Soul Solutions Healing Group 

We tend to think of spiritual growth as something we “work on” or “learn.” Someof us consider it a matter of how we feel our way through life, maintaining a steady balance of living in a way that is truthful to us. We could say that each interpretation is correct. As we seek, we find.

In our earliest steps during our quest for spiritual growth, we seem to first look for validation of what we are experiencing on many levels. We ask others for permission that it is acceptable to feel the way we are feeling. We then begin to develop self trust and listen to our inner voice. We learn to go within for truth about who we are and connect with Source.

As we become connected with ourselves, we begin developing more intimacy with our feelings. Often, if we experience something we don’t like, we may revert to a time when our perceptions seemed more fitting for our path. In most cases, this involves using our mind’s evaluation of our situation, which we use to interpret and analyze our feelings. This is completely natural, yet our mental efforts can occasionally cause us to experience some limitation. Eventually, we begin to recognize that working on anything spiritual can be helpful to us as long as our efforts help us “release” and move forward versus “identify” and remain mental.

Losing Identity

A common misperception about spiritual growth is that we “become more” than what we once were, or “build upon” who we are. It is only natural to feel that we would grow spiritually in the way that we have lived our physical lives. We tend to measure our success in the physical by what we’ve gained. Spiritual growth, however, is not a subject-object dichotomy, nor is it a process by which we “build more” onto our identity. Spiritual growth, rather, is the relinquishment of ego-identification. Spiritual growth is not a process by which we become more; it is a process by which we “strip away” who we are not. It is the process by which we lose what is not real in us, and recognize what is real in us.

The denuding of our perceived identity is a natural process which is taking place in our consciousness. It is a natural step in consciousness evolution, and it is a process which is occurring more rapidly now due to the Quantum Leap and the onset of the New Energy. As consciousness continues to support us, we are experiencing a stripping away of our old identity. We feel that we begin to lose our mental ideas about ourselves; of what we believe ourselves to be and do. The nature of this change can cause confusion, multiplying our emotional responses and causing us to question our feelings and personal truths. As we naturally make our way through the confusion, however, we begin to understand that spiritual growth is not something meant to be “learned” so much as it is experienced as something that we “recognize” as we “unlearn” what is not true about ourselves.

We have taught ourselves untruths about who we are, and we often live our lives with those untruths as our template for living until we spiritually awaken. As we wake up to the truth of who we are, we understand that there is nothing in us that is not perfect or not whole. We simply continually evolve our beliefs and perceptions about who we are as we naturally move into a clearer awareness and consciousness.

Through our learning, we develop “recognition,” which can be experienced as insight, revelation, a knowingness of truth, etc. In learning, we are teaching ourselves something. In recognition, we simply perceive with clarity. “Learning” and “recognizing” work together to serve us. When we recognize a truth, we no longer need to learn for the moment. Because we are “recognizing” (or remembering) our true nature rather than “learning” it, we come to understand that we have the ability to fully recognize our true selves in any moment. Hence the miracle is born.

Ego Identity

We have a general idea about how we grow spiritually. We know that we develop a mental identity in order to learn who we are. Now that this identity is changing within us, let’s take a closer look at what “identity” is. Let’s look at an unmistakably obvious example of our changing identity – ego.

I’ve observed that how I feel about other people is almost always an indicator of how I feel about myself. Yes, we can sense and know that our feelings guide us, and that the law of attraction is always in motion with how we are interacting with our world. Yet, our ego identity always has something “in mind” to maintain separation and the preservation of its existence within us.

We constantly see ourselves in other people by how we feel about them. Our interactions with strangers can be a great indicator of how we are relating with ourselves (especially when driving vehicles). I base this on the premise “interacting with others equals interacting with our self” because when we are in full alignment with our self - when we are not repressing our feelings consciously or subconsciously; when our energies are balanced - we are in a state of grace. The natural state of the human being is one of love, acceptance and innocence. Children are an excellent example.

