Ep22 Ego and Spiritual Identity

Announcer 0:28

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, john Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's john.

John Moore 0:47

Hello, everybody.

As usual, I feel the urge to say good morning, although I don't know what time it is where you are, it is morning here. I like to record these things early, I don't know, I am an early morning kind of person. I get a lot of energy in the morning. And I like to, I like to get things done sometimes before most of the rest of the world is awake. there's a there's a clarity that happens in the morning. So the world, you know, the world has an aura, we have auras, we have, you know, astral bodies, and the theory of bodies and all of these things. And, you know, we are if you are sensitive, and we're all sensitive to some degree or another, we pick up on the, you know, the quote, unquote, vibe around us. And morning times before for me, before everybody is awake, the vibe is cleaner. You know, there's people aren't up and busy, and it's, you know, it tends to feel a little calmer for me. And so this is a good time for me to do these things. Some people are late night people, I think, I think my daughter's fall into that category. And it's probably similar where, you know, it's, you know, the vibe gets calmer, after most people are asleep. And, you know, not going about the worries of the day, and, and whatnot. So today, it is. And again, I don't know when you're listening to this, but it is June, it's the beginning of June, as I record this. For us on the in the Northern Hemisphere, we're coming to the end of spring, in a couple of weeks and into into summer. We're having certainly having some summer ish weather here, where I live in Maine in the northeast of the United States. It tends to be when there's a really weird thing. We have an expression, I realize other people say the same thing. If you don't like the weather, wait a minute of it changes. Some people have have related our temperatures to the lottery numbers where they go up, up and down all the time. So we'll have a day of 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and then another day of 40 degrees Fahrenheit The next day, and it'll go back and forth quite a lot until it sort of stabilizes a little bit. When summer hits, and even then, it's it's a little bit crazy. We sometimes get snow into May. It's a little rare, but it has happened. And you know, but I love it. I love I love weather. I love to observe weather and you know, I always talk about the day here. I feel like it's something I hope it feels it feels like a connection. It feels like you can understand a little bit what my environments like when I'm talking to you. It's a little bit overcast today, which I am you know I'm totally cool with. Obviously I like all kinds of weather. sunny days do make me happy but soda rainstorms. Anyway, today we're going to talk about ego and what is ego and different ideas about ego? And do you have a big ego, a little ego all of these things? It's an important and popular topic. And at least you know in an English in the United States that word is used very loosely, right. So there is the the you know, Freudian definition of ego There's the union definition of ego there people have spiritual ideas of what ego is. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what ego is, is ego. Bad? Is it something that you need to get rid of? Excuse me, cough there. I don't edit these in general. So, you know, sometimes I cough.

And then I have a little sip of coffee. Um, that helps me a little bit. Um, so let's talk about ego, and, and we're gonna get into identity and spiritual identity and sort of ideal identity, that that sort of thing. And I talk a lot about all of these things, because I think it becomes confusing. When if you're a spiritual seeker, it can become super confusing. And you sort of wonder, what the heck are these people talking about? And I've heard the word ego, I've heard people say, the ego is the devil, and you've got to get rid of it, you've got to get rid of your ego, and all of these things. So I'm going to give you my definition of ego. And it may or definitely may not correspond with what other people how other people define ego and minds probably closest to the psychoanalyst young. Ego is simply your sense of identity, the sense of who you are, your sense of eye, most of the time as a separate being in the world. Okay. So when I say I went to the store, my concept of who that I is, as my ego, right, it's my, it's my self concept is another sort of idea there that fits. And so it is, again, how I operate in the world, as an individual, where this becomes sticky from a spiritual perspective is that people, well, there's a number of places and I'm going to talk about, I'm going to talk about them. But where becomes the stickiest from the spiritual perspective is the over identification with the ego. And that simply means that this is, you know, my idea of, I'm a body and a mind, and I'm moving through the world as a separate being. And that's all there is, separates me from identifying as part of the whole identifying as part of divinity as part of the entire universe as interconnected to everything. And that's where trouble kind starts to creep in. From a spiritual perspective. Right? When we have when we don't think we are connected to everything. We become less ethical, for example, right? We don't treat people and beings in the planet that we live on very well, because we feel like we are separate from that. We feel like we're not affected by how we treat others. And this is where this is where karma comes in. Right? This is when as the effects we create in the universe are the effects we are creating for ourselves. Because we are part and parcel and not separate from everything. But we have an ego we come into the world, sort of undifferentiated, right as babies, we, you know, everything is sort of an extension of us. And then we learn, you know, the ego is primarily learned our self self concept, our idea of ourself is learned over time. We learn we have a name, and we identify with that name. When somebody says our name, we pay attention. We learn the adults bring us you know, bring us food and change us and do all of these things as a baby. So they seem separate from us, even though they're perhaps responding to us crying or whatever. And so the idea of separation happens fairly early on, in human development. I can't give you the you know the exact range but it's it's early When we're first born, and then we know that we grow up and we we add to our self concept, things happen to us. We think of ourselves and that make us think of ourselves in certain ways. We also have this ideal self concept. And this is something something I'm doing some work around right now some exploratory work around right now in meditation, and in doing shamanic journeying

is that we all, you know, if, if I were to ask you to describe yourself in your, and how it relates to your values, right? I have this ideal self, where I say, you know, I'm a good person, I am a, I'm an honest person. I am, you know, a good father, I'm a good this, I'm a good that. And so, you know, we have this version of our selves and our self concept that is, kind of, you know, that has to do with our values and our ideals. And sometimes we don't always live up to those. Right? Sometimes, um, sometimes I'm not 100% honest, to be to be 100% honest with you. I am not always 100% honest. And that is something, you know, I don't, in general, I do not tell lies, or mislead people or steal things, or do any of you know, do any of that. But, you know, if I'm at somebody's house, and they serve me some food, and I don't think it's the greatest thing, I've, you know, I've ever eaten, and they, you know, ask me how it is, I'm gonna say, wow, this is, you know, this is great, this is great, you've done a good job here, I'm not going to I'm not going to hurt their feelings. Right? And that's, you know, that's a choice. And it's part of my value system. Do I value honoring their feelings more than, you know, telling a white lie now? And then? And some people would not, some people would say, No, I'm sorry, I don't like this. And, you know, feelings would get hurt. And that is a value choice. So these ideals that we have tie into our values, and how do I feel about myself, when I don't necessarily live up to my values, like I, you know, one of my ideals is that I think I'm a good parent, right, I have a great relationship with my daughters. And I like to think I'm a good parent. Um, anybody who's listening to this, as a parent knows that sometimes you fail, sometimes you make a choice, and it turns out to be the wrong one. And parenting is hard. making choices, some people just sort of give up and have set these like, strict rules for no reason. And don't put a lot of fun to it, I put a significant amount of thought into parenting. And I have a great relationship with my daughters. And sometimes that means I make choices that I'm not happy about afterwards. And how does that affect me? When I don't live up to my ideals? Right? Does that affect my self esteem? This is another component. Another component of ego is how high highly I regard myself, or how highly you regard yourself. And ultimately, when I'm speaking of I, I'm talking about ego here. So we know and I've talked about this in earlier podcasts about divinity and all of these things that inside each of us, at the core of each of us, we have a mind and we have a body and we have a soul and we have a spirit and we have you know, an astral body and an etheric body and a mental body and all of these different systems and levels and, you know, types of spiritual reality and consciousness, all of these things. And underneath, all of it is this spark of pure divinity, this spark of the creator of the universe, whether you want to call that God or the universe or what have you. And that spark is is the piece that is the same as everything. Everything you see, is made out of the same stuff from a spiritual perspective. Even material reality, it's all made out of the same stuff. There's different flavors of it, there's different frequencies of it. But the substance of material reality, when you get down to it, it's all it's all energy and information. So we are at our core this divinity, and we are divinity expressing itself as individual.

And people have been trying to make sense of that for ever. Like, why is that? Why, like, if I'm a divine being, at my core, if I am, if I am the universe, essentially, I'm a part of that. Why? Why even have an ego? Why even differentiate into into this human form for this incarnation? And, you know, lots of people have answered that question. I'll give you I'll give you a take or two on that. And I'm gonna be 100% honest with you. Who knows, right? who really knows? It just is. And, you know, I know they're part of being human is wanting to understand everything and wanting to understand why, the answer to why. And sometimes it's really hard to parse out and this one is, in, in particular, very hard to parse out. So one story is that the, you know, the formless Creator of the universe, just decided it is being playful, right is creating this whole universe to sort of experience play. And that might sound weird, if you've been through tragedy and trauma, as we all have. This doesn't feel very playful. But you have to think of things on a universal scale, or multiversal scale, right? There's more than one universe. Probably infinite universes for all I know. So that's one idea that this universal consciousness had the idea that it wanted to, it wanted to play. And I thought, you know, I don't know. I mean, I don't know about ascribing human activities, universal consciousness. One of the things one of the characteristics of human beings is that we tend to anthropomorphize everything, meaning we turn everything, we look at everything through the lens of being human, right? When we think about when we think about aliens. And this is probably this may sound like a tangent, but it's probably good in the realm of discussing ego, right? We talk about aliens from, from outer space, or wherever they happen to be from, could be in other dimensions or what have you, let's say they, let's say they exist. I've never, I've never met one. But let's say that you know, that aliens exist. Well, you know, our scientists and all these people like, Oh, you know, some of them are like, well, if, you know, if aliens exist, we shouldn't contact them, because they could just wipe us out, or, you know, come and take all our resources and all this stuff. And they put a very human slant on things, right? They look at, they look at us, as if we, you know, they look at aliens, as if they are us, looking at other creatures that we've maybe wiped off the planet or that sort of thing. And you have to think if there is if there are advanced, alien civilizations that grew up outside of the, you know, grew up with completely different biology than us and, you know, came up without the same social structures as us. We have no idea how or what they think or what their motivations might be. We just don't and look, you know, we can't, I think trying to understand what they might be like, by using human beings as an example is, you know, completely wrong. Whatever, whatever they're like, it's not going to be like us. It's it's going to be, quote unquote, alien. So Alien that we may have a difficult time understanding it because it'll be so outside of our experience that we can't necessarily put ourselves in their shoes. If they wear shoes, who knows? Maybe they don't wear shoes.

