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 0:53
Hello, everybody.
As I record this, it is February 22 2021. Yesterday happened to be my birthday. And I don't make a huge deal out of birthdays. I haven't since I was younger, but I, you know, I will take some time to celebrate with family, you know, I made another lap around the sun. It's, you know, it's been quite a year, right? 2022 2021 has been quite a year, personally and on the global scale and all of these things. It makes me really, really grateful for what I have. And yesterday, I spent, I spent the day with my daughter's my twin daughters and my girlfriend, and we had a wonderful meal together. And, you know, it just made me feel full of life. And I think that's what birthdays should do, what celebration should do. Definitely spending time with the ones I love, you know, nourishes me, and I hope that you, you know, in this time of turmoil are able to connect in some way with you know, those you love those you care about people who nurture you. I think it's important to pay attention to relationships that are nurturing and equally important to pay attention to those that are that are not maybe and works, either adjust them or cut them off or what, what have you but do what's healthy and right and life fulfilling and good for you. So I think it was, you know, it's an appropriate topic. Today, today, the topic, I'm going to talk about miracles. today. I'm going to talk about them, I hope from somewhat unique perspective, right? I'm going to talk about, you know, I'm talking about finding the miracles in the mundane. And this is something that came up came up recently with somebody was talking to who was is probably still using, using plant medicine, hallucinogenic chemicals to have spiritual experiences. And I you know, I'm certainly not going to cast judgment on that. I'm not going to say whether that's whether that's bad or good. That's something that is practice globally, and, you know, that sort of thing. But what I will say is that, you know, shamanic work, it's not it's, it's really not necessary to use chemicals to do shamanic work, you can there are certainly cultures that do that, but there are other cultures who drive those brain states using drums or dancing or ritual or austerity or, you know, what have you. And, you know, if you're are, you know, depending upon your practices in whether it's using hallucinogens, or whether it's, you know, some other kind of spiritual work. If you're spending most of your time escaping reality, I'm not saying this person was spending most of their time escaping reality but it just this, this was something that came up in the conversation. You know, if you are spending time escaping, quote unquote reality We call ordinary reality your ordinary waking state and your you know, constantly having to walk around in a state of bliss, it can be very grounding for one, right? We all know those people we talk about who have, you know, quote unquote, their heads in the clouds walking around, dissociated, not really paying attention to the world around them.
But more importantly, I think, you know, when this is the case, you are missing so much of the world, so much of the world. And I understand that sometimes we have this, this huge negative bias, and we can look out at the world and see everything that's wrong with it. Right, we can look at the poverty and the crime and disease and all of these things, and the, you know, the problems with the environment, we can look all that stuff, and it can be overwhelming, it can be depressing, create anxiety, all of those things. But I am here to tell you that there is no matter what, no matter all of this stuff that's going on, there's still beauty in the world, there's still spirit that can be experienced firsthand, by paying attention to your senses, in ordinary reality, to you know, looking at a grain of sand or a mountain or even another person. And, you know, that leads me to talk about, again, the topic is finding miracles in the mundane. And that seems a little bit contradictory, right, because our idea of miracles are that they are not mundane, they're not. You know, they're supernatural. They don't happen very often. That sort of thing. I think that feeling is fallacious. And I'm going to talk about it in a few ways. But I'm going to give you you know, per usual, when I talk about a word, when I talk about an important word, a word like miracle, or a word, like initiation or a word like spirit, I want to define the terms and not just because I'm being, you know, a nerdy bookworm, or, you know, I'm trying to control the conversation or control the definitions that you think about, but I want you to understand what I am talking about, I want you to understand what my intention is, when I speak about miracles, and I can't really do that if you have a, you know, you have a vastly different definition of the word miracle than I do. And that's not to say your definition is wrong, and mine is right or whatever. But it's just for understanding, it's just so that you can know that when I use the symbol of the word miracle. Kind of what's in my brain, right? What am I thinking about? And I'm not saying you need to toss out your definitions. Please don't. I am not the authority on language or, or anything like that. This is just for understanding. So when I look to the dictionary and my phone, the word miracle has, has a few definitions, some of which I like, and some of which, you know, some parts I don't necessarily agree with. But the first one is a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws, and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency. So in other words, something happens. And it's surprising, and it's welcome. And it is a god or the God or something along those lines doing something and there is no scientific explanation for, for what's happening. The next one is, you know, and I'll read three of these, the next one is a highly improbable or extraordinary event development or accomplishment, that brings very welcome circumstances or very welcome consequences, right. So something that is unlikely to happen, but happens anyway, like somebody recovers from an illness that they thought was, and this definition removes removes the divine aspect, from miracle. And so the last one, and this is sort of a commercial definition, I guess, is an amazing product or achievement or an outstanding example of something. And you know, when I read this definition, I think of the You know, television commercials for laundry soap, which, you know, people are like, Oh, you know, it's a miracle I got the stains out of my shirt. So, uh, you know, I guess so that's, that's a little funny to me. But that's what that brings to mind.
