The Essential I, Spirit-Beingness, and Individuality
While Jim and I were exploring what had been and was taking place in spiritual terms culturally, in the spring of 1977 before the crisis over my father’s forthcoming passing on, we went to Esalen along the northern California coast at Big Sur for a five day workshop in mind, body, and spirit. It was there that we met a “body-worker” we continued to see in a coastal town about three hours from where we lived, twice a month for about a year. A large part of the premise of his activities was the idea that painful past memories are stored in one’s muscles and tissues, and by pressing on these tight places, those held memories and body tensions could let go and soften.
One day when I was on the massage table while Jim was reading in a nearby room, where I was amidst an environment in which I felt totally safe, I found myself leaving my body from my back, somewhat lower than my navel. As I left I said, “Goodbye, Bill.” He asked, “Where are you going?” to which I replied, “Down.” Then “I” was in a realm in which I directly knew myself as myself and no other, with no body or thoughts. I was pure awareness, within a dimension of soft, timeless, vibrant stillness, with limitless probabilities available.
From somewhere Bill’s voice reached me when he said, “Turn over.” I remember following its energy sounds as I returned to my body organism. Afterward, I didn’t know how to think about this astonishing event. Yes, I had used a meditation where I was not my body, I was not my thoughts, etc., but somehow I couldn’t make connections with the meditation for many inwardly sensed reasons. Yes, I had read numerous accounts of out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, but my experience wasn’t similar to what I read because I didn’t have a body or thoughts during it. “I” had been in a place of pure being, direct knowing, and Oneness. So at the time I wrote about the whole thing, and in order to refresh my memory I have recently read my description of the event and what it was like to be me, in that dimension of my being.
For years I puzzled about what had happened until I finally figured out, to my own satisfaction, that somehow I had been gifted with an experience that I later called “the Essential I,” where I knew myself and my individuality at my core. And “I” have never been the same since that time. The Essential I is a starting place for me in terms of knowing what I am, which I always keep in mind. Combined with spirit-beingness, it is my basic identity in relationship with this reality system.
The best perspective I’ve been able to come up with so far is one where my desire as an Essential I for experiences brought me into spirit-beingness, where there is light, sound, energy generations, and subtle forms. This includes having individual conscious awareness. From there, as a combined Essential I and spirit-being, I chose to be involved with this Earth system of physical reality, both its basic form and the software of patterns (bands B and A) that are mixed into it.
I think for most of us when we say “I am (something),” we are identifying with whatever that is, and for the moment it makes up our identity. As an example, if I say “I am a human being,” in my own mind I automatically become all that concept means to me, at least temporarily. The same goes for saying “I am a female,” or “I am a consumer,” or my saying “I am an Essential I/spirit-being.” From my point of view, it is important to be able to move in and out of these various belief structures in order to experientially understand one’s innate flexibility and the power of one’s mental constructions. In a later chapter I’ll be describing what I think are the divinity-based powers each of us uses, most often automatically, as a combined Essential I and spirit-being with a human form.
Regarding individuality, as I understand it, being an individual within a matrix of competition where there isn’t enough for everyone is quite different from being in other realities and matrixes that don’t include designs of adversaries and dominators, where each of us is seen as a precious spirit-being person, a unique individual who can contribute to the overall well-being.
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