Our True Spiritual Identity

Learning how to understand our identity is a key step on our spiritual paths. First, there are few people that even choose to try and understand themselves. They simply go about reacting to the world and never really reflecting on how or why they do the things they do. And when I say the how or why, I’m not speaking of their actions in the world, so much as their interior life where they make judgments, evaluate things, where their mind creates a story of their life. And, then, there is the single identity—sort of the persona of a person, the way that they’re seen by the world. And then, we can go a little deeper and understand that we have an ego. And then, there might be a point where we begin to see that we have multiple selves inside of ourselves. Where there’s a part that we present to the world, as a whole, but then there might be a different part of ourselves that we present to a close friend or a partner. And there might be a different part of ourselves that we present when we feel threatened or when we feel secure. I could go on, but you understand this. Underneath all of these selves—some of them false selves, but some of them constructed by us—but underneath all of these selves is a deeper identity. It’s an identity that’s very closely tied to our purpose as a human being. One way of understanding that identity would be to say that it’s the soul or the identity of the soul, and even though there is that very intimate connection to God that is the source of life for us, also the source of our consciousness and being, we know not to confuse ourselves with being God. Meaning that we have this God of our understanding within us, but the God of the universe is much more than we can understand, and we live inside of this being of God with a separate identity, but that identity fits into what we might call a cosmic arrangement of beings and purpose and a certain kind of harmony that exists through many dimensions or worlds.

We might think of this as our spiritual identity or our true spiritual identity, but any way that we describe this, we have to understand that our sense of our material being and our material mind are not capable of a deeper or more complete understanding of this identity without certain things occurring within us. Some of the things that occur for us are frightening. There is the fear that comes from the loss of all of our material identities, especially when a part of ourselves is exposed that we feel is less than ideal or less than pure. We might feel shame or other things that make it difficult for us to lose certain ways that we look at ourselves. And then there is the transition of death, which that we fear also strips something essential away, something that might lead to a different kind of suffering or that might lead to a loss of something that feels so essential to us.

But these changes for us are not anything compared to the process that actually brings us to the brink of our true spiritual identity. And that process is an emptying of ourselves. Let’s say that it begins with our own attempt to empty ourselves. We might start by emptying ourselves of the things that we consider to be false or fear-based or material-based. We might look toward a more ideal understanding or more perfected understanding of our being. But anything that we construct, however close it might come to our ideal, is not going to be the fullness of that identity that I’m speaking about. It’s something beyond our own ability to empty ourselves. There is a part of the emptying that comes through a surrender to God. That surrender sometimes comes in a moment when we feel the most vulnerable and the most prone to react in a fear or a fearful-based way. And there is an acceptance that goes with that surrender that, at least in the beginning, feels dreadful. It feels as if we are exposed as being a fraud or false as a being. That our experiences have somehow been false or some lie that we have been living. But our spiritual journey, in part, is a journey where we learn to see through those fears, to see through those identifies, and understand that they don’t really have a permanent existence. They don’t have an eternal existence. But when we go through that surrender and acceptance, there is a step beyond that that we might call a vastation of our being. Where even the things that we intuitively know to be true somehow also seem to fall away. It’s not that these intuitive truths that we learn are false, but what happens is that they don’t have the same level of importance to us as some other aspects of our purpose. And this purpose is the purpose of our spiritual being, our spiritual identity. It’s not our purpose as a human being, although it greatly impacts our human existence. It’s rare for a person, just as we identify ourselves by our names, it’s rare for a person that we name in our lives to go through this kind of vastation in such a way that they have let go of any part of themselves that is an obstacle to their union or their oneness with God. 

So, we find ourselves from this side of that experience looking at what appears to us or feels to us like a puzzle or a conundrum where everything becomes contradictory. In order to be filled or full or whole, there is this emptying that happens. In order to be loved or feel love, there is the giving away of all of our love as if we give away ourselves, willing to lose ourselves so that we are then found, meaning that we find ourselves in a different way. There’s a surrender to any kind of suffering that we might be experiencing that seems tragic or too painful, such that we fear our life being reduced to that level of suffering or that level of not knowing. But it is in the not knowing and the acceptance of that emptiness that everything changes for us as a soul.

One way to understand the magnitude of this vastation is to look at Jesus on the cross. Knowing what we know from his words and his ministry about the ways in which he identified with God, knowing that he had surrendered himself to the purpose of his life in God so completely, that even for him, there is the possibility of a misidentification of himself or some part of himself. So we might say that the vastation is so complete, it is why on the cross that he would say, “Why have you forsaken me?” because that part of him that still clung to his own ideas of what he might do and be, still had to be let go, and the only way those things could be released was to feel as if he was completely alone and abandoned. Because in that abandonment of that last bit of an identify for him was the moment of vastation when the full spirit of God, not the spirit of inspiration, but the full spirit of God filled him. And his purpose, even though he was anointed in a worldly sense, even though he was thought to be the Messiah, his spiritual anointing as Christ in the more universal way that we see him, actually occurred at that moment of emptiness. And his life and the archetypal energy of his being came into more or a sharper focus for human beings to see in a material realm. You can be sure that our ability to see this process is limited, but the fact that we can see that it is the kind of process that I’m describing, we can see the magnitude of his life and his spiritual work. And that is why anyone who has traveled the path similar to him feels so unique as a spiritual entity, whether it be the Buddha, whether it be Jesus or Muhammad or one of the saints. The contrast of their lives to other life around them is so different, even to those other teachers of truth reveals the possibility of our own unique contribution to the spiritual realms that hold earth in such a compassionate embrace.

The work here is not easy work. It is from our side of the realms that we see and hope for from our side is fearful, devastating, and difficult to walk into. Yet everyone here, now, has walked into that path in some way. And that is why we sometimes feel so vulnerable. It’s why we sometimes feel like we don’t have enough ability or strength, and those signs become the signs that show us we’re on the right path rather than being signs that cause us fear and cause us to avoid the right path. It’s been described as straight and narrow, and there’s so many depictions of this straight and narrow path, but it’s not a path that everyone walks. It’s more a path or a journey within each of us that is so unique and so well prepared for us to overcome our fears, to overcome our senses of needing security. For us to overcome our physical suffering or our mental anguish. We overcome, in a sense, this path helps us overcome the world, where the world cannot undo our spiritual work. It has to recognize our spiritual work in the acknowledgement of our own being so that our own self-esteem is coming from this sense of purpose that we have as a spiritual being. This sense of personal work that each of us must face in this life. And it’s when we come face to face with that work that we are actually taking steps on that path. No one else can walk on that path for us. No one can take responsibility for that path, and even though we might see our spiritual teachers or leaders give themselves up for us, their giving up is showing us the way of our own path forward. And the giving up is not a surrender to the wrong things, it is more an acceptance of our need to enter the path and accept the fullness of its meaning and anything that we encounter on that path. Sometimes that path will feel very dark and very hidden. Sometimes it will feel very open and raw. Every person here has a sense of that path and seldom mistakes any other path for that true path, that true journey that we signed up for in this life. When we come out on the other side of this process, we understand that it will be nothing like we imagined beforehand. The best understanding that we can have of being on the other side of that journey is a different kind of wholeness that is so powerful that any physical brokenness we might feel, any lack of capacity that we feel, any fear or anxiety that we feel will be so changed that even though we may still carry them as part of our journey, they become of so little consequence as we go forward. So little consequence that our change as a soul appears super-human, appears transcendent to the world. And this transcendence is at the root of understanding Jesus as being resurrected and having new life in order for other new life to come. He shows us and shows up for us no matter what our understanding or our prior understanding of him might be.