Without recognizing ego’s presence, it can be easy for us to mistake ego (or perceived identity) for who we truly are. We’ll call our true selves “I” or “I am.” We spend most of our time automatically sifting through our experiences and “working on our spirituality” that we forget what it is we are moving towards, and what it is we are detaching from. This can only mean confusion, as A Course in Miracles states.

Essentially, we are growing into awareness and true perception, and detaching from ego’s influence. Recognition of ego’s influence then becomes consciousness and the Atonement (At-one-ment). We can learn this in infinite ways through infinite means without even calling our life “spiritual,” and we may label it in infinite ways. (See A Course in Miracles for the definition of Atonement.)

Our ego identity wants us to appease it by acknowledging and embracing it and by valuing it. Ego wants us to resist unification (At-one-ment), which it perceives as a form of attack. It wants us to remain ignorant of its influence and confused as to what is the true “I” and what is ego. Ego wants to control us, but it does not want us to know that we are being controlled by it. Any thoughts of attack that we have, for example, are prime symptoms of being influenced by it. What ego desperately does not want us to know is that our attack of others is an attack on ourselves.

Once again, “a thought about others is merely a thought about our own self.” Not only does this sound spiritual, but it is also psychologically true. Our thoughts of others are a mental projection of our own inner feelings. As we recognize this split in our minds, we bring awareness to the fact that ego is losing its control over us. Without this recognition, however, we simply let ego dominate our minds and continue to confuse us, and thus, perpetuate our illusion of what we think is our identity and what we believe to be true of other people.

As we become intertwined in the ego-mind, our search for answers becomes difficult to distinguish because we must appease our beliefs, programming, learned associations, and any falsehood that ego has persuaded us to believe or what we have been taught by others about ourselves. The lies of the ego are endless, and its demise is in sight when it fails to prevent our arrival at an immutable truth. Ego fools us by reinforcing its identity as our own, and we mistake these short-lived, seemingly positive emotions for growth, gain, or even truth. Yet, we aren’t always discovering a truth, however, when we feel good. Sometimes our egos conceal truth from us, masquerading illusion as something real. This is what perceived identity is – illusion - although more obvious when observing from the level of the ego-mind.

Nevertheless, our consciousness evolution is perfect, and will always take us in a perfect, natural direction for us. No matter how long we choose darkness, there is ultimately nowhere to go but God. For example, in the Quantum Leap, many of the old workings, the old belief systems, the old thoughts about who we no longer are, are beginning to fall away due to what we’ve created - the New Energy, or the New Earth. Whether we’ve been participating in this awakening process consciously or are just beginning to feel it, we may still find ourselves looking for a “truth” within the changes which we can rely on – a truth that is beyond our loss of perceived identity. And of course, it is human nature to feel darkness in the times when our truth is changing.

The Darkness

The Christian perspective calls these painful times in consciousness rebirthing the “Dark Night of the Soul.” It is a time in which our identity evolves at the soul level. We break through to an expanded consciousness, and thereby, an expanded version of our self. To simplify, “The Dark Night of the Soul” could be seen as the loss of mental identification with self. Mental identification is the filter through which spiritual knowledge is lost. If we are trying to be something different than “I,” we may wonder why part of our identity appears absent. In such instances, we experience “darkness,” or a detachment from “I,” or a detachment from the most recent version of truth about who we are. A Course in Miracles speaks of this as the resurrection and the crucifixion, which can take place as often or as rarely as we like. The common belief that this process is a one time occurrence which lasts a long time is not entirely accurate, for we continually grow in consciousness, and we may choose to crucify ourselves daily. For simplicity, you might say that the dark night (or nights) is what we may experience as we arrive at the spiritual understanding - or recognition - that we are more than what we had previously perceived ourselves to be. The dark night is simply a process of our consciousness evolving. Yet it could also be viewed as an attachment to the pain of losing our identity. We can’t negate going through the dark night of the soul (or however we choose to label the experience) because it is a part of our human experience. It is vital for each of us, however, to question processes of growth such as the “dark night” for ourselves. The recognition of the “dark night” serves our purpose, but the propagation of it can jail us. By attaching to the darkness, we slow the miracle of our instant salvation. We choose individually if the darkness is painful, or if it frees us. (Read Jim Marion’s Putting On the Mind of Christ to learn more about the Dark Night of The Soul.)