So let's sort through these a little bit, from my perspective, right? So, from my perspective, you know, our reality, the things that we experience as being outside, you know, ordinary reality, things we experience as being outside ourselves, that sort of thing. That's all constructed in our consciousness, right? Your experience of reality, whether whatever the reality of the world is, everything you experience, touch, sight, sound, taste, smell, all of that even internal stuff, thoughts, feelings. By definition, you experience all of that inside your consciousness. Right? You things that are outside of your consciousness, you have no experience of what this means to me is that the entire universe, as you experience it, from the things that you are touching right now, to the sound of my voice to the thoughts you're having. All of that is constructed. All of that is built inside your consciousness. Right? What we see, I'm looking at, what am I looking at? I'm looking at a bottle right now, that is a pretty orange bottle that's full of Italian blood orange soda. Right? It looks delicious. I haven't tried it. But I'm not. You know, when when I talk about seeing, there's two parts of that, right? My sense organs, my eyes receive light that bounces off or is transmitted through this object hits the back of my retinas, it produces an electrical signal that goes into the parts of my brain. And I experienced the image of this bottle, this orange bottle. Okay, I'm not having a direct experience of the orange bottle. Because it is, you know, gone through all of these layers of translation, right? It's gone through, you know, from just photons bouncing off the bottle into my eyes, and then my eyes turning, you know, my retinas turning that into a signal, the signal going into the back of my brain, and I have no idea I couldn't tell you, I'm sure there are, you know, neuroscientists out there who could explain how sight is decoded in the brain. But I'll get on to why we can't ever really describe consciousness and conscious experience in a minute. But so my brain is constructing my cat inside my consciousness somewhere, it might be my brain, it might not be my brain is constructing the image of this bottle, right. And one level deeper than that. One level beyond that, beyond the fact that there is this constructed image in my consciousness of this thing that I'm looking at is that I'm actually having a subjective experience of this bottle. I'm a, I'm experiencing it. And this is a little bit harder to describe, right? It's that I'm aware of it in an experiential level. That's different than if I point a camera at this bottle, and it receives light waves and it transfer, you know, transforms that into a computer, for example, as a series of ones and zeros and the computer could reconstruct the image. The computer isn't aware, I don't care how smart your computer is, I don't care if your computer can pass the Turing test or pretend it is self aware or you know process natural language or even mimic emotions. The computer is not having a subjective experience of reality. I'm not experiencing a constructed feeling, experience of reality, not having an experience a computer can process bits and bytes, but it can't experience and the way we can you know, we can see Things we can hear things we can feel our emotions, we can sense our thoughts. However those come to you sometimes, you know, maybe pictures or sounds or, or maybe just an impression of something.
