Our Eternal Spirits, Part One
Who we are & how we got here.
I.
We are not modern men having spiritual experiences, but eternal spirits having the experience of a modern man.
Our ancient spirits are only temporarily experiencing this body, this mind, these emotions, and this particular ego. They’ve passed through many such bodies, minds, emotions, and egos before. All of those are mere phenomena you’re experiencing now, but you are what which experiences, not what you experience. We’ve been wrapped up in these experiences for so long that we’ve forgotten who we are.
Bodies are born and grow, only to rot away. Our minds learn and develop but these too wither in time. Our ego, the part of us identified with such passing things, fights to preserve itself and get what it wants in this transient world of illusion and suffering yet it too shall perish and be forgotten, leaving no trace of itself behind. But it is our spirits alone that outlasts all of these, and which has consciousness (that which experiences) as one of its essential attributes along with free will. It existed long before you had any of those aforementioned things and will continue to exist long after they are gone.
“For the [spirit] there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.” (Bhagavad Gita, 2.20)
Our present circumstances and the specific body & mind our spirits are inhabiting at this moment is the effect of our choices made in previous lifetimes. Our choices now are already shaping who we will become not only in this life but in future lifetimes too. This cycle of life, death, and rebirth into many forms has been going on for far too long, my dear reader. I wonder how many eons it has been, now? I’m not sure.
But this is not how it was at first. Do you remember?
Originally, your spirit and mine were situated in The Transcendental Realm as one among many unlimited spiritual beings eternally emanating from God’s self-existent Light. We were one with God from eternities past as only one part of a greater whole, at first in a nescient manner, as though in a serene dreamless sleep. Gradually, and providentially too we must add, self-awareness dawned on us. We could then distinguish between God, ourselves, the insentient energies that manifest from God, and the other sentient spiritual beings that emanate from God just as we do.
This gradual progression into self-awareness was a wholly natural process for spirits like us, and it was our first step towards spiritual enlightenment. An essential component of this awakening was the realization that we have always had free will. From then on we were faced with a choice, and really we have only ever been faced with the same choice ever since: to live in harmony with God and thereby unfold our unique spiritual personhood in loving service towards Him, or try in ignorance to find happiness apart from Him.
As our capacity to desire joy is infinite, only God, The Infinite Lord, can satisfy our hearts. But having been deceived into serving ourselves instead, we have devolved from our original high station into this material universe and identified with the passing things in it. We’ve been wandering this and likely other planets, taking on myriad forms, seeking a happiness that lasts in vain.
Finding ourselves now in human form, we are beset with troubles but have a unique opportunity. A human has the correct faculties necessary for us to be able to awaken. The ultimate aim for a human life, then, is to overcome the illusion of the false egoic self that we have constructed for ourselves out of the passing objects and circumstances we experience, and instead discover and express our true unique spiritual self in loving communion with The Supreme God.
Though all spirits have their origin as units of consciousness in God’s ocean of uncreated light, contrary to the childish New Age idea that “we are all one”, free spiritual persons are actually all meaningfully distinct from each other and have a unique spiritual destiny to fulfill that is realized in the way that a particular spirit is meant to glorify God. While some of our roles may be slightly similar enough to each other that we can reasonably be grouped together, in the end God has a special role for each of us. By seeking and obeying God in this world, we will evolve into what we have always been and were always meant to be: gods who serve God.
We desire bliss because we come from bliss. We seek peace, freedom, love, wisdom and joy in the external things out there, but everything our extraordinary souls have been seeking has always been within us. The Divine Avatar known as Jesus Christ taught, “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21) but how can this be so unless God Himself is within you? Precisely what makes the Kingdom of God worthy of that title is that God Himself dwells there. The Qu’Ran says, “[God] is nearer to [us] than our jugular vein” (Q 50:16), and how else can He be nearer to us than as the soul of our soul, the consciousness of our consciousness, the heart of our heart?
II.
“There is something in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable.”
- Meister Eckhart
The relationship between our spirits and God has been compared to that between a sun and its particles of light. This metaphor isn’t perfect, in fact, nothing in this material plane is really a perfect metaphor for understanding the mystery of the essential origin of our identity in God, our descent into this world, and our quest to return. But let us explicate this metaphor, regardless, because it still helps to a great extent.
The sun is situated in one location, yet it spreads its presence throughout the solar system via the light that it cannot help but emit. A sun necessarily emits particles of light, that’s just a part of what a sun does. The sun and the little particles of light are actually of the same qualitative essence, even though the light-particles necessarily have their origin in the sun. Consider as well, that the sun despite being of the same qualitative essence as the light-particles is so much more powerful than the little atoms of light that between the two there is no comparison. A little ray of sunshine peeking out of a cloud is a pleasant thing, but if the entire sun were to come waltzing out of the clouds and into our homes everything would be hopelessly incinerated.