And so I do find it. I do find it really interesting that there's a lot of UFO Disclosure coming out from the government right now, a lot of video footage from military planes and showing stuff right now. It makes me feel like they're on the verge of releasing some information that they've had for a long time. Who knows? I find it interesting that this stuff is starting to get leaked out. And, you know, people are like, yeah, it's funny, because for so long, there was a thought that oh, you know, when aliens, you know, when the government reveals their aliens, people are gonna freak out about it, people are gonna panic, it's gonna lead to people questioning their belief systems and all this and that. And the truth is, it's barely made news. Like, it's bear like, not that these are necessarily aliens, but they're, they're, you know, the government leaking all kinds of UFO Footage. Um, you know, it's just, it's just funny like, that people are like, yeah, you know, all right. We're cool. All right, we're not gonna, you know, we're not even going to pay attention, we got other things going on pandemics going on. The political situation around the world is chaotic, as always, that sort of thing. So the other thing, the other sticky part about ego is that when we over identify with it, again, we're saying, this is all you know, ego is all I am. My sense of self as being separate, is all I am. We tend to act in ways that aren't necessarily ethical. Because we do not care for other beings as we care for ourselves. We we tend to become self centered, right, we pollute, we are cruel to other people, we may use harsh words. And I just think of the I think of the, you know, I think of the Buddhists call it the eight, is it the Eightfold Path, I may be speaking incorrectly, you'll have to pardon me if I do. But, um, you know, the Eightfold you know, the eight rules of Buddha, Buddhist, you know, that Buddha spoke about which are, you know, things like, right speech, right? Well, why does that matter? Why does it matter if I speak in what is the right, you know, and what is right speech, but in general, I can, you know, I can hurt people with my words. And if I do that, I am seeing them as separate from myselves. Right. So this is all about busting through this illusion, that I am not connected, that I am not a part of other people, that we're not connected to the hole together in the same way. And that we don't have the same sort of the over soul, the Brahman and Sanskrit, right? That we're all swimming in the same, the same water. And to use a crude metaphor, it's like, I'm peeing in the pool, and I'm expecting it only to affect you. We're all in the same pool. Right? And so when I mess up the environment, or I use cruel words to somebody, or I hurt somebody, or I'm, you know, I'm cruel to animals, or all of these things. I'm in the same pool. These, you know, I am a part of all of those. And so, that reality, that sort of weakening of that ego wall tends to make us act in ethical ways. Right? What the golden rule Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, is you know, and and if you come from a Christian background, you know, that, you know, that comes from Christianity, but the Buddha spoke the same, you know, almost Most identical words to that 500 years earlier, in there is

spiritual wisdom there. It's not just an ethical guideline, there's spiritual wisdom, because when you understand that you are one with everything, and everyone treating others badly, means you're treating yourself badly. But the stronger you identify with your ego, the less you care about others. So an extreme example of that is sort of the narcissistic sociopath. And you can, you know, just look at very recent politics to see that sort of that sort of thing. Right? The narcissistic sociopath cares about no one but themselves, and they have an over inflated sense of themselves. At least, at least in the United States, we use the expression, he's got a big ego, right, he's got a big ego. I don't know how you measure ego. But what we mean is, this person has an inflated sense of themselves, right? Sometimes, that is used to put down somebody who has a significant amount of self confidence. And there's nothing wrong with genuine self confidence. Right. So that's the other side of that's the other side of identifying with the Divinity is that there is a certain sense of self confidence that comes from that, when I know that I'm connected to the entire universe, when I know that I have a divine self. And then I am divinity, expressing itself through this human form through my emotions, my mind and my body. When I know that there is a certain self confidence, a sense of confidence, but it's not. It's not the kind of confidence that brags it's not hubris, it is not the kind of confidence that seeks out more confidence in the form of material things, or accolades or praise. That's, that's fake confidence. Real confidence is I am real confidence manifests itself manifests itself as becoming less, less attached, and less averse, right? Less attached to things, right, I don't care about things anymore. Unless averse I'm not pushing away things that I that I don't desire. So attachments are that I'm clinging to the things that I desire, and aversions or I'm pushing away the things that I don't desire. So spiritual self confidence happens when you know, I stop, I identify less and less with my ego self, that doesn't mean that your self goes away. It just means I don't think that that's all I am. And, and so attachments and aversions start to dissipate. And again, this is spoken about by Buddha and it's spoken about and other certainly other forms of spirituality. Sometimes it's really hidden in there, sometimes you have to dig for, for that. You know, in other spiritual teachings, because there's cultural background to the teachings, there's, you know, there's stuff going on there. And people have to be taught in certain, certain ways. I'm, I'm speaking very, I think I'm hoping that I'm speaking very plainly about this stuff. Because for me, to, for me to grasp this stuff. I've got to define it for myself in the simplest of terms, and I tried to do that for this, this podcast especially.

Right, um, you know, if you're a regular listener, one of the things I do is, you know, if I throw a term out there, like ego as I will always sort of define it, so that we're so that you understand what I mean. When I'm saying stuff, not that I'm trying to define you know, be The source of truth of you know, this is what this word means, just so that you, you know, I have to put these terms in a simple form, so that we understand each other. So when I when I, when I talk about ego, and you're hearing me talk about it, that you know what I mean, when I talk about it. So there's not, you know, hopefully not creating more confusion. That is, that's just my goal is to speak very clearly. So, I tend to take these things and put them into simpler terms so that I can understand them. I'm not, you know, I studied lots of things, but I wouldn't consider myself a religious scholar, per se. But I certainly look at lots of other forms of spirituality, I don't read Sanskrit, I don't read Pali, I don't read Latin. He took four years of Latin in high school. I don't remember much of it. I hate to say that, but that's, that's true. And so, you know, I'm often relying on translations of stuff and lots of different sources and analyses by people smarter than I am. And when I do that, I'm, you know, and then I try to take things and break them down into my own terms. And, you know, this is the thing that I think most people would benefit from, right, when you're reading scripture, or you're reading. And that may be sacrilegious for you for Pete to suggest that, excuse me, that you that you break things down into terms that you can understand, I don't know, hopefully not, hopefully not. And I don't really, you know, I'm not trying to change anybody's belief system, or religion or anything like that. That's not the goal here. You know, my own my own viewpoints or my own viewpoints, my opinions are my opinions. You know, and you may certainly disagree about my definitions of things. And, and I'm okay with that. Because again, like that's, hopefully, hopefully, it's part of me, loosening the grip that ego has on me and identifying less and less with that sense of self. So the way that ego can come through is we see that in these ideological wars, right? religious wars, people fighting it out, I mean, that's going on in the world right now. People fighting over religious differences, which, you know, ultimately, when we see we see conflict, like Israel and Palestine that's going on right now. You know, it's about all kinds of things. It's about land and water rights and history and the ability for people to self govern and all of these things underneath it all. There of course, of course, in that part of the world, there's a religious component to the warfare, right there is this sense of I deserve this because I am, you know, from the people that God has denoted this land belongs to, there is that justification habit on on both sides of that conflict? I am right because I, you know, I am the chosen one, we are the chosen people. God Himself said this, this piece of land belongs to me. Um, and I'm not going to speak about the truth or falsehood of that, but there is. To me, there is less God in that conflict than ego. Right, there is when ego acts up, it is very defensive. There's this strong identification of and there's this othering that happens, those people over there are others.

