CHAPTER 6
Spirit Has No Gender
Stop and consider this a moment: In times past you have spoken such truisms with abandon but not with sincerity. They have yet to be integrated into your set of beliefs about reality. They have been ideals not truly embraced. This is not an indictment by the way. The integration process is a gradual and sometimes painstaking one. Just in the last chapter we offered an insight which may take years to embrace fully enough to create a redefinition of the human experience.
That is the purpose of these ideas we present. You are being offered the chance to redefine your existence. You are NOT a physical being. You are not male or female, human or alien. You are spirit through and through. You have simply defined yourself as separate from your own Soul. You have experienced life through such a definition almost from your first breath. Now, as an adult, you have the opportunity to expand your awareness beyond the definitions of an infant. You now can begin to integrate your intuitive grasp of a greater truth into your moment to moment existence.
Have patience with yourself. Yes! We have said this before. The simple realization that you are spirit, always have been, never separate, will not produce immediate enlightenment or liberation. You have not and will not lose all of the old definitions that you have created from birth until today. You must replace them with new beliefs one at a time. Eventually the house of cards of old beliefs will fall. That leap of faith will not come easily or painlessly, but it will come. The result of that transition will not be the dissolution of your 'old' world. Your present identity will not be lost or even replaced. You need not fear being unable to continue functioning in the world or being annihilated as a human focused being. Nothing is ever lost.
What you will find is that you are everywhere and everything. You will see your Self wherever you look. You will view the world with understanding and compassion, accepting what is and choosing your next moment freely.
You have embarked on a marvelous journey of discovery into unknown seas. To begin this journey, you had to recognize that there was more to who you are than you consciously knew. As this larger identity integrates into your consciousness, you must redefine your experience of life. As unsettling as this can be , you will find great joy in each step along the way. Let this joy lead you forward. Follow the calling of your heart and all will be well.
Each thrust into physicality requires a selection of aspects to be manifested and those to let lie, latent and unseen. Sometimes you choose to be male or left-handed or cross-eyed, anxious or relaxed, blue eyed or brown and so on. The traits that appear to be unseen are still explored by your larger Self in other-dimensional experiences to which you can have access but have not been willing to know thus far. From the moment that you, as infant, became aware of yourself, you have systematically shut out any other definitions which may threaten the identity, "me". Do not underestimate the power of that first point of self-awareness. It is a momentous event. It is an event that structures a brand new universe in which you are separate and distinct from every experience you have. All phenomena becomes "outside" of you as a result.
As the choice to see manifestation and not the latent wholeness of self and other grows in your experience, you build a structure to your life that you must madly explain, describe and pattern. This structure grows increasingly complex and unwieldy. You must block out significant portions of the vastness of experience inherent in every present moment in order to maintain a secure structure of your defining. You assume roles, like male and female, early in life, in toddler-hood in fact, that seem unassailable and permanent. You have created a whole world that expresses such assumptions. You make decisions about who you are well before you have words to express them. "Me Tarzan, You Jane," is incredibly sophisticated by comparison and not nearly so pervasive and meaningful.
Letting go of a lifetime's accumulation of definitions based upon the assumptions launched in infancy certainly must seem daunting if not impossible. We remind you that such a goal is not the point of the exercise. It is the experience of the present moment, in which you decide to view your world in a new way that has true meaning. A new future is created in such moments that you can move into in any and every moment thereafter. It quickly becomes all but inevitable. In "Life is Nothing Personal" we discussed the idea that physical details are less important and less creatively powerful than the direct experience of life. Such experience takes place deep inside you. That ineffable"space" that is not a space from which you observe the universe and yourself, holds the power to choose, which structures the world around you. When you withdraw from identifying the world around you as "reality" and focus upon your actual experience as the "Real World", you take up the power to choose.
Turning your attention to this "Experiential Self" is the grand opening to joy in your life. It is an act of self love that is unparalleled in human existence. Your experience is truly the only real thing in your life. All else is only speculation and assumption. Ground yourself in your own life experience and you can become the master of how you feel, think and believe. From such a center you can choose how your world looks, feels and what it means. This is the power you attribute to saints and messiahs. It can be yours starting right now.