So, the reality, all of the reality that you experienced, and this is nothing new philosophers have been talking about this for a minute, you know, really, really long time, I was gonna say, a million years, but we didn't have philosophers million years ago, I don't think anyway. But a very long time, philosophers have been talking about this, you know, the matrix is a little bit of a movie about this, right? Where that's the whole head and a bottle kind of thing. If you you know, what is it's about the nature of reality and how it be can be completely constructed, although that was sort of mechanical, feeding sensory information into, you know, somebody's brain directly. But again, even that does not explain the subjective experience of reality that you're having right now. Right, it does not explain how you have the experience of what you're looking at. Just not decoding, right. And so, to me, to me, this experience is subjective experience, is a part of our divinity, it's a part of our divine nature, right? When you think about what the ideas of god or gods or you know, whatever they are, they are creators. Right? If you come from what you know, even if you're, even if you're in an atheist, you can understand that in the world's religious and spiritual stories, that it is divine, you know, some divine power that creates the universe. So what does that mean for your consciousness, where you're, you know, some part of you we call your consciousness is essentially constructing your entire world for you, you know, whether, beyond the reality of what, you know, what is out there in ordinary reality, you know, your consciousness can construct a whole world take, take, for example, when you're dreaming, right, an entirely constructed world. And I'll talk another time about the spiritual, you know, on the spirituality of dreaming in the spiritual aspects of dreaming, but you're, you're dreaming consciousness can create without, without a physical reality out there can create an entire universe for you. For me, this is the miracle, this is the miracle, and it fits a lot of those criteria from a lot of those definitions. Right? First of all, there is no scientific explanation of conscious, subjective conscious experience, there is none and I don't, you know, it does not matter what brain scans do, or we say, when you look at this, you know, there, this part of your neurology lights up, that's great, but that can cannot explain your subjective experience of reality. The fact that you are conscious that you are experiencing that is, to me the miracle, so that covers the does not have a scientific explanation. So, is this divine? is this? You know, does this have a divine source, which would cover one of the definitions? Well, you know, honestly, I believe it does. And so, you know, again, this is an this is a little bit of a matter of faith or belief or culture or what have you, or self examination. I believe that our consciousness, our, you know, I believe that our consciousness emanates from divine consciousness, that we are individual aspects of that. And so, without that divine spark that is at the core of all of us, that connects us to everything there is you know, we would not have, we would not have conscious experience and so Yeah, I do. I do think that it covers you know, it covers that aspect of the, of the definition of miracle. So I think that our, you know, just our day to day, consciousness that we take for granted is the miracle. That is the thing to be in awe of. Now, where this does not fit into a lot of the definitions of miracle is that this is our, you know, again, we
we live in this like a fish in the ocean, right? We live in our field of consciousness all the time, even when we think we're unconscious, there's still you know, even when you're in a dead sleep, there's some part of you paying attention. Because your fire alarm could wake you up or, you know, a loved one could wake you from that. So there's some part of your consciousness that's still paying attention. And I won't go into, you know, the whole down the whole, you know, what if somebody is in a coma, or that's kind of a kind of a rat hole, I'm just saying, if you're listening to this, if you have an experience of reality, even though you experience it out there, right outside of yourself. It's all actually happening inside of you inside of your, your consciousness, not inside your body, right? Not inside of you that, you know, my body encompasses the entire universe. Although that is an interesting meditation, I recommend practicing sometime, but that everything you experience is happening. happening in consciousness? And does consciousness live in the brain? You know, that's a big question. scientists and philosophers have tried to answer for a long time. My thought is, I don't think so I don't think consciousness itself lives in the brain. I think the brain is a receiver of consciousness. I think we live in a field of consciousness, I think his science finds out more, we find out that some parts of consciousness are what we call non local meaning they they happen when we aren't in direct connection to things. There's lots of anomalous stuff about low, you know, non local consciousness, there's, there's plenty of research out there. I think that even when we look into the body, we find neuro peptides. In every cell of the body, I think the guts, the human gut has been called the second brain recently by by science, and that it does do a fair amount of thinking for us. Although maybe not, maybe not at the level of consciousness, right. But the role of the brain in consciousness is not to be under estimated. But it's not. It's also not to be overestimated. Okay, and I, you know, I can tell you as a shamanic practitioner, having dealt with departed spirits, and that sort of thing that consciousness exists after physical after physical death, it exists before physical life exists after physical death, the amount of time you spend on a body is relatively short compared to compared to existence as, as a whole. Although time starts to break down, once you don't have a once you don't have a body time, as it turns out, our experience of time is very closely tied to our bodies. And that makes sense because we have to do things like eat and sleep. And you know, that sort of thing. Right, eat, sleep and go to the bathroom. And those are important biological activities governed a little bit by our experience of time. So So just to recap, my, you know, my my proposition, then is that consciousness, your experience of your subjective experience of consciousness of reality, that is the miracle. But what I promised you was today to talk about the miracles of the mundane and in a way, again, like we're swimming around in consciousness all the time. And so this is our everyday reality, and it might not feel so miraculous. But if you stop to appreciate for a moment, you will understand what an amazing thing your consciousness is. It's a little bit hard when you take the perspective of all of this stuff is happening externally, right. But I want to give you some things that you can do to have this experience that of how just amazingly miraculous and fantastic and wonderful Beyond all belief that your consciousness is that your subjective experience of consciousness is.