Okay, they don't believe the same things. I do. So they are others and therefore inferior, right. So what happens for a lot of people and this is, I see this little drama playing out everywhere, right. So we see this with racism, with nationalism with all kinds of bigotry, all kinds of hatred stems out of this othering. And what's going on there frequently is that people have, so we have our individual identity, and then we frequently tie that to a group identity. Right. So in order to have some self esteem, I'm going to relegate some of my identity. So I am, you know, I'm a citizen of the United States, we call ourselves Americans, even though I know there are other Americas, right? There's North America, South America, Central America. You know, in the United States, we refer to ourselves as Americans, which is itself separating, saying that, you know, other people, people from other countries are not Americans. But, you know, we don't have I know, in other languages, it exists to say, you know, these are you United States, essentially, but we don't have that phrase. And so, you know, people strongly identify with that, and people want to say, whatever country they're from, is number one, America is number one, or number, you know, wherever you're from, is number one, we're the best at something, we take pride in who we are, and, you know, that sort of thing. Um, a lot of religious spiritual writings about the dangers of pride. Right. And again, pride isn't necessarily like, Hey, I'm proud, you know, I'm proud of my kids, they did, you know, did a great job in school this year. That's not necessarily what we're talking about. We're talking about is, again, building up this ego, building up this esteem from I'm associated with this country, and so people from other countries are inferior to me, or other countries are inferior to me. What a load a to tell you, it's a load of crap. And I don't care where you're from, or what your religion is, or what your ethnicity is, or whatever, it's all crap. All of it is all just more and more separation. And the more you tie your sense of self worth, to some group identity, whether that be religious or ethnic, or, you know, national, or you tie your identity to a sports team. Look at these, you know, all over the world. There are riots after sports games, whether your team wins or loses people are burning cars in the street and rioting. What's that all about? Well, what that's about is people have given up, given up their self esteem, and this is pride, this is the danger of pride. Right? pride in where it doesn't belong, especially in some sort of group identity, some sort of nationalistic or ethnic or sexual identity. Right. We have to show dominance in a violent way. Well, that's, you know, that's a perversion of the divine masculine, right? It's this violent impulse, I'm gonna have power over somebody else, and that is a major cause of the ills in the world. A major cause? Right, ethnic cleansing. genocide, pretty much the same thing. You know, you know, riots over sports games.

The violence we saw in the Capitol in the United States, in, you know, earlier in the year where people broke, you know, people identified with a single politician, again, giving up their individuality, to act as part of a mob Right, so they have ego but part of that ego is over identified with a group enough to do things they probably normally wouldn't do when you look at some of them. We look at some of the people who are arrested for the violence in the capital of the United States are like, Oh, I don't you know, that person's, you know, a local business owner and has never been violent never been arrested in their lives. And some of them are, were definitely rabble rousers who, who have, you know, belong to violent extremist groups. And those people I believe, were manipulating the mob. And so were the politicians who were who were spurring them on. Because a mob, a mob are people who have in an unhealthy way, given up a lot of their individual identity, and just sort of going along for the ride. And mobs are capable of almost anything, any level of violence. You know, moms or moms are really dangerous in that way. They have an ego of their own, so to speak. And a lot of people have been arrested for that violence, or, like, I don't know, I just got caught up. Right, that's what happens. That's what happens when you don't you know, you have this ego, but a big portion of it is identified with in the in a wrong way, with a mob or a group or, you know, a nationality or an ethnicity. You know, when it when when it's over identified with ethnicity, you get hate groups, when it's over identified with, you know, sports teams, we get riots after sports events, happens all over the world. That's crazy to me. So, what's, what then is healthy is, you know, this sense of, Okay, I have an understanding, I have an ego, I have this sense of self as a separate thing. But again, it's like I have a body, but I am not the body. I have a mind, but I'm not the mind, I have an ego, but I am not the ego. I am this, ultimately, this divine spark, that is part of everything. And everything that I do affects me, because I am interconnected. Right? I'm peeing in the pool. And if I assume that I'm the only other people are affected by me peeing in the pool, that's a pretty wrong assumption. So the goal then is or not the goal, but you know, one of the ways through this one of the ways of spiritual development is to start to dis identify with that which you are not right? I am not the ego, I have the ego. This is not to say that you delude yourself into pretending that you do not have an ego. That is a different thing. I have an ego. If I did not, I would not be able to speak to you, from a sense of who I am as an individual. I just don't think that my ego is underneath at all who I am. I think it's a thing that I have. Right? And the universe has many, many egos. Billions, maybe trillions, who knows? Have egos and they're all you know, through it all. They're all interconnected. It's sort of like a really good metaphor. I hope it's a good metaphor to communicate this is that if you look at mushrooms growing in the forest, right. You see these mushrooms popping up from the soil.

And you look at they look like individual mushrooms. But underneath the soil is this huge network of mycelium. Right? And the mushrooms that are popping up, you know, let's say 100 mushrooms pop up and you know a spot in the forest floor. Right. And they all look like individual beings. And they could be regarded as such. And if you know, let's say they're edible, and you pick each one and they're individualized mushrooms, but when they're growing underneath all of that is one network of mycelium. If you don't know what mycelium is it's like the equivalent of roots for mushrooms like the roots of trees grow every right when you know mushrooms grow the moat the most of what you see above ground is not the majority of what a mushroom is. Mushrooms are a fungus and they grow on substrate which could be all kinds of things but you know, some grow in soil and have these huge there are you know, the largest living being on earth that we know of, is a patch of mycelium that's miles wide, right? So there's a living one living being that's you know, miles and miles wide. And, um so this is a little bit what what ego is like, right? So you know, the, the oversold the Brahman as you were, maybe we think of that as the mycelium. So, it's everything there is and everything interconnected. And, you know, under, that's underneath everything, and then we pop up, our little ego pops up a little, you know, our body pops up, pops into existence. And, you know, we appear as individuals, individual mushrooms, but underneath it all, we're all interconnected. Everything we do ripples out, like dropping a stone, in a pond, that ripples go everywhere. So I started this by talking about why I like to do these in the morning. And why I'm a morning person is that I don't experience a lot of the ripples of the people who are, are around me. And because they're asleep. You know, they're primarily asleep when I not everybody, but but more people are. So even on an energetic level, you know, the thoughts we put out into the world, the words we put out into the world, affect everything around us. And that includes us, right? We often don't include ourselves in things like when we do exercises on compassion. You know, when we give love to others, we don't always give love to ourselves. Seems kind of weird. But frequently when I see clients, either from, you know, doing a shamanic healing session with somebody or you know, coaching or mentoring people have these frequently have these horrible inner dialogues, and we say things to ourselves that we would not accept from a stranger, or someone we loved speaking to us in things that we would never say to someone that we loved. Right. So that's really negative. That's, you know, negative self talk is about negative self esteem. You know, underneath that all that real level of, you know, and some people overcompensate for that stuff, right. Some people overcompensate for negative self esteem by, you know, buying flashy clothes or a flashy car, or, you know, they give this outward appearance of being more than they are. Or they brag a lot or what have you. Underneath that is a real sense of I'm broken, I'm unworthy. You know, which is sad to me, because the ultimate truth is, again, we're that mycelium under the mushrooms, we're just where the mushrooms popping up. But underneath it all We are, we are the universe. underneath it all We are everything there is we're no less a part of the universe than anybody or anything else. We're no less a part of the universe than the sun.

Right? So with that, I'm going to wrap up I hope that you enjoy this I hope that you'll subscribe and whatever, using whatever podcasting listening channel you use, whether that's you know, Spotify or iTunes or something else. Hopefully Subscribe, I hope you'll visit my website I hope you'll interact. You know, send me send me messages if there are topics you're interested in, or guests you'd like me to talk to, because I do this, I do this for you. And I love that I have listeners all over the world and it it helps give me that greater sense of connection. Right, that sense of connection to everything there is into the whole universe. With that, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. And I will talk to you real soon.

Announcer 51:04

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John Moore. For more info or to contact john go to MaineShamon.com that's maineshaman.com

Ep14 You are a God

Announcer 0:29

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, john Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's john.

John Moore 0:51

Hello, everybody. My Love to You, as I am speaking to you, it is morning. It is where in my where I am, it's very foggy this morning. And I happen to be a person who loves fog, particularly if I don't have to drive in it. But you know, as a shamanic practitioner, we have a love for whether we work with nature spirits a lot and work with whether helping spirits and do all kinds of work. fog is to me it's beautiful. And it reminds me a lot of the mysterious nature of reality that we are what we see what we experience, what we hear is only a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of what's actually there. Right? There's so much that's hidden to us. And fog is an interesting reminder of that, right? We can look out into the fog, we can see the fog, we can see shapes, as they approach as they get closer to us. But we don't get to see everything. And it's a reminder because we would normally get to see those things. We would usually get to see those things, but we don't necessarily so fog is you know, I love the atmosphere, it creates in the fact that I get to see the atmosphere, right? If you think about it, we move through the Earth's atmosphere all day every day. And we're not always conscious of it unless it's foggy or raining or the wind is blowing or something right. We don't think about the atmosphere. But we move through it. And spirit is the same way. You know, we I'm reminded of the old police song we are spirits living in the material world, right. But we're also living in a very spiritual world. There are far far more layers of spirit than there are layers of physical reality. physical reality seems like because it comes, we experience it through our senses and through our our, our egoic mind, it can very easily seem like all there is because we don't always unless you're extremely clairvoyant or you trained as a, you know, some sort of shamanic practitioner or clairvoyant or something, we don't often see an experience the you know, the spiritual world in a way that is comparable with our physical senses, that is as present as our physical senses. I can tell you that after I don't know years and years and years of training, and practice and daily spiritual work. You know, I do notice myself more aware of the spiritual component of the reality I live in on a daily basis. It's become, you know, when I compare my my previous experience, my present experience, it's like a night and day. So it's a capacity that can be developed. Today, this episode, The topic is you are a god and I'm going to talk about divinity and the Divinity that is the core of who you are. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who you are, and I and I recognize that in some spiritual systems, I might be speaking blasphemously by saying you are a god. Um, I'm not necessarily saying you are the god although I'll get to that but you are God and I will talk about how that is not just me puffing you up or speaking in really abstract terms, although it can be really challenging to talk about divinity, right? We sometimes talk about God or divinity or the universe as the ineffable. Right that unnameable. And I like to joke and this makes, I don't know if this makes sense if English is not your native language, but you know, I like to ask the ineffable. Right. So if you know, at least in at least in US English, when you say I like to ask something, it's, it's short for an expletive, right? I'm gonna ask the ineffable. So there's a little bit of a double meaning there.