God is like the sun1 and our spirits are like those little atoms of light. God’s infinite self-existing luminous effulgence is comprised of an unlimited number of spirits, and these spirits are you and me and every other living sentient being in existence whether they are aware of that or not and regardless of what form they are currently embodied in. Just as a little atom of light ultimately comes from the sun, our spirits ultimately come from God. We are effects and God is the causal source, this has been so eternally and will never not be so. We are of the same qualitative essence as God, and thus we intrinsically share important qualities in common with Him such as intrinsic existence2, wisdom, beauty, power, creativity, and joy though in an infinitesimally smaller manner, thus no spirit can ever boast of being equal to God despite being sub-eternal3 with Him. Both our spirit and the Supreme Lord are of the nature of pure consciousness, bliss, and being but God has never fallen into illusion as we have at present - that is not even possible for Him.
The sun/light and God/spirit metaphor has to be understood with five caveats.
First, a sun necessarily emits particles of light, but God’s effulgence resulting in unlimited sentient spirits is an eternally, freely chosen action. There are no “necessities” with God as there are for forces of nature like the Sun, as God is omnipotent, thus the most free of all beings. His gracious and gratuitous goodness results in the reality of there being eternal spirits who will forever realize their identity in Him and find their highest happiness in Him.
The second caveat is that God is literally infinite, unlike the sun. This means He is always complete, perfect, and pure no matter how many entities leave Him for a time and no matter how many return. God is not “subtracted from” by having entities depart from Him or emerge from Him, nor is he “added to” by having beings be reunited with Him. After all, no matter what number you subtract from infinity you are still left with infinity. God is always infinite and whole, no matter what emerges from and goes back into Him, unlike any material thing.
The third caveat is that while the Sun is in a specific location, God is omnipresent, and thus literally present everywhere. If you could point at something where He is not present, you would be pointing at nothingness. God can freely choose to make His presence more available in a specific place for our sakes, as He does for example in a holy temple or a sacred grove, but ultimately there is nowhere He is not.
The fourth caveat is that while the Sun and its light can both change, God fundamentally cannot change. Our spirits are sub-eternal with Him but can go through changes in our state of consciousness such as our descent into illusion and awakening back into unity with Him, but He does not ever change at all.
The final caveat is that while the atoms of light from the sun are all more or less the same, the myriad consciousness-persons who are all Sub-Eternal with God are all truly unique and are actually even more unique the more in harmony with God they are.
God is transcendent, imminent, transcendentally imminent and imminently transcendental. This idea is called panentheism, which is not the same as pantheism4. Similarly our spirits are in this world but not of this world, though due to our state of illusion we can think they are of this world too though this is not so and could never be so. God, our Father, our Master, has every imaginable good quality5 taken to its maximal possible extent, its greatest possible depths, and then yet exceeded even beyond that. Every positive quality originates in God, and we only even love these other good qualities at all because they remind us of God. Loving is an essential part of our spirits along with consciousness and free will as we cannot help but love. A critical component of our existential problem is that we have ignorantly chosen to love the infinitesimally lesser manifestations of God’s good qualities in the creation instead of God himself.
The spirits that we are in our innermost essence are eternal and not just immortal. Though these two words are often used interchangeably, the truth is they simply do not mean the same thing. When something is immortal it means that it having once come into being will never cease to be. But when something is declared eternal it means that it has always existed, will always exist, will never cease to exist, could never cease to exist. For something to be eternal it must have a beginningless past plus an endless future. We could say immortality is a uni-directional concept, of an existence reaching infinitely into the future after starting in a definite point. But eternality refers to a bi-directional concept, of an existence reaching infinitely in both directions of temporality, into both past and future.
Our spirits were eternally one with God in an unconscious manner at first, and we will return to this state of oneness with God but in a conscious way by following The Dharma. The bliss and power that will come with being one with God consciously will more than make up for the long sojourn in-between these states of oneness. To live in such harmony with God is the very summit of existence.
III.