If we have no expectations of what we think we “should” be; if we hold an open acceptance about who we are, we would rarely encounter a backlash wave of experiencing who we are not. With total acceptance of our experience of ourselves, we resist nothing by the limitation we call identification. In truth, we are always experiencing “more” of who we are. We choose the “dark night” by default when we don’t. Embracing and allowing these changes of “identity” without attachment makes the “dark night” an impossibility for us and for generations to come.

“Hey, I’m Human”

Of course, sometimes life just hurts! We integrate massive amounts of energy within us and balance tremendous energy around us. We don’t always know how we are doing it, but we do. It’s in our nature to evolve energy. We experience the least pain and the most joy by practicing total acceptance of ourselves. Acceptance and non-attachment is priority number one.

When we are integrating quantum shifts within us, our ego can react, and we may find our ego defending itself against nothing – or anything, or everything. Our ego-mind will occasionally search for what it can devise into a belief system, naturally probing for its security, looking to gain a foothold once again in us. But ultimately, it will disappear.

With the perceived identity falling away, the “I” beneath is revealed in our consciousness. This is the full recognition of God within coming to the forefront of our awareness. We experience ourselves as brand new in the “I,” and without our previous filters which have fallen away. We may feel a different type of connection to our self, perhaps relating differently to ourselves than we’ve related to our self in the past. We naturally observe how we’ve been controlling so many aspects of our lives, and we feel comfortable practicing graceful surrender. We no longer resist the change, but instead begin to flow with our new consciousness. We find that prior quantum shifts caused upheaval within us, but subsequent ones seem to lift us into more alignment and clarity within us.

We begin to realize that we can now go within and create anything we need. We are not bound by the old schematic of our “old energy” beings. Even though the old earth still exists around us, the new earth is being built into it by our choice to evolve our consciousness. We have a new and different type of access to our inward-dwelling divinity. We no longer require the assistance and the protection of our angels, yet they are still there for us. We no longer need to wait for celestial alignments for optimal results, nor deliberate until something or someone arrives to empower us to live our lives.  Although we’ve been living this way for many years - developing this new energy - the difference now is in what is available to us by accepting and living that way…now.

As the quantum ripple effect continues, we will see many changes on this earth in the next years. There will be new and independent thought-forms breaking free to the surface of the minds of most everyone. Creativity will soar. Some will be creating peace, some will be creating havoc. Some will be leaving the dark night once and for all, while others will feel that they are being pulled into it for the first time, because they will not yet realize it was something that they chose from a place of perceived identity. All of us have taken the leap and have participated in the process in some way.

Consciousness IS

Growth comes in many different forms and, as we’ve mentioned, sometimes the most profound growth is simply unrecognizable at first, thus, requiring learning. At times, our internal change is condemned by our ego instead of acknowledged as a perfect process in motion. We have all gone through our share of struggle, and we will continue to learn how to work with the new energy and our new beings. Our surrender of more of our lives and expressing more of our selves work brilliantly for creating freedom and peace within us.

Our changing identity may have altered how we view our spiritual growth, but what we are in our core being – in spirit – has not changed. We are simply learning how to experience and utilize more of “I.” As we remain non-judgmental, totally present, and eliminate our filters, we will continue to be in the best place within ourselves…home. With less identity, we are able to honestly accept who we are and who we have been, and we seem to project that honesty outward in our feelings and expressions, living our lives with less inhibition, mental jurisdiction, non-attachment, and more freedom. We can feel this honesty as we look around at what people are expressing and how they are expressing it, whether through writing or speaking or doing our favorite type of spiritual work. The quantum changes and detachment from ego can be painful, but they leave behind what is real and present to begin with – “I.'

by Todd Schaefer

copyright 2007. Todd Schaefer/Soul Solutions Healing Group. All Rights Reserved.