Which I find humorous and humor is great. And I think you can approach spirituality with reference and humor, right? I think you can, um, gosh, if we are created, you know, if we are created, however you think we are created by spirit with the capacity for laughter? Why should we not use that. And it's the same for anything, I think, if we're created for it, with the capacity for laughter, and grief, and pleasure, and pain, and all of those things, we're probably meant to experience all of those things. And I think laughter is a very high can be very close, help us get very close to divinity, we'll put it that way. Because laughter is a giant release, it's, you know, we're letting go of all of this tension we have built up and it allows us to sort of relax into ourselves into our beingness. So I'm going to talk about divinity a little bit in general. And I'm going to talk about our divine nature a little bit in general, and I'm going to give you some of my spiritual framework, right. And I call it my spiritual framework only because, you know, there's a few sort of propositions that I have our that I have articulated in a way that may not have been articulated before, specifically. But, you know, every, every spiritual system at its core kind of has these ideas, right. So it's, I'm not taking credit for the ideas, I'm taking credit, if I you know, if credit is due, the only thing I'll take credit for is the specific words I've chosen to put around these ideas. I don't want to give you, I'm not starting a religion, I promise I'm not into that. Just to communicate, it's just to communicate some ideas. And again, I love you know, if you've listened to this podcast before, I will frequently define my terms, right? If I'm talking about love, if I'm talking about spirit, if I'm talking about the soul, and today, we're gonna talk about divinity. And I'm going to define that, because you know, particularly an English language is really imprecise. And different people have different cultural ideas or different ideas from experiences or readings they've done or that sort of thing. And it's not to say that my definitions are the only ones or anything like that, that would be very egoic of me, wouldn't it? It's just that when I give you my definition, it's so that you can hopefully have a better understanding of what I mean, when I use these words. So when I talk about divinity, on a, on a broader sense, this is something that almost every spiritual system has a name for. Right? And, and again, every culture, every language puts different words on it. Okay, so in Sanskrit, we have the ottman, right, which is the soul the indwelling, permanent soul, so permanent, that's a word will. That's a word, we'll tack onto divinity, right? And what do I mean by permanent? By permanent, I mean, undying, unborn, outside of time, actually, outside of space. I'll talk a little bit about how that can be about how something can exist outside of time and space. But you know, this part of ourselves so, you know, you might think of it as your Buddha nature or your Christ. consciousness or any number of things, this oversold this piece of you that is undying, right? And I, in my tradition of shamanism, we just call this your spirit. Right? Your Spirit is this undying, perfect piece of yourself. So I called it permanent. And I also call it perfect. What do I mean by perfect?

By perfect I, you know, perfect is a term that's a little hard to define. But what I mean is that this is a part of you, that cannot be killed, because it hasn't, it's never been born and it will never die. It cannot be wounded. It is unaffected by the life you live on this planet, unlike other parts of yourselves. Right so we, when we experienced trauma, for example, we carry that in our, we carry that in our soul body, here, then our astral body, we carry it in our physical body, we carry it in our mental body, but the indwelling divine spirits does not carry that is not affected by that. Okay, so we have to sort of characteristics of this divine, this divinity, this divine part of ourselves, this is that it's permanent. It is outside of time, and so it is unborn and undying. And it is perfect in that it cannot, it cannot change. It's it's cannot be wounded, affected. You know, there's there's no place for it to go. It's perfected, this perfected part of us. Okay. And I and I've talked about how this exists in there are a lot of different ideas about this in different words and different metaphors that are put on it in different descriptions, from otteman to you know, Buddha nature to Christ consciousness, and I can't think of all the other terms but there are so many of them. Right. I'm I'm not an expert in Lima, the spiritual system of Salima, but I've been I've been watching. I've been watching the show strange Angel, which is about jack Parsons, the founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was also you know, into ritual magic and stone selima. But in the book of the law, which is sort of, you know, I guess the main book of Salima, you know, I don't I don't want to miss peak fear. If you're filling my I don't want to misspeak. So feel free to correct me. But the the main book affiliate, there's a passage that says every man and every woman is a star. And that's a really important point. And what does that mean? Right? What does that mean? So I will talk about that. And I always like to give something if I can, a little practical at some point in every episode of the podcast. And so I want to give you a practical exercise which will not necessarily turn you into an enlightened being that is fully embodied their divinity, but will give you a brief experience, I hope that will bring you closer to this to a state in which you can realize your divinity. Okay, so I'll give you a little brief meditative exercise towards the end, which will hopefully be, you know, somewhat lovely experience. I'll say this in advance if you're listening to this podcast, in a place where you need to pay attention. So let's say you're driving or you're, I don't know, stepping onto an escalator or operating heavy machinery or cooking or something along those lines, we need to pay attention. Obviously, you don't want to do a closed eye meditative exercise. So please be safe in the physical and physical reality. Because while your divine nature cannot be harmed your physical body shorthand, and you have that for a reason. So let's take good care of it. Let's take good care of your physical body. It's quite a blessing to be incarnated into a physical body. I know some systems are like, gosh, this is terrible. You know, you have to escape being incarnated physically. It's quite a blessing because not every being gets to experience, physical birth, and yes, there is suffering associated with having a physical body. As I'm getting older, I recognize that aches and pains and

you know heartache from loved ones dying and all of those things. There's a richness of experience there as well. And we're kind of, you know, we, we there is a purpose to it, I don't know specifically what your purpose is, other than it is to find your purpose and live it. Okay. And I'm going to have a grip my next episode, my next podcast episode, I have scheduled a wonderful guest, who is going to talk about exactly that, finding your purpose, why that's important, how to how to find it, how to crystallize that and how to live from your purpose. Okay, so here are here are going to sort of describe my, I'm going to talk about my ideas, the way that I have verbalized what I have experienced around this divinity and give you sort of a few, a few principles that I teach, and that I, you know, do my best to live by. And, you know, take them for what they're worth, compare them to your own belief system, throw them out completely if they don't work for you. But at least you know, if you hear them, you'll understand where I'm coming from. So the first, the first sort of principle is that if you go deep enough into anything, the deeper you go into anything, the more spiritual it becomes. So everything is a spirit, right? I come from an animistic tradition. So everything is a spirit. And the deeper you go into it, you peel back the layers of physical reality, whatever, um, the more spiritual it becomes. The more you know, and by spiritual I mean, the more formless, the less physical it becomes. I'm gonna have a brief sip of coffee while you ponder that. Coffee is divine. So I'll give you some examples of that. Right? Hmm, excuse me. Somebody who is an amazing artist, for example, who, you know, loses themself in the work that they're doing, loses their loses their egoic mind while they're painting, you don't have to be. You don't have to be, you know, Van Gogh or the, you know, the world's best painter. But just the art of going deep, deep, deep into this activity, this expressive activity where you start to lose your egoic self, the more spiritual that activity becomes. And that can be anything. And I noticed that early on in my life, when I was training in martial arts, I had kind of a brilliant but crazy teacher who would make us do the same movement over and over and over and over again. And at first, you know, and I'm talking for hours, hours and hours and hours, who do exactly the same movement. And at first, I'm like, the office is painful, this is boring, I hate this. And then the mind would quiet down, and then I would start to get insights, and then I would lose my sense of self. And it was almost like, the movement was happening.