In this planet, in this cycle, the doctrine that our soul is sub-eternal with God was first divinely revealed to the Aryan Brahmins who wrote The Upanishads to teach it. It could only have been divinely revealed for it to be known at all, because unless one who is not in a state of illusion tells you what the truth is the one in a state of illusion could never know what the truth is at all, since all they know is illusion. The Indo-Aryans are a specific branch of the glorious Indo-European or Aryan Race who went south-east into India and Iran instead of West into Europe as most of the other Indo-European/Aryans did. Though they tragically perished from bloody feudal wars with each other and the abhorrent sin of race-mixing over time, their pure Aryan racial spirit still remains in the words and works they left behind, which the dusky peoples they conquered have preserved by way of tradition to an extent though they distorted some aspects of what the Indo-Aryans revealed. Most of the exalted Aryan peoples developed their energies towards mastery over the material world, especially in The West, but in The East it came to pass that The Supreme God had destined that here The Aryans would use their energies to unlock the spiritual mysteries of the cosmos, a beneficence for all those who would study and realize their doctrines. As part of His Plan, at specifically a time when the western branch of the remaining pure Aryan Peoples in Europe and The New World are undergoing a severe spiritual and racial crisis the truths that our forgotten eastern cousins have uncovered are more readily accessible to us than ever before.
Of the various races of Man that still exist today, only a rare few have risen above the ego and made manifest to a degree their true spiritual selves as gods who serve God, and among these The Aryan Peoples stands out most consistently as having made manifest their divine nature in service to God on Earth6. To recover to as pure an extent as possible the original spiritual teachings of the Aryans, free from all Dravidian distortions, is an important part of the mission of this newsletter.
One of the more insidious distortions that has become commonplace when speaking of the doctrine of the eternality of the spirit, which many “New Age” people are guilty of inculcating, is this idea that our true spiritual self is merely some kind of neutral awareness or some type of philosophical abstraction like “The Will”7 as opposed to a real discernible unique personality. In their zeal to overcome ego, many wind up overshooting their mark and think that any kind of expression of individuality at all is a manifestation of the illusioned ego, which is not true. This dangerous and perniciously subtle false teaching is not what The Aryans taught but is rather an example of Dravidian distortions, and it leads to very seriously stunted spiritual development, as people wind up repressing their very true selves that God lovingly craves for them to express in an effort to spiritually grow! Such a sentiment that all individual expression as such is inherently egoic and sinful arises from a complex that is precisely egoic and sinful. Spiritual growth is dependent upon discerning our true eternal self from our ego and then choosing to express the former in lieu of the latter. This teaching arises from a failure to understand what the danger of the ego actually is, and who we really are.
This false teaching comes from a similar place as the Dravidian distortion of Aryan teaching that our eternal spirits are all “equal” which is another way of saying that they are all exactly the same. This is not true, either. While we are all eternal spiritual consciousnesses, we have also each always had unique qualifying attributes that are imprinted upon us from eternity past that we must make manifest, and this necessitates some real differentiation and hierarchy.
I’ve always been fascinated by how the Greek word Thumnos, meaning a courageous drive for glory, is often translated as spirit in English, so that we can say of a valorous warrior that he is “very spirited.” Thus the English word spirit can have the metaphysical connotations that I’ve been using it for, but it can also be used to describe vitality. There is much wisdom in these two senses of the word spirit being lumped into a single word in English. The truth is, these two senses of spirit are deeply linked. Our spirit is not some abstract wisp but drive is an essential component of it, and teachers of various traditions have done great harm by teaching that we’re meant to be passive at all times and that passivity is some kind of holy virtue - this is, in fact, an utterly warped expression of egomania. You know you are expressing your true self when you are on fire with life. The question is never one of suppressing our drive but of directing it towards the right aims.
Many things which we consider to be essential components of our personality are likely a sincere organic expression of our eternal spiritual self, but a misguided modern “guru” would tell you to repress these things because they are egoic! Any kind of virtue that comes to you naturally, any kind of inclination towards a good wholesome activity even if only a hobby, any sincere spiritual expression, is without question an expression of your eternal self even if only to a slight degree.
The Aryan understanding is that true personality and consciousness are inherently interlinked at every level. Wherever either personality or consciousness is present, the other is also necessarily present as a matter of course. This is true also for entities that only appear to us to be conscious in a slight degree such as plants, which also all have their own personalities. But when an eternal spirit is incarnated as a plant, it is only able to express its unique personality to a slight degree. Spirits are meant to continuously take on more advanced forms, progressively advancing from plant to animal to human to deity, allowing for ever more free expressions of their true selves. A greater expression of true personality requires a greater degree of consciousness and vice-versa. The gods, who have the greatest degree of consciousness other than God Himself, have even more unique personality than us humans ever could. The Supreme God has the most unique of all personalities, and He is a personal being.
