AWAKENING AS A HUMAN*DIVINE BEING

Awakening as a Human*Divine Being

Since early human history people have sought to understand the nature of the universe in which we live. Different methods have been adopted by scientists and followers of various spiritual traditions, with a sharp contrast between the two.

The most significant breakthroughs have occurred when someone was able to free themselves from fixed assumptions about reality. Creative imagination has been a powerful tool. In science it led to discoveries ranging from the structure of the benzene molecule and Einstein’s theory of relativity. In spirituality, metaphors and allegories have been used to translate experiences of higher states of consciousness to make them understandable to others.

We live in a universe in which everything is interconnected. The world in which we think we are is limited to what is perceived by the physical senses, what can be objectively studied and measured, and how we interpret our experiences. Both science and spirituality state that the universe is multidimensional, and that consciousness is fundamental. In order to understand and study consciousness, we have to be able to work with our own consciousness and become capable of modulating it to different states. There have been methodologies developed by many spiritual traditions over the course of centuries to accomplish this.

Spiritual traditions state that consciousness can transform manifest reality. Research has shown that an intention can be stored in a simple electronic device that can alter the pH of water, even when it is not in direct contact with it. Theories about information from science can shed light on what spiritual traditions call alchemy – a transformation from one state to another.

In this book, we will be presenting ways to help you bring about a radical shift in your perspective. You will learn ways to awaken a means of perception beyond your physical senses, experience subtle levels on which you exist, and eventually realize yourself as a multidimensional being. You will discover how to work with what we call the imaginal faculty of the soul – creative imagination – in order to not only open to revealed wisdom (in contrast to acquired knowledge), but also to creatively participate in the process of evolution of what is possible in manifestation. We will draw from the wisdom of different spiritual traditions, including Zorastrianism, ancient and contemporary Sufism, as well as from discoveries in science that contribute to deeper ways of how we understand and relate to ourselves and the world. We hope that this book will serve as a guidebook to help you carve out your own unique spiritual path of unfoldment in life.

In this book you will learn to develop your resurrection body, which is the spiritual body of the soul. It is produced by alchemical work through awakened life experiences. It is the presence of itself mirrored in itself with no boundaries.

Awakening in Life

We want spirituality to be something that’s practical and meaningful in our day-to-day life, not something that makes us otherworldly or spacey, or have difficulty functioning. If anything, we want spirituality to make us much more capable of dealing with all the challenges that there are in the world, especially right now. What does it mean to be a human*divine being in the thick of things, in the midst of life? An important aspect of that is learning to recognize when we’ve been pulled out of that vast, interconnected state of consciousness that you’ve had, at least briefly, that state of relational unity, and that feeling of being in a transformed world.

When we say awakening in life, it’s not awakening in a life somewhere other worldly or somewhere beyond the world that we are in. What’s dramatically different is the world that we thought we were in was just a state of limited perspective and a distortion of the actual reality in which we exist. The problem has been our vantage point, which includes our identification with the world of our senses, our thoughts and concepts about what we’re experiencing, our emotions, and our personality. We think of ourselves as just this life that goes through time and space in this one physical incarnation. That’s certainly an important aspect of who we are, but it’s the tiniest piece of who we actually are. In order to experience multidimensional consciousness, we first have to be able to awaken our subtle senses. We have to develop the capacity to be able to access subtle levels of reality that are all present right here. We can think of them as different vibrational realms, much more subtle than what we normally have the capacity to experience. The first step is to be able to experience these individually, and then the second step is to be able to experience these as a part of the unitive structure of our being which exists on many levels of reality.

We’ve described ta’wil or harmonic perception as a means of seeing deeper levels behind things than what we perceive in the material world - the world of the senses. Ta’wil enables us to perceive how things tell the story of their evolution through the realms down into the material realm. Another way of looking at it is that ta’wil opens up our perception of those other levels and gives us an invitation to experience them. Harmonic perception is the invitation to experience many of these realms at the same time.

The beauty of ta’wil and our participation in the imaginal faculty is that we can open a place within us, a greater surface area, so that now we have room for many more realms than we ever experienced before. This is the widened arena in which we can do our spiritual practices, rather than thinking that we are one little person having a limited perspective in our physical body.

Every interaction, every relationship, no matter how difficult, is potentially a portal to the sacred. When we reduce ourselves to a state of limitation, we forget the true nature of who we are. We react to something and feel a polarization, a dualistic relationship. We have thoughts in our mind that come from our conditioning, things that we’ve been told along the way or we’ve identified from belief systems that others have told us. This is a reactive state of experience and a far cry from existing as a human*divine being. What’s the remedy for this? Part of the remedy is remembering what our true nature is, even if temporarily, we don’t know how to pull ourselves out of the place that we are stuck in. Many readers may be familiar with the term zikr which is an essential practice of the Sufis. It literally means remembrance. Usually, when we hear the word remembrance, we think of remembering something that’s from the past. In actuality, this is a remembrance of who we are and who