And I was just along for the ride. What was left, what was still functioning of my egoic mind in those moments, was more an observer. So the movement was happening through me the expression was happening through me. Um, you know, if you watch somebody who's an amazing athlete, you know, they're, quote, unquote, in the zone in flow. That's, you know, where this principle comes in, they go very, very deep into this state, where the ego drop, ego kind of drops away, and allows their spiritual self to come through. So that's sort of the core idea is that the deeper you go into anything, the more spiritual it becomes, the more spiritual truth is revealed. And by spiritual truth, I don't necessarily mean words that you could write down or speak or hear, talking about experiential truth. Right? And so if there's, if there's a practical piece of advice here, that would be Find what that is for you find what activity or thing that you can do that you can do in a way. And I'm not talking about necessarily mindless activity like playing a video game or you know, stuff that just occupies occupies brain space. It has to be something that resonates for you that you love deeply, because love is a big part of this as well. And I'm not talking about the chemical love that we experience when we're with, you know, human being that we're very attracted to, and they give us attention and, you know, that sort of love. I'm talking about this Soul love. And I will talk more about that in my next podcast episode as well. Love as well, we could do a whole series of podcasts about love, and what Divine Love means and that sort of thing. So that's sort of the first principle. So the second principle is there is no more spiritual activity than going in deeply into yourself. Right? So yes, you can have a spiritual experience from cooking or painting or reading prayer or anything, right, as long as you have, understand that first principle that the deeper you go, the more spiritual becomes, there is no more spiritual experience than going deep, deep, deep into yourself. Because the there is nothing closer. Right? You can't, you know, to do these outside activities, there has to be some sort of recognition as to be some sort of ego recognition. That, you know, an ego is all about separation, these things exist separately for me, there are sets of practices where you recognize everything as an emanation of yourself. And I think that is a way of going deeply into yourself to. There are lots of lots and lots and lots and lots of practices for doing this, I'm going to give you one today, but oh my gosh, there are so many different practices. So again, if there's a bit of practical advice, here, it's find a spiritual practice that works for you. And meditation is the classic and there are millions of forms of meditation. Meditation is in, you know, one way it's been described to me is, it's like you're peering into a pond, and the wind is blowing and there are these ripples on the pond and you can't see into it. And you know, the, the silt is stirred up from the wind and the waves and meditation calms the wind, and the pond becomes still and the silt settles, and you're able to look clearly through the pond, at what's down there, while the pond, you know, obviously, that's a metaphor, that's you, you're the pond, you're pairing deeply into yourself, and meditation helps calm the monkey mind. And the chatter that's going on meditation is a beautiful practice. There are many, many forms of meditation. You know, and meditation, on a physical level is fantastic for you, it's really good for you, it's good for lowering stress and helping with blood pressure and all kinds of wonderful things, sleep and anxiety.

So, meditate, that's practical advice there. Okay. So, the first principle the more the more deeply you go into anything the more spiritual becomes the second principle is there is nothing more spiritual than going deeply into oneself. And that is where the gold lies in my opinion. And the third principle is, the more deeply you go into yourself, the more in flow, life will become, the more flow you will experience. You will be in harmony in much more in harmony with the universe and this is about living purpose as an expression of your divinity, your Divine Self, this is about living out your true will your purpose, the thing you the way you were meant to do. When you are living outside of that, when you were not in touch with your beingness that is beingness is another expression for the Divinity that is within you and Um, you know, when when you when you step outside of your being this life becomes harder. And I'm talking about at all levels, so physical life becomes harder. Because spirit is trying to make you have an easier life. And I don't mean necessarily that I'm going to meditate and tomorrow I will win the lottery and all my financial troubles will go away. What I mean is that when I, when I identify as beingness when I more fully identify as my beingness as my divine self, yes, physical life, you know, you this is where manifestation happens. So, you are, you know, you start to, you may develop the ability to manifest things that will maybe win the lottery, I don't know. But whether it will start to matter less whether or not you do, and, you know, the the external physical circumstances of your life, you know, they'll they will line up but also, at the same time, you just won't care as much when they don't you will live from a place of equanimity because, yeah, I can get sick, I can my body can get hurt, I can, you know, lose a job or have a relationship breakups are all of those things, none of that affects my beingness. So, let me talk a moment about the word beingness as an expression of divinity, this is another synonym, if you would beingness. So, how would I describe beingness okay. And this is, this is where the timeless part you know, when I described as permanent and perfect nature comes, comes in. So, spirit, ultimately, beingness is formless, it does not have a size or shape, it has no mass. And if you know anything about physics, time, and space are intimately linked to mass. Right, so something that has no mass, lives outside of time and lives outside of space. So your beingness again, your divine nature is formless, has no mass, and it is therefore timeless, it is outside of time, it is unborn and undying. And this is the perfect part of you, because also having no form, it can't be injured or wounded or any of those things. I think of it. And there are all kinds of different expressions. And again, I'm trying to F the ineffable. I'm trying to describe something that is indescribable. So I can only sort of describe it in very loose terms.

And again, here's this, if I were going to visualize it, I would visualize it as a point or a star of just infinite blinding, bright light. But in that there is complete stillness, complete and utter stillness, and peace. Right. And I've done spiritual exercises where you sort of you get in touch with the Beingness, and then you introspect it, you ask questions, and allow the answers to arise. Some of these questions are, does beingness experience fear? Well, there's a resounding no there because what does beingness have to fear? Again, it can't be wounded. It's undying, it's unborn, unchanged, unchangeable. Therefore, there is no fear there. Does beingness experience lack of a sense of lack again, no, for the same reason, so you can introspect, you know, when you get in touch with beingness, your divine nature? You can you can introspect it a little bit and yes, you know, your answers are sort of bubbling up into your consciousness, and we don't know exactly where they're coming from, and that's fine. That's totally fine. I'm allowing my egoic mind to have some, you know, get some information to get some alignment right. One way, another way, I'll give you lots of different ways to think about it. One way to think about this spirit, this, you know, divine spark, at the, at the center of us and this is the way I think of it is that there is divinity with a capital D, you might say God, or Brahman or the oversoul, or the universe, or you might have whatever word for the, the spirit of everything there is. Okay, and so my personal divinity is like a spark on that flame, or a drop in that ocean, or a beam of light from that star. One of those things, it is inseparable, it is connected, it is completely connected. But it is somewhat individuated. So that, um, you know, in some belief systems, it's so that I can, you know, if I, you know, if I identify as divinity, I can, the only way to reflect upon myself, the only way to observe myself, and the way for the Divinity to observe itself, is to have a part that is somewhat individuated. Right. And that's like saying, you know, I can, I can see with my eyes, my eyes are still a part of my body. And I can sense them as individual parts, right. But I can also since them is still a part of me. Hopefully, my eyes are inseparable. I don't, you know, yes, I can lose an eye. And this is where this metaphor breaks down a little bit, because you at your core are inseparable from the divine nature of all there is. We are inter interconnected in interdependent, interconnected beings. So, there's a beautiful exercise that is taught by shamanic teacher, Sandra ingerman, called transfiguration. She has a number of programs, I think she has a book called healing with spiritual light. And she definitely has a, you know, online program where you can learn this transfiguration exercise. It is an absolutely beautiful, fantastic exercise that I highly recommend everybody practice, I don't care, it's not the thing about this, even though Sandra ingerman is a shamanic teacher, and a teacher of teachers. This particular exercise is not not demonic, in that you don't have to know how to journey to do it. Anybody can anybody can do it without any sort of previous training or knowledge.

And it's really beautiful. And to me, it is settling in to that divine spark in experiencing that. And they've done some really cool experiments with transfiguration where they've taken polluted water, and, you know, brought it into a space where people were doing transfiguration and then sent it off to the lab, and the water gets clean, all of a sudden. So it's very interesting, it does have an effect on physical reality. So you know, to use another yet another metaphor for this divine spark is that, you know, we have all of these selves, right, I have a physical self and a mental self and an emotional self. And I have any theory IQ, or an A third double, and an astral body and all of these things. So I like to think sometimes of the Divine Self, the divine spark, as sort of like this light in the center of a bunch shining through a bunch of filters, says divine light is, you know, at my core, and then every layer of filter that it gets every filter, every body, every part of myself that it goes through filters that a little bit like if you had a bunch of colored lenses, and you were looking at the sun through them, you know, you would get sort of this interesting, distorted color changed picture of the Sun which is very different than looking at the sun itself. And so the You know, transfiguration some of these meditative exercises, allows you to temporarily take away some of these filters, and have a more direct experience of this divine inner nature. And you know, that experience does filter up into your egoic mind because you can remember it. But, you know, again that then you could start to identify with meaning. I don't think of myself as just a body anymore. I think of myself as having this divine light shining through me and yes, I still have I have a body but I am not a body. Okay. And there's a whole there's a whole exercise around dis identification as well. Right to have a body I'm not a body, I have thoughts, I am not my thoughts. I have feelings, I am not my feelings. What am I? What am I right? And that is, you know, the, the Indian saints Ramana Maharshi. You know, that was the core of his exercise, what am I asked, start over and over again, your ego starts to break down a little bit. Anything you can, you know, anything you can think of starts to starts to peel away until you get to beingness. So, we know, so what do we know about beingness so far, right? We know that it's permanent, it's outside of time. It's perfect, it cannot be wounded or damaged, has no mass has no form. It can be visualized as light. But again, that's putting you know that's putting a metaphor on it. It shines through. It shines through all that we are all of our bodies, like a filter. At its core, when you experience it, when you do an exercise you're really experiencing beingness The only way I can describe it, again, it it defies description a little bit is an ultimate sense of peace, stillness, love, divine, not love, not romantic love, although romantic love is beautiful, Divine Love, which is complete, utter surrender, acceptance. Right, so complete. So from the Sedona Method, courageousness acceptance and peace courageousness meaning complete lack of fear because you can't, that part can't die or be harmed. There's nothing, nothing to fear. acceptance, because you're a part of all there is there's nothing, nothing to push away. Nothing to cling to.