So I love music, for example. My daughters and I share a lot of playlists online I, you know, before the pandemic, I loved going to listen to live music. And sometimes I'll I'll listen to live music online and I have lots of friends who are musicians and I grew up in a somewhat musical family and lots of my family members play music, and I played music as a kid. And so musics very important to me, right. And when I think about my experience of music, and how moving it can be, for me, how emotional music can be, for me, music has the ability to you know, really change our experience of everything. It's why, you know, we play music when we are in church or temple and we pray, you know, we sing, when we celebrate birthdays, or weddings, or what have you, we listen to music to be happy, we listen to music to get over being sad. Music really is this thing that can shape our shape our experience tremendously. And it's a powerful tool, it's a powerful consciousness altering tool. And so when we think about what's happening, when I am experiencing music, let's say I'm listening to a symphony, over the radio, let's say there's a, you know, there's a symphony in London, England, that is performing, or had performed, and even their, their music was recorded. So these people with all of these instruments are making little vibrations in the air, it's picked up by recording equipment, these in these days, that recording equipment is most likely digital. So that gets transformed into these ones and zeros signals and either stored somewhere or broadcast out over the airwaves. My radio picks that up some, you know, a signal. Again, these days, it's a digital signal. So it's just a series of ones and zeros. And then my my radio translates those ones and zeros into some magnetic impulses and the magnetic impulses in the speakers vibrate the air. So causes you know causes wavy air, essentially, that wavy air causes pressure changes inside my ears. pressure changes vibrate, the my eardrum, the tiny bones in my ears, causing, you know, nerve impulses to travel into my brain into the auditory processing areas of my brain. From all of that from the ones and zeros in the wavy air and the electronics and the you know, everything that you know and and I you know, made that incredibly simple, right? That was really simplified explanation of what actually has to happen. I experience a symphony in my consciousness, I can have the experience, even if I know nothing about music, even if I have never heard those instruments before or whatever I can experience that music in my consciousness, my consciousness can assemble the experience of listening to a symphony from squiggly air, wavy air, pressing up against my eardrums, changing the pressure in my ears and causing vibrations and electrical send some signals to happen. Well, that's a pretty significant miracle when you stop and think about it. It's significant that your consciousness can do that. When you think about great composers from the past Mozart, Beethoven or whoever, whoever is important to you, in your culture, these people who wrote the symphonies who created these things. You know, they're celebrated as miraculous and, and, and they are and they're, and they're creators. And, you know, they had to have amazing an amazing level of thought to produce the things that they did. But without your ability, whether or not you appreciate classical music or whatever, you know, whatever music you like,
without your ability to construct that experience, and you don't even do it consciously, you don't even have to think about it. Music would just be wavy air, right music would just be way the air. And it's the same thing with poetry, you know, I can, I can write poetry and read it to you. And you can have the experience of, of a poem, or you can read a poem. And you know, the light bouncing off the page can hitting your retinas and creating electrical signals in your brain. You can experience up home. There was a funny description, I saw online somewhere of reading, right? It's one of these things where people break things down into absurd terms. And so they're reading is staring at pieces of a dead tree and hallucinating. Right. You know, when you're reading stories, you're, you know, if you're looking at paper, it is yeah, it's, you know, hopefully, it's recycled paper. But it's, you know, you're looking at these dead trees, you're looking at marks on dead trees, and hallucinating, you can experience all reality. And it's why books and novels are popular. Same thing, even if you even if you don't really read and you watch television, right your your mind, your consciousness, you're still constructing the stories that you're witnessing. And it's like that for every single thing you experience. When you taste something, right. Even when you're taking food into your body, and you're tasting it with your tongue and smelling it with your, you know, your olfactory organs, your your nose, or, you know, and you experience, the texture and your mouth and all of these things. You know that it's your consciousness that's having the experience of eating chocolate cake. You could break that down ad infinitum, you could talk about the chemicals and the receptors and say shitty how you measure measure, feeling satisfied. And you break it down into macronutrients and how, you