When we are wholly identified with our lower desires for safety, food, and pleasure to the extent that we are unwilling to sacrifice these for higher goals that bring true happiness, that is ego. Our true spiritual self wants to express the courage, self-control, and creative power that is native to it and rule over the flesh that it inhabits. When we are resolved to embark upon instilling a good habit in ourselves, such as exercising or meditating, it is the true eternal spiritual self that recognizes the need to do this, wants to carry it out, and joys in doing it. This is all an expression of our true self on a low level, especially provided we are motivated by the right intention, the best intention of all being to glorify God. The ego is the part of us that holds us back from this. Any kind of wretched vice, no matter how deeply entrenched, is a part of your ego and must be overcome for your true spiritual self to be expressed. The true spiritual self has every virtue, though it may be naturally inclined to express one more than others, and because our egos love to avoid being chipped away at by our true selves, it is best to work on the virtue we are most reluctant to develop most of all.
The ego is a false constructed self, a mask, that obstructs our true self and it has arisen due to our complete identification with the temporary body and mind we are inhabiting, the passions that emerge from it and their objects of desire. When we made the choice to not be in harmony with God, the result was that we gradually forgot God, and as our true spiritual self has Him as its source and telos, this necessarily resulted in us severely misunderstanding ourselves. Having obscured Him from ourselves due to our own ignorant actions, and having received the effect of entering a body that decays and dies in a transient world of suffering and illusion, we identified with this body and this world, having nothing else to latch onto, nothing else that was as immediately present to our dimmed consciousness. But when we walk the path and practice Sadhana, we gradually undo the layers of illusion that we are entangled in, awaken to who we really are, and start returning home.
IV.
Not only are consciousness and personality inherently inseparable, but both of these are also intertwined with narrative. For a personality to even make sense it has to have attributes to express and these can’t help but be expressed in a narrative. Narrative is to a self what water is to a fish, and this is true too for our eternal spiritual selves. To understand the cosmic narrative, our role in the great drama of the universe, is critical to understanding ourselves. Indeed, the sheer joy of storytelling is part of why God made us self-aware to begin with. Though it may not always be readily apparent, we are actors in an epic of galactic and inter-dimensional proportions that is far more thrilling than any tale that has ever entered into the mind of a mere mortal, because the author of this story is The Supreme Lord. When this story reaches its climax all sentient creatures in all of the universes will glorify God forever as He makes Himself manifest to the characters in it, namely, you and me.
When I began my study of the wisdom of the East, I was frustrated that the Sages of Dharma always spoke about the spirit falling into illusion, but they would never speak about how or when this had happened, and it frustrated me because it seemed like an important detail. How could we work our way out of illusion unless we had understood how we had fallen into it to begin with? How can we retrace our steps unless we know where we had gotten off the path?
It didn’t take me long to discover that the Living God had spread revelations to different groups of people around the Earth at different times, so that a wise few for whom it is necessary could piece them together at the right time like the pieces in a puzzle. Though the metaphysical reality of the eternal spirit and it’s relationship with God was divinely revealed to the sages of the east, the story of the fall of our soul into illusion was divinely revealed to the prophets of the west.
You have heard the Adam and Eve story, but you may not know that this story is extremely esoteric. Even after many years of reading it I do not think I am done unlocking all of its mysteries, but of the following I am certain. Adam and Eve refer not just to individuals but to all of us. Everyone reading this article, and everyone you will ever meet on this planet, was incarnated in the Garden of Eden during our past lives as an Adam or an Eve where we personally made the fateful choice to descend into illusion after being deceived into it by ancient forces of evil. Gone are the theological absurdities, so often asserted, that we each have to suffer dreadfully for something a single couple did millennia ago in addition to being accountable for our own actions. The truth is, you did it. You ate the forbidden fruit, in one of your past lives, and have been suffering from it ever since.
But why did God even place us in the Garden of Eden to begin with? It’s necessary to understand this first. Our eternal spirits agreed to take on human form and to incarnate in the earthly paradise so that we could grow as sub-creators8. God, The Supreme Being, made this whole universe that we inhabit emanationistically and this is a true act of creation, but we as little consciousnesses in God’s world can create out of the raw material of the universe and our experiences in it. God imagines tree and stone and other wonders, and man makes out of these. This derivative creation, or sub-creation, is another fundamental aspect of being an eternal spirit. Every action we do is a type of artistic sub-creation, ultimately, whether we are aware of that or not. The essential question is whether we are sub-creating well or not. When we sub-create9 wisely by being in harmony with God and strive to follow His wise instructions, then we beautify His creation, glorify God, and elevate ourselves spiritually.
We agreed to incarnate in Eden to grow as sub-creators. We were meant to till, replenish, and harness the marvellous material world that God had made to express our individual unique natures and glorify Him. By doing this well, we would grow as sub-creators and graduate to a further stage in existence and become gods of great power with even more sub-creative potential because gods can move both the spiritual and material planes effortlessly.