And peace, complete stillness, complete surrender, just rest in that moment. So spiritual practices or exercises that give you some sense of this, you know, I would refer to this work, maybe others would not, but I would refer to this as theosis or God work, right? This is where you are, you know, getting in touch with that inner part of yourself. That is no different than God for lack of a lack of another term. And I realized the term God is very loaded. We all have different concepts of what that word means. You know, whether you come from a Judeo Christian background or Islam or whether you practice Hinduism or Buddhism or Zoroastrianism or your gnostic, or you're an atheist. So that can be a very loaded word. So we'll you know, I'll try to do my best to stick with a word divinity. Divine Light, can you be an atheist and believe in your divinity? I don't know Probably. Probably you could be atheistic meaning you don't believe in. You don't believe in a in a God, a creator god or what have you and still understand that there are layers of yourself. That may be non physical, I think that could be, I don't know, maybe I'll, maybe I'll bring on some, some people who are atheists at some point and have a conversation with them, that would be interesting. I think, um, you know, I know people who are sort of materialist atheists. And, you know, from that perspective, the material world is all there is there is nothing else. That's challenging, because I have lots of, you know, on the daily, I experienced non physical reality. And even if, you know, their, their explanation would be it's all in my head. And it's just the, you know, all of my experiences are just subjective. And they're the result of electrochemical interactions going on in my physical brain. Um, that, you know, again, it's not my job to proselytize or change what anybody believes, but my experience is otherwise, and you know, there, I believe that consciousness is non local. And being non local, it is not. You know, it's not structured in that way. Consciousness doesn't reside in the brain, the brain is a receiver of consciousness, and it can tune itself to sort of different wavelengths of consciousness. That's what we do when we practice shamanism. We tune our brains to be able to do shamanic journeys. But the material the information we bring back sometimes is non local. Meaning we're not experiencing it from physical senses. And so there's a component of that, and hey, maybe someday. Maybe someday quantum science will explain that. But I honestly think that a lot, you know, when you read a lot about quantum science, and I'm no expert, but it seems, you know, very, it seems like sciences describing spiritual concepts. Right, and they're using, they're using scientific terms to do that. I think they're talking a lot a lot about you know, they're talking a lot about the same things that spiritual people are talking about using, using vastly different vocabulary. We think about quantum entanglement, how two particles, you know, that are not in contact with each other, sent, quote, unquote, communicate, right? They seem to have awareness not, you know, I don't know if awareness is even the right word. But if you change one, you change the other one, or simply observing one changes the other one. How does that work at a fundamental level? How does that work from a physical material reality? I don't know. I mean, I can't explain it from a quantum science perspective.

But from a spiritual perspective, we say that everything is connected to everything at a spiritual level, at a level that, you know, we cannot necessarily measure with scientific instruments right now. So, so, yeah, I think they're, I think there's room for overlap there. I think the subjective experience of consciousness is extremely difficult to describe as, as simply a bunch of chemical interactions going on in the brain. Right? The experience of the world you're having right now, listening to this podcast, that will be quite challenging to explain. As neuro chemical signals passing between cells. You know, we can see areas of the brain light up. But how does that give us the experience we're having? And, you know, it's possible that that can never be explained. on a physical level. I don't know. I mean, who knows what we'll learn, who knows what we'll learn, but, you know, I open the door to that I open the door to I'm open to the idea that the more we learn about the nature of reality, the more we learn about the nature of reality and the tools that we use, to plumb the nature of reality. are the tools that we use if your tools are science, that's great. If your tools are spirit, that's great. Okay, and at some point, maybe our vocabularies will overlap. Who knows? Who knows? That'd be a great thing. Um, so yeah, so I'm, I'm digressing, I like tangents a whole lot. I like to have things go off the rails a little bit so. So I have described divinity and I've described how at your core, you were this divine spark and or a beam of light from, you know from the star that is divinity or you are a star and a system of stars or, you know, what have you these are all metaphors, because, again, it's formless, you can visualize your divinity. And I've given you some ideas, hopefully about some places to look for practices, meditative practices, transfiguration, that sort of thing. And I'll leave you with, I'll leave you with a really short brief, but I think beautiful exercise that you can practice almost anytime you want, because it requires nothing. It requires nothing but yourself. And again, going into yourself, that is the deepest form of practice I can think of. So, this exercise is very simple to describe, but can get deeper and deeper, the more you practice it. So the practice is this, and it is easier, it is easier frequently with closed eyes, although you can try it with open eyes. So just for a moment, it doesn't have to be longer than that. Decide to let go of all of your desires. Just decide to drop all of your desire desires, for a brief moment. And just feel what that's like. Just be what you are. Without desires. Okay. And you can practice this for a minute or two, any sort of anytime you want. And it's just, it's just a decision on your part. Okay, for now, I'm gonna, you know, you probably unless you are fully enlightened, will not be able to drop all of your desires permanently, you will get thirsty, you will get hungry, we'll get physically uncomfortable, you will see an advertisement for that brand new car that you want. But just just try this for a moment, you can do it for a moment. Just drop all desires for a moment. And just be what you are.

And that will give you a little bit of an experience of your beingness which is ultimately desireless because it experiences no lack. There is nothing that lacks his whole complete and perfect. Therefore, at your core, you are also because it is you your beingness is you you are whole complete, imperfect. There is nothing to fix. There's no place to go. There is nothing to do. Just who you are, be who you are. I hope that I hope that you'll practice that from time to time, I hope that you will have an experience of your divinity. And if you choose to go down this path further and explore that more, I hope that you get to live your life more in flow. I will my plan for next week is that I will have two new episodes coming out because I have two people. I have two guests coming on. I am very excited about that. Just to tease it a little bit. I have somebody who's going to come. Somebody I've known for Gosh, a really long time. Who is going to talk about finding your purpose and living from that purpose living from divine love and living from your purpose. And that is such a wonderful, important topic. To me. I think that's I think that's that's bound to be an exciting conversation. And then later in the week, I will be talking to my teacher and Sean As I am very excited about this, she has agreed to come on and talk about living a shamanic life. So if you have any interest or desire at all to or you know, just are curious about shamanism at all and what it's like to live dramatically, um, you know, you'll, it's definitely something you'll want to catch. Once again, you can contact me through my website, which is maineshaman, maineshaman.com.

Announcer 51:09

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, john more. For more info or to contact john go to MaineShaman.com that's MaineShaman.com

Ep03 Spirit, Soul, and Ego

Announcer 0:29

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, john Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John.

John Moore 0:49

Hello, everybody. I'm talking to you just after sunrise. It's a beautiful morning. It's a little overcast here. But I always try to greet the sun, the provider, the source of life on Earth, in one, you know, in on a physical level and a spiritual level. My topic for today, I'm going to talk about spirit, soul and ego and what those are and how they relate. And Gosh, I hope I have some good news for you today, not news. But I hope I have some good information for you that I'm going to do my best to inspire a little bit today. And the reason for that is, you know, the global situation is pretty crazy right now, we have, we're obviously in the middle of a global pandemic, that is affecting every human being on this planet. At this moment, whether you are sick have been sick know, people who've been sick, known people who have died, all these things, and I'm talking to you from the United States. I know I have listeners all over the world. And that's fantastic. And I and I greet you and thank you for listening and tuning in to me. Special greetings to my friends in India. But wherever you are, know that you are loved and appreciated. And I, you know, I do this for you. And I do this to reach out. And I do this to help hopefully bring us together and you know, maybe bring a little bit of light, where things may seem dark. And I'll talk a little bit about that as well. In my last podcast, I talked about the divine masculine, divine feminine, and what they look like and how they how they take place. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that today. But in the context of what we might call spiritual development. spiritual development is a big topic. Obviously, if you walk into any bookstore, there's a huge section of books on spiritual development, there are courses online, there's everything you can think of every type of practice meditation, shamanic journeying, you know, everything, everything you can think of out there. So I'm going to start today, and I'm going to give you my definitions of spirit, soul and ego. And I realized that my definitions may not match up with your definitions or other people's definitions. And that's fine. we sort of have to be okay with that. Right? Words are models. And I'm gonna talk a lot about models today. But models are not the things right, if I say the word dog, that is a word that represents the animal dog, but that is that word is not the dog. Right? We say the map is not the territory is a pointer. It's a reference to something. And, you know, the spiritual realm is primarily invisible. Not to everyone but it you know, for for most people as we go around in our daily lives, we experience sort of 3d reality where time flows in one direction only and effects have causes and, and all of those things. And so, the definitions of things can be sort of loose. And the other thing that happens is that everything we experience on a spiritual level