know, blood sugar affects your brain and all of these things, you can break it down ad infinitum to the chemical level, and you can still not account for the subjective experience of eating a piece of chocolate cake. And that's sort of why I call it miracles, miracles of the mundane. Because we don't often, we don't often stop and reflect on that we don't often stop and reflect on just how amazing our experience is. Even if you are subjectively having what you might call a bad experience a negative experience, right? You see something that horrifies you, you hear something that's unpleasant, or, you know, or even just your life circumstances are not great. And you you know, maybe you're living in circumstances that are stressful every day. And gosh, you know, there's a lot of that in the world. There's a lot of that in the world. Unfortunately, there's a lot of starvation and natural disasters and all of these things. So even if you're living under those circumstances, or experiencing things that you subjectively determine are unpleasant or what you don't want or you know, that cause a negative emotional reaction for you. You still have the experience that's still occurring in your consciousness, you're still able to be aware of that. And that in itself is a miracle. And that's a miracle that you own right? barring somebody killing you are knocking you unconscious you know, we have sovereignty over our consciousness we are our you know, we are the ruler that's not to say, you know, you can bend reality to your will although you can a little bit that's magic. Not necessarily spirituality, but I guess that is spiritual. Bending reality to your will is, you know, sorcery or magic or, or that sort of thing, and it's Hard, gosh, it's hard work.
If it were easy, we would all be lottery winners, right? We would all be, we would all be billionaires, if, if bending reality to your will was a really easy thing to do. It's enough then just to experience reality from time to time as constructed as to, to understand that the entire world, the entire universe, exists inside your consciousness. And that you are the one creating that experience. You are the one your consciousness, the thing that you are, is what's creating that miracle of subjective experience. I, I do my best. I forget, I'm, you know, I'm living in conditioned human experience myself, I forget, I do not do this all the time. But I have found great benefit over the years from reflecting on that. Reflecting on that nature of reality. As constructed as miraculous itself, just everything as miraculous, as you know, when I'm looking at a, an orange bottle and experiencing that orange bottle that's both constructed and miraculous, it is coming. You know, the the capacity for consciousness is coming from my divine self. And the same is true for you. And I'll let the philosophers argue about what is real what's actually out there. And, and, you know, how would you know what's actually out there? If you're, if you're, you know, if we're living in the matrix, if we're plugged into a machine that's feeding us a sense of reality? How would we know? I don't have an answer for that. Clearly, that's, you know, where the where the questions of, you know, the matrix, and philosophers who talk about those things. You know, they can argue about that stuff. You know, and scientists these days, are actually looking for evidence that we may be living inside a giant simulation. Can you imagine? Can you imagine what would be required to simulate the universe into existence? That should be mind blowing. And so when you approach the world, when you approach everything as miraculous, as you know, the experience of everything is miraculous, even those things that we deem unpleasant. Bad, we put judgments on them. This hurts, or I have disease, or somebody I love died, or all of these things. It's not to say you should not be experiencing grief or anything that you're experiencing emotion wise, but even your emotions about that. Right? It's, you know, yeah, you, you know, we can talk about the chemicals that allow us to feel certain emotions, and the neural pathways and the beliefs and all of those things. We talked about all of that. But you're still experiencing grief or experiencing, feeling sick or experiencing anger, or all of those things. Again, that's a miracle. It's a miracle that you can have those experiences. It's a miracle that you can grieve. And, you know, those things are part of their part of human life and human existence. They're part of our incarnation on this planet. And a lot of people talk, you know, a lot of people live their life avoiding these things, or, you know, trying to overcome them. I, you know, in My take is that that's not exactly the right attitude. My experiences to go into them is to go through them. It's hard. I mean, that is not that's a warrior path, right? diving deep into your unpleasant feelings, diving deep into grief, diving deep into the parts of your life that you don't particularly care for. That is absolutely a warrior path. But what I think that does and has done for me is it does Give me