So you see, the material world is not inherently evil as some claim, but it serves its proper place as a training school for our eternal souls to pass through over the course of its developmental unfoldment. As we grow the material world is not even necessarily left behind, it’s just that we perceive the spiritual world in addition to the material world to a much greater degree. Such gods as we are meant to become are masters of the spiritual and material worlds. Reincarnating allows us to take on many forms and learn many lessons for our spiritual growth to better unfold and express the spiritual being that we have always been.
Given that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent how could we fail to be good sub-creators if we follow His instructions as we ought? And how could we fail to be if we didn’t? When we assert ourselves against His instructions, we are losing our true identity as His sub-eternal sub-creative devotees and falling into the false expression of self known as the ego. When we sub-create on our own terms, according to our own limited and ignorant conception of what is good and true and beautiful, we are being egoic and out of touch with ourselves. Ensnared by ego, we incarnate in countless lifetimes in many forms again and again in the mad pursuit of trying to live according to our own will and not God’s.
Sub-creating according to God’s instructions results in Dharmic civilizations that reflect in this very earth the highest realms of reality, and that’s what we are advancing in every good deed we do no matter how small. But sub-creating out of harmony with God results in this material world becoming more and more like the hell realms every day, where God is distant and people live in total discordance with each other, their environment, and themselves in a constant bid for slight morsels of pleasure and power. We make this world more like Hell with each wicked deed.
God made us to be His royal priests and holy kings, a sublime dignity. As priest, we mediate and represent Him to the lower creatures in the cosmic hierarchy such as the plants and the animals that He gave us dominion over, and help them to spiritually grow. As kings we rule over the very good world that He made. Our exercising of our willpower, reason, creativity is always a kind of rulership over this material creation that God made for us.
It’s never too late to begin to live up to to our original high calling in the particular context of our very own life, in the distinct way we are meant to live this out, even if we have been sinning and wandering aimlessly for lifetimes.
Understanding the initial chapters of our cosmic saga is necessary for understanding where we are now. It could be known to us with certainty by divine revelation, as there are many ways that our story could be, theoretically, but scriptures like (in this case) The Bible help us have a sense of what the story that we are involved in is. Unless the director of the drama tells you what the story is, you couldn’t know for sure what it is or what your role in it is supposed to be. But how was it ever possible for us to be goaded into following the wrong path? Why would God even permit this? Tune in for part two…
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Indeed, in many cultures He is explicitly worshipped by His presence in The Sun, this was especially the case in antiquity where the supreme deity of a culture is a solar deity.
This means we ultimately could never not exist, as Lord Krishna (a divine avatar) beautifully explains in the Bhagavad-Gita.
Others have used the term “co-eternal” to describe our relationship with God, but I do not like this. So I have substituted it for a term I have invented myself, “Sub-Eternal” which describes when something exists as an eternal effect. Our spirits are sub-eternal effects of the Supreme God who is the cause.
Pantheism is the mistaken notion that the sum total of the universe is, itself, God. While God is present in the universe and it’s a part of Him in a sense, He is also beyond it at the same time. Traditionally, Abrahamists present God as wholly Transcendent, and pagans lean towards Pantheism. They’re both half-right, in a way.
He also has more than a few good qualities that we can’t imagine. It’s arrogant of us to assume that the good qualities our mortal minds can discern are the only good qualities there are at all. As we spiritually grow into the next realm of existence we will understand things about Him we cannot possibly know now… “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” 1 Corinthians 2:9
Many Aryans who have realized their true identity as eternal servants of God have done so under the aegis of Christianity. The Exoteric traditions of this faith teach the erroneous notion that our spirits are immortal rather than eternal, but there has always been a substrate of esotericism within Christianity that teaches the true doctrine that our spirits are eternal. Many who realized this truth chose to keep it secret to avoid persecution.
There is plainly no such thing as “pure will” without a person who wills. That whole notion is just theoretical phantasmagoria. Willing implies a one who is willing. If we are speaking of forces that don’t have consciousness at all, we are speaking of insentient energies and not “wills”
I despise the term “Co-Creator” and won’t ever use it. New Agers use this term, and it implies some kind of equality with God, which we don’t have and never could. It also implies that our creative ability and God’s are somehow qualitatively the same, which is not true.
For the term “Sub-Creator” and the thinking behind it we are indebted to one of the greatest Aryan spiritual sages of the Kali Yuga, J.R.R. Tolkien. His book, The Silmarillion, has incredible insights into the antediluvian world and the metaphysical reality.