is filtered through our culture. It's filtered through our ego, we're going to talk about what that is today through our own personal experiences, all of those things. And so there's, there's nothing wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong. If your definitions of things differ from mine, it's, I'm going to give you mine so I can have. So you know, I can have a common language with you. So, when you're listening to me, you know what I'm talking about. So you're not, you know, hopefully less confused when I use these terms, because I may be using them in a way that you haven't experienced before. And of course, my, my definitions, my you know, they're not necessarily mine, they come from my shamanic practice, and were given to me by my teachers and that sort of thing. When I say my, I'm just saying the ones that I'm using, not things that I have made up, I don't want you to think that I've invented some new system of explaining reality, there's nothing new about what I'm talking about. I have a perspective, but even that is informed by my culture, my my teachings, my, you know, studies that I've done journeys that I've done as a shamanic practitioner, all of those things are, so I don't, I don't claim ownership to them when I say mine. And that's the difficulty with words, right? In English. When I say my this, it could describe ownership, or it could describe, you know, just something I've I've adopted. So let's talk a little bit about spirit and soul first, and then we'll talk about ego after that. And then a minute, spend a little time on what, you know how to sort of go a little deeper if you're interested, how to go a little deeper into this into this learning. And so my first, before I get into spirit, soul, and ego, I'm going to talk to you about what I mean, when I say the word spiritual, right? This is speaking spirit. This is a podcast when I talk about spiritual topics, and what is what do I mean when I use the word spiritual? To me, spiritual is anything that gives you a connection with something greater than yourself. something beyond your physical self, your ego, that sort of thing. And that's a very broad definition, right? Because for some people walking in nature, might give them a deeper connection. Would I describe that as spiritual? Absolutely. No, it wouldn't be a spiritual experience. Meditation when you go inside, and touch a part of yourself that is connected to the entire universe. Absolutely, spiritual. If you pray, if you're a religious person, and you pray, and that gives you a sense of connection to deity, absolutely, that is spiritual. That's a spiritual practice. When I hug my children, and I feel this unconditional love for them, and from them. Absolutely, that is a spiritual moment for me. lovemaking, sex can be a very spiritual experience. It doesn't have to be. But it certainly can be if it gives you again, this sense of greater connection. So that's my take on, you know what the word spiritual means. And I have this theory that the deeper you go into anything, the more spiritual it becomes. And I'll give you a few examples. I have practice martial arts since I was about five or six years old. I'm in my late 40s right now. So it's a lot a lot of years. And in the beginning, you learn punches and kicks and you know, arm bars and all of those things. But the more you go into it, the more spiritual it becomes, the more connected you feel, the more in rhythm you feel, even with your opponent. Even you know, when you're practicing techniques that may seem, you know, violent, you know, hopefully, with practice, you become more peaceful and you become it seems like a contradiction, but it's true. You become more peaceful. You abhor violence you become softer, you become more connected with energy.

When I see somebody who isn't for example, in a Amazing basketball player. And they're what we call in the zone, right? Where they're just in rhythm and flow with what's going on, that seems like a very, I'm not a great basketball player. But that seems like a very spiritual experience for me. Recently, I was watching a cooking show, and Chef on the show was talking about how for him, cooking was all about finding this moment. And the second, he described that I'm like, Oh, he's having a deeply spiritual experience with cooking food with preparing food. He's got this emotional connection to what he's doing this spiritual connection. So the deeper you go into anything, the more spiritual it becomes. And when I talk about, you know, in a moment, when I talk about soul and spirit, I'm talking about how going deeper into yourself is probably about the, you know, the most spiritual thing you could do. So let's talk about those. Okay, so again, these are my definitions. And again, when I say my, I mean, adopted from my teachers, and that sort of thing. And I recognize that some people use these words interchangeably. So some people use spirit and soul to describe the same thing. And some people use spirit and soul with sort of opposite definitions of the way I used them. But I just want to give you these definitions so that again, we can have a common language so you, I'm not confusing you by what I'm talking about. So when I say spirit and soul, so in the shamanic world, one of the main practices that we do is called soul retrieval. And this is in response to some sort of trauma that somebody has experienced or an injury to a limb or shock to the system. And you know, this jives actually really well with modern psychological models of trauma, there's a splitting off, there's part of your soul breaks away. So your soul is this sort of body of spiritual energy that you carry around with you. And it is affected by your life experiences, it reincarnates with you, when you go from life to life, and it's, you know, can can sort of take on wounds and injuries and carry those, carry those along. So a lot of the work we do in shamanism is healing those parts, right finding, you know, recollecting and reuniting and integrating those parts. And this jives really well with sort of union part psychology, you know, family, internal family systems, therapy, those sort of modern psychological models, right, of this fractionating of the self, the soul. Okay, and, you know, we, you, we all have a soul and is closely in close contact with our body. So what happens, you have a physical body, you have lots of different bodies, right, you have a physical body, you have a soul body, a spirit body. When your soul body, completely leaves. That's when that's when you die, right? That's when your physical body dies. Your soul body does not die, and neither does your spirit. But your soul body can carry sort of baggage wounds, that sort of thing. It's affected by your life experiences. You know, it gains experience and it can be wounded, it can be healed. It can be developed, this is most this is what we're talking about. When we talk about spiritual development. We're talking about developing the soul or astral body, that non physical part of you. And so when I talk about spirit, what I'm talking about in so in, in Sanskrit, there's the word Atman, which is this like internal dwelling, undying slice of divinity. This is your this is your Divine Self. The part of you that is absolutely undying, indefinable, does not get wounded does not is not affected by life experiences. It is just this divine light that is at the center of you.

And there's some really amazing meditational practices that happen. There's one taught by the shamanic teacher Sandra ingerman, called transfiguration. Which is an absolutely beautiful, beautiful practice and, and simple and extremely deep and profound spiritual experiences do not have to be complex, or take years of training. Some of them can be extremely simple and experienced by anyone. Why because we all have this indwelling Spirit, this this part of ourselves. And this, I hope is a little bit of light, if you're experiencing some of the tumult of the world right now, in any sort of way that is painful to know that there's a part of you that is completely unaffected, that is just perfect love and perfect peace at your center, if you want to visualize this, you can visualize this as just an intense light, somewhere in the center of your body, usually in your, in your chest area, just that shines in all different directions at all times, and can never be dimmed can never be injured or affected. And this is your connection to divinity. So let's talk about let's talk about your bodies, let's talk about your different, different bodies. And so, again, all of this comes from a cultural context, right. So in you know, if you go back and you look at ancient Egyptian religion, they described all of these soul parts, and they had these, you know, huge system of religion around funerary rites, and this part of the soul did this and this part of the soul that this, you know, went off, and there's, you know, that that whole funerary ritual thing was about their, their model of, you know, the afterlife, and the parts of the soul and that sort of thing, right. And, again, this, this is filtered through their culture. In Norse belief, there's, again, soul, there's all different parts of the soul, right? There's, you know, there's a part of the soul that gives you luck, for example. And it's located, it's like a backpack in your back. And, you know, that's recognized in many different cultures. So the way I like to look at it, a metaphor that works really well for me, is that human beings are like an onion, a multi layered onion, we have so many layers that you can peel back, one after another after another after another, right, we have a physical body. But when you get beyond, you know, when you you know, that's a super oversimplification of even our physical presence, right, because we have, you know, a circulatory system and a skeletal system and a neurological system. And then we have all kinds of biochemistry going on. And we have all of the processes that go on we have, you know, respiration and cellular energy production, and all of that stuff, right? The stuff that goes on just to give us this body that we have in this physical world, and your, your other bodies, your soul body, your energy, body, all of these things are equally complex. So you could study these for many lifetimes and never get to the end of them, which is why we create these super oversimplifications. We say we have a body, we have a mind we have you know, we have a spirit we have a soul. Those are super oversimplifications. But it's necessary so that we can have a conversation about it so that we can talk about it. Again, I can talk about I can use the word dog, but I, you know, which represents it's a pointer to the animal dog, but I can't, you know, I could spend the rest of my life describing every thing that makes up a dog from you know, behavior to history to how their, you know, their body, you know, it could go into Veterinary Science, all of those things. So, just just an oversimplification, we have all of these bodies, and I view them as these overlapping layers and the

they really blend into each other. Right? So for example, we all we know about, we know that humans have an energy body, okay, this is how a lot of energy healing works, how a lot of you know, acupuncture or Reiki or any of those things, work on the level of the human energy system. The human energy body is close to overlaps with, interacts with the physical body very close very, very closely. And they overlap in such a way that it's almost impossible to really pull them apart and differentiate them. Right. So some of the meridians, some of the acupuncture meridians closely follow, you know, the nervous system and some, some do not. And so trying to separate those out is a little bit, you know, it's necessary if you're studying, studying something like acupuncture to think of them as separate things, but they're really not. Okay, and the same is true. The same is true for the soul body, right, you have the soul body, which is a little bit removed from the energy body. It's a little bit further inside that onion. Right, but they overlap, they interact and and they and they affect they can affect the physical body. So a lot of shamanic healing works on the level of the soul body. So we've talked about soul retrieval, there's other, there are other, many other practices that shamans do all over the world, that affect the soul body. And that can provide a template for physical healing a template for mental healing, a template for, you know, healing, you know, some of that comes through the energy body, some of it does not. You know, again, we could study this for forever and get to the bottom of it. And that's, to me, that's a really cool thing to think about how amazing we are as human incarnations, how lucky we are to have incarnated in the physical body. And I realize some religious systems say that that's a terrible thing to have to incarnate because we have to experience pain and loss and suffering and all of those things. And I get that. And we we do like having a body is not, it's not a walk in the park, right? It's not, it's not all pleasure, it is certainly the ability to experience pleasure and pain and all of those things. And those dualities exist in the human body, but we're lucky because we do get to interact on this plane, we do get to do things that develop our soul body that develop our astral body that develop our mind develop our these things. So that's my takeaway. And I promised I was going to talk about ego and I will talk about ego a little bit. And ego is one of those things. At least in the US, it's a little bit of a dirty word. In that when you describe somebody as having a big ego, for example, that is not a compliment, right? We say that little check out that guy's ego, um, you know, meaning that they have an inflated sense of self that they think very highly of themselves and perhaps should not should you know, that this is a judgment about somebody not showing humility. And humility isn't humility, humility, humility is a wonderful trait to have. So what are we talking about when we talk about ego? So ego ism is a mental construct. So it it takes place, sort of, it's not its own body. And my my take it is simply your sense of who you are, your sense of I, and all of the sort of complex things that that comes with, right? So when I think of myself, you know, my, my name is john, something my parents gave me when I was born.