a greater experience of the Divinity that is inside all of us. That divine spark, the part of us, that is connected to everything that the part of us that is immortal, that is inseparable from the universe that is, you know, when I say part, it's really weird, it's like, there is really no part we can experience that as a part, it's easier to talk about it as a part, but it's inseparable. It's part of the universe, unity of the entire universe, our divine self, or spirit, the spark that's inside of us. It's sort of like, Well, one way to describe it, I guess, would be if I had, if I had a glass of seawater, and I took it into the ocean with me, and I dove into the ocean, right? There's sort of this you know, the, the glass creates this sort of experience of separateness with the, you know, the water that's inside the glass, but ultimately, ultimately, that water is connected to the entire ocean and is inseparable. That's a little bit what your divine spark is like. And so the things that can give you a greater experience of your divinity, I think are the whole point, you know, one of the one of the whole points, but you know, kind of the entire goal of enlightenment, awakening, spiritual development, whatever name you want to put on it. Labels don't really, you know, labels do not apply, well, whatever we call it, when we start to slap names on it, it's, you know, it's really, you know, the term they use is ineffable, right, it's unnameable. We try to slap a name on it. You know, for simplification sake, I speak about the universe, right? You know, what really is that it's, you know, it's one word that describes everything there is in this in this reality. That's a really big shortcut. So really what I want to leave you with, you know, and I try to be practical whenever I can on these podcasts. Oh, and by the way, I'm going to have an exciting guest. My next podcast, I have lined up a guest, a good friend of mine. I won't give away what we're going to talk about yet, but it will be my first guest. This will be my first she will be not yet she will be my first guest on this podcast. So stay tuned for that, make sure you subscribe. You know, however you listen to podcasts, make sure you subscribe to this one. So you don't you don't miss that miss out on that. But I'm going to leave you with a piece of practical, practical practice. That sounds a little bit redundant. I'll leave you with a bit of practice, you can decide whether or not it's practical. And this is something you do not have to make it a formal exercise or formal practice. But as you're going through your day, today and off into the future, whenever you think about it, take a moment and observe something in your experience. So look at something touched something, taste something if it's safe to do so. smell something, have a sensory experience of something or you know, do all of the above. You know, when I talk about eating, eating chocolate cake, look at the cake, taste the cake, smell the cake, feel the cake in your mouth. Was it sound like when you're chewing on the cake, I don't know. But have an experience. take a pause. Whatever you're experiencing at the moment. take a pause and just allow the understanding that I am constructing all of this. This you know, it's not to say there isn't cake out there. It's not to say there isn't cake in the world. But your experience of the cake is being constructed by your consciousness. just become aware of that allow that experience To allow yourself to feel that experience, What's that like?
And, you know, you could tap at the end of the practice, you could tack on a little thing like, Well, isn't that a miracle? Or isn't that miraculous, or what a miracle, or anything that allows you to just appreciate, have the experience of appreciation for taking a moment, and realizing that you are existing in a living miracle. Which is, you know, we'll use the word consciousness and again, consciousness is small word or for a really huge topic. So I will leave you for this episode. I sincerely appreciate everybody who listens. One of the things I love to do, when I look at the statistics for this podcast is I look at where people are listening to this, and I'm so excited. I'm excited for everybody who's listening. But I'm extra excited about the people outside of the United States, which is my home country, where I'm, you know, I'm, I'm recording this from, I am really excited to see that I'm really excited to be able to connect with people in Russia and India, and Japan, and Nepal, and Bangladesh. And I want you to know that I do love and appreciate each and every one of you. Just as human beings, you know, definitely especially that you're tuning into this podcast and letting me connect to you. It does, it means a lot to me. And I want to make this podcast as useful and lovely. And, you know, make your time listening to this worthwhile I want you to when you're you know, when you're listening to these things, you know, it'll learn some stuff or have a realization or you know, I want to pique your interest in something that maybe you do a little bit more research into. But I want you to find this useful, and I want you to find this time valuable. And I would encourage you to reach out to me through my website. If you have any suggestions for topics or things that you'd be interested in me talking about or want to learn more or provide feedback. I do love that. I do love it when people reach out. My website is maineshaman.com that's MaineShaman.com.
Announcer 48:17
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