those agendas of aggression and combativeness come to us directly from the Custodians, who were always spurring humans on to make bloody war upon each other. It’s what the Custodians themselves were doing most of the time, so it’s all that they knew.

And throughout history they have been our main teachers in how to be human.

Which is ironic, since they weren’t human themselves.

Humanity needs to face up to the fact that we have been schooled by the wrong teachers and indoctrinated by beings of questionable moral and ethical fiber. And their teachings filter down into every world religion and into each of the common forms of metaphysical practice we tend to study when we become deeply interested in spirituality.

I’ve never been a fan of any belief structure that is anti-life. Many spiritual disciplines seem to encourage a stance that requires ascetic withdrawal from the world. This can include many self-destructive practices like vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, which usually do more harm than good.

Who are we pledging obedience too, anyway? Would a self-sufficient, infinite God require obedience? Why? Wouldn’t God be beyond such petty “needs?”

So many spiritual seekers see the poisons that can dampen the beauty and functionality of society and choose to completely withdraw their energies. And that doesn’t really work.

Among spiritual seekers I’ve found a huge percentage of folks to be anti-money, and they don’t even realize it. They justify this stance by talking about the evil corporations, the exploitation of the human labor force, the incredible tax burden citizens face, and so forth – and these are all good points.

But their attitude too often becomes one of steadfastly refusing to engage with the world of commerce or capitalism in any form. Even though we live in the age of the entrepreneur, and anyone can put up a free blog or web page and sell goods or services very easily, too few spiritual seekers are taking advantage of these incredible tools. They feel guilty about charging money for their writing, their services, or the goods that they promote. And they allow others within that circle who are themselves really screwed up about money issues to make them feel guilty, too.

We need to stop that.

You can’t be so invested in spiritual ideas that you forget to honor the needs of the body. And to honor the body in this particular place and time means engaging in activities that allow money to flow your way. To do anything less is an act of suicide.

We need to continue to root out the poisons that Custodial mind control has instilled in us, while at the same time embracing the miracles that life on the physical plane can offer us. This truly can be heaven on Earth if we get our act together. But it won’t happen through taking vows of poverty or exhibiting false piety, which too often happens in metaphysical circles. There’s a lot of “I’m more enlightened than you” nonsense that gets passed around, and a lot of this dysfunction centers around acting really weird about money.

If you write something of value and you’re selling a book, DVD, or ebook, I have no problems paying you for it. You’re providing me with something wonderful that is enhancing my life and increasing my knowledge – and that has great value to me.

If you get letters or emails from idiots saying “Information should be free!” (Translation: “I’m a user with an enlarged sense of entitlement, so gimme, gimme, gimme!”) — ignore them.

There ARE people on this planet who aren’t afraid to give value for value – to exchange energy in a balanced way.

Sometimes spiritual students forget that we all have bodies. We have hungry bellies that require food. We have many complex needs including rent or mortgage payments, car payments, health and car insurance, and a wide variety of expenses that are a part of living in a modern world.

You don’t become wealthy by hating wealth. You don’t become more balanced in your personal energy by staging a rebellion against the physical realm. And you definitely don’t earn any karmic brownie points by bullying people who provide you with something of value into spending countless hours slaving away for you for free by laying guilt trips on them or assessing them as “evil” or “unenlightened.”

If you’re turning somebody else into a slave, expecting them to serve you for free, you’ve become a Custodian. Remember how into slavery they were?

We need to find ways to reinvent what it means to be alive in physical form and discover new ways of becoming fully engaged in creating cool things down here in the world of “3-D.”

At the same time, we need to keep stripping away programming, thought forms, and indoctrination that prevent us from understanding our spiritual natures and coming into our full power as sovereign energy beings.

On the shamanic path students are taught from the beginning of their training that they need to keep one foot in each world – one rooted firmly in the physical, one planted deeply in the spiritual realm.

While straddling the two, you can access a lot of power, a nuanced kind of energy that is balanced and controlled.

Personally I never want to lose the capacity to be flabbergasted with tears streaming down my cheeks whenever I’m presented with a natural marvel like the gorgeous double rainbow I saw last night.

At the same time, I continue to challenge myself and others to push the boundaries of human understanding so that we can map out the world of the metaphysical in a truer, more joyful, and more magical way than has come before.

We can do it. We each have tremendous innate wisdom. We just need to listen to it.