Before you start throwing up arguments to this idea, remember that you are a spiritual being. Your existence is meta-physical. The physical world is a creation of your spiritual Self. Your conscious Self (the collection of beliefs and definitions about who, what, where and why you are) stands between the two. It is like a bridge which you can maintain and bolster up as separate from both or you can expand your identity to include both ends of the bridge. By expanding your conscious mind to embrace into your identity your spiritual Self and the world around you, you open to infinite joy and wisdom. It all starts with embracing the possibility of being an infinite being, a Soul. A Soul is not something you have or something that has you. A Soul is what you are. It is as large as you can imagine it to be and growing larger as your imagination stretches.
So, back we go once more to the title of this work. Spirit, which is what you are through and through, has no gender. It has no "human" limits. Those are ALL self-imposed and arbitrary. Trying to define such words as Soul or Spirit or even Self in terms that are even vaguely human and physical is an occupation fraught with confusion and difficulty. Projecting your Soul into form, making it look like a ghost even in your imagination, robs you of so much genuine information about your nature as a being. Instead, let your musings expand beyond forms into feeling, thought and inspiration. It is you who experiences infinity as the result of the expansion of consciousness. That ever growing universe of feeling, idea and inspiration is your true body and form. It is out of that unlimited power that all that you perceive is created. From the chair you sit upon to the hopes and dreams you hold for your future, All That Is is made up of the inspiration of your true body and form; spirit. No other definition we know holds as much truth, hope, power and love.
The only barrier to your embracing this knowledge in full is the body of belief and definition which you cling to for security, that insists that your survival depends on believing that the world outside of you is real. This is why meditation is so incredibly valuable. In meditation, you detach from the world outside of you for a little while. You reach for and often touch the portion of your being that experiences life. From there you have a chance to view life differently and decide how to live it.
Your Soul's desire, in human terms, is to experience itself through "you". That is a bit awkward because it assumes that your Soul and you are somehow distinct from each other. Thus you seek a relationship with your spiritual Self, God in fact. That is why you have projected God outward into the universe and made God separate from yourself. Instead, we suggest that you BE your Soul. Be God! Begin in one moment and choose again and again to embrace this identity. It will get easier with practice. Do not do this to attain some goal. Do it simply because such expansive thoughts and feelings are ripe with joy. As a spiritual being, the bulk of your Self lives in a state of infinitely expanding joy. This wholeness of Self pulls you inexorably along in this joy. Run headlong into it. It is the finest reward for true self-knowledge imaginable.
To live your Soul's desire in the human world, you will release that world completely. All those limits you have chosen will fall. The permanency of physicality is an idea that you can let go. You will then begin to perceive the subtle layers of energy, idea and inspiration that enwraps the physical manifestations. The physical is like a holographic projection of your whole Self, perceived by you alone in your special way, based upon your definitions. When your definitions change, the world you perceive changes. When you flow with your Soul's desire, even the immutability of the "laws of Physics" become subject to change. All as a result of your choice.
You never were a victim, not of the world around you or of God. Your life experience has always been the result of your choosing. That you recognize nothing other than what you have chosen does not indicate that no other choice is possible. Your staunch insistence has robbed you of all those rewards of genuine self-acceptance and trust.
Rebel! Expand your rebellion to touch every idea you have ever had about what was or was not real. Question the truth of every thought you think. Thus do you become truly conscious. You have blindly accepted so many ideas without a speck of conscious inquiry. Those ideas are in the middle of a huge cosmic onion built layer upon layer upon the flimsiest concepts originating in the first bursts of conscious awareness. Cut to the core with your questioning! Leave no idea unturned. Replace every small vision of life with the largest vision you can muster. Then, question anew. Doing this chooses a new and glorious reality, one which grows into your own infinite Self. This is what you long for at the deepest levels of your being. It is who and what you really are.
On to Chapter 7:
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