That's a part of, but something that I you know, I happen to like, if somebody says, john, I'm gonna turn around, right? Because I identify with it. That's my name. That's one part of my ego, but I'm also a dad, that's a concept that I have about myself. So it's about your self concept. It's about who and how you I identify, okay. So, we can develop problems with our ego, right, we can develop problems. One problem is we can develop hubris, right? We can develop this inflated sense of self. And that certainly can happen with some types of spiritual development. And so the astral body, the soul body, is has this sort of hubris effect on the ego because it does affect the mental body. Certainly, it affects our consciousness. And I certainly have known people who consider themselves ascended or above others or beyond. You know, beyond flaw and that that sort of thing in that is a real trap. That is a super serious is a terrible trap to fall into. In spiritual development. If you ever think that your work is done, you are probably wrong, you're most likely wrong. Unless you are the Buddha or, or are actually, you know, some sort of enlightened master The problem is that people think they are, and they aren't. And they might have developed amazing spiritual abilities, you know, we think about, um, you know, I think about a Buddhist teacher that I studied with decades ago, who was considered by some of his students enlightened and had all kinds of special abilities and things like that. And, you know, he, he wound up taking his own life later, which is both tragic, but also an indicator that he hadn't done the work that was necessary to clean up, you know, cleanup is the shadow parts, which I, I talked about in my first podcast on darkness and light being two sides of the same coin. You know, the Shadow Work is super important. And if you don't do it, it will, it will come, it will come back and bite you, you have to do that, you're gonna come back again and again and again, and have to work on the same thing over and over again. So that can, that can definitely happen. And that's a problem that can happen with ego. Where, and this is where I hope there's a little bit of light pouring in here as to what I'm talking about not just warnings. What can happen though, is you do the work. So he goes about identification, right? It's about identifying who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Right? You can ask that you can use that as a mantra, who or what am I could be a mantra that you repeat. And the the, you know, the Indian saint Ramana Maharshi. You know, that was his mantra, that's what he taught his students to repeat over and over again, to get at the, to get at the core of the self, this feeling of being unified with divinity with being unified with a source and that's where you can go with, I think, almost any spiritual practice that helps you turn inside. And in my last podcast, I talked about the divine masculine and the divine feminine. And so, um, you know, and again, there's no one is better than the other, there's no, they are, they're co they're co equal, as long as they are treated as such, as long as they aren't misinterpreted or, or, you know, as long as there's not power over, right? There's power with, okay. So, divine masculine spiritual practices are the things that we do, outwardly, such as making offerings, praying to a deity, you know, setting up an altar, you know, all of those things are these sort of outward expressions of spirituality, divinity. And they are, they are absolutely valid, and they are in a prayer, chanting, anything that that comes from within to without

equally valid is the turning inside, right? Remember, I said, the more you go inside something, the more spiritual it becomes. And that includes yourself, the deeper you go into yourself, and you reach that point where you identify this is where the ego comes into place, right? The ego is a tool that, when used correctly, allows you to identify more and more with that divine part of yourself. And that is the Divine Feminine part of spiritual development. And hey, you don't have to choose just one avenue, you can do both things. You can make offerings, and you can meditate and turn inside. You can pray to a deity and you can take up shamanic journeying and, you know, get more insight by by turning into the inner realms. You can do both at the same time, and it's a very, very powerful combination. This divine masculine and divine feminine practices, the outward practices, the inward practices. And if you separate them out too much, if you focus on one area, a little too much, they can become out of balance. Right? I mean, you know, we all know I've lots of friends who grew up in a religion and may even Don't go to church every week and don't actually really believe or practice, they just, it's a thing that they do. It's this, it's this, you know, well, you know, I went to church every week as a child, and I still go to church, but I don't really practice and we don't really believe, you know, which to me, is it unfortunate and a missed opportunity, right, either to dive deeper into that religion or to find one that you do believe in and can practice both externally and internally, right, there's not much spiritual development going on there. Unfortunately, this is not a judgement, you're free to do whatever, whatever you want, I just see it as a missed opportunity, it makes me a little a little bit makes me a little bit sad, although, you know, I'm sure there's a benefit from that I'm sure. People who do that are able to make some kind of connection, at least on a social level. And, you know, ritual is important ritual is any sort of symbolic action that we take, right. And ritual is important. Even on a psychological level, we actually, in the Western world, I think are missing a lot of ritual that exists in other places. We stripped that out of our daily lives a little, a little too much, in my opinion. So you know, a lot of people are starting to bring that bring that back, a lot of people are starting to explore more here. But we became, you know, we went through the Industrial Revolution, and we spend a lot of time working and focused really on day to day physical survival stuff. And it's an interesting note, I realized this is a complete tangent, but it's an interesting note that studies show that, you know, in previous times pre Industrial Revolution, you know, even during hunter gatherer times, people had more free time, right, they didn't, they weren't hunting and gathering all day, you know, eight hours a day, every day, they had more free time to do things like develop art and music and, and religion and culture and, you know, build giant stone monuments, places and things like that. They had the cycles to do that we don't in this modern world, because we spend a third of our time sleeping a third of our time working, and the other third of the time, usually, you know, some, hopefully, some of that, you know, resting, relaxing, going inside doing development, but it's a very limited window for that sort of activity. Right. And we have all of the other things we have to do, we have to go shopping and feed the kids and you know, just day to day life stuff, clean the house. And so it becomes a little bit out of balance. So when you can, when you do have the opportunity, it's important. It's an important part of spiritual hygiene, it's as important to me as brushing your teeth, which is very important to spend some time daily in spiritual refresh, reflection, spiritual practice, any of those things. So with that, I'm going to bring this podcast to a close. You know, we talked a little bit about what I mean by spirit, soul and ego.

I hope, I hope that you learn something, I hope that you, I can, you know, maybe give you a little push to spend a little more time turning inside, finding that divine part of yourself. I don't care who you are, I don't care what your life experience is, is a real beautiful thing to me that everyone every single individual on this planet. And that includes people who no longer have bodies and may still be around have that divine spark they have that they have that divine aspect, that divine nature that they are absolutely connected to the unity that is the universe. And and it's, it's absolutely beautiful. It's an absolutely beautiful thing. If you can get any sort of experience of that it will it will change you it will change it for the better. So if you would like more information about me or what I do, or this podcast or if you're listening to this somehow and don't have access to previous episodes, you can go to my website, which is named shaman comm that's MaineShaman.com. And I mean like the state because that's where I live. In March, I am co-teaching a an introduction to shamanic journeying class online. You can find more information about that on my website. And I'm co teaching that with three other really amazing shamanic teachers. And we're doing this because we are in the middle of a global pandemic, and I am not teaching in person at this, you know, at this time and so this is a good opportunity, if you have ever wanted to learn about shamanic journeying to do that, and will take place over a weekend at the end of March. And again, there's, there's more information on my website, you can check that out. If you have, you can contact me through there. If you have questions or suggestions for podcast topics. Gosh, I would love that I would love to make this more about what you want to hear about. And or guests. I'm, I am fully intending on having having guests so it's not just you listening to the sound of my voice and me listening to the sound of my voice in the future. I want to thank you so much for listening. It's it's very important to me right now to be reaching out to other people in in any way that I can. And I do love you and I don't care who you are. And that may sound a little weird. But you know if people can there's a saying that if if people can hate people they have never even met that I can choose to love people I have never met and and just know that that that you are loved no matter who you are, no matter where you are. And I'm I am going to be a part of that I'm going to be a part of the ones who are who are loving in this in this crazy world and bring hopefully some healing and sanity to the to the world as it's being shaken up. With that I will leave you have a blessed day.

Announcer 37:33

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, john more. For more info or to contact john, go to Maineshaman.com that's MaineShaman.com.