Make yourself a
living example of the spirit. Do not say that you will be in the future; say that you are
now. And you are because you are the exact image of the Supreme.
—Anonymous
It’s the law! What
life’s experiences will be depends upon where we are in consciousness. Emmet Fox put
this principle simply when he said, "Life is consciousness." This statement is
like a two-edged sword. The first edge we may see is the cut of blame and shame—It’s
all my fault. It may take a second look beyond the blame to see the edge that
is our point of power—If it’s not what I want, I can change it!
Understanding this principle makes us victors instead of victims, captains of our souls
and not helpless captives carried along on life’s unpredictable tide. In order to
wisely cut ourselves free from past limits, we need to know the three avenues of awareness
available to us and the results of following each one.
The first and obvious one is
the consciousness of ourselves as physical beings. It was the first awareness we projected
in the world. As infants we were very aware of our physical needs and
desires—comfort, hunger, thirst, physical safety and security. And we were certainly
vocal about making our needs known without shame. Sometimes people live their entire lives
with the belief, "I am a physical being," and never go beyond. This avenue of
thinking includes the ideas that things run out; there isn’t enough to go around.
Life becomes a process in which we seek to meet physical and material needs. We may even
believe that the physical body has the ability to kill us. Faced with outer appearances
and human diagnoses, we find ourselves afraid and think, "My God, something going on
in my body is going to kill me."
Sometimes we can become so
wrapped up in outer physical things that we aren’t even aware of how physical we have
become. Even our religious life can be centered in physicality. We may go to church,
appear to be quite religious, read all the right books, believe what the scriptures have
to say and still be in a physical or materialistic state of mind. How can that be? When we
accept only the surface of things and maintain a literal understanding of spiritual
concepts, when we attend church, participate in baptism and communion as only physical
acts which must be done to fulfill religious requirements, and fail to see the spiritual
reality in back of it all, then we continue to think of ourselves as physical beings. In
this way we reduce religion to materialistic physical acts and behavior aimed at earning
some future reward when physical existence ends.
The next avenue of awareness
is the mental state. "I have a physical body with physical needs and desires, but I
think; therefore, I am." Following this road of awareness, a person sees himself as a
mental being, aware of his thinking and feeling natures and subject to the push and pull
of them both. We all know what human emotions can do and the roller coaster ride they can
provide. Often we are slaves to our thinking. We let thoughts think us instead of
exercising our power to control thought. The trap we can fall into is to believe that we are
our thoughts and feelings rather than that we have thoughts and
feelings.
Either of these two avenues
leads us to cut off the greater part of our lives, to be unaware of the greater part of
ourselves. We have bodies, but in reality we are not our bodies. They are our good and
faithful servants, vehicles through which we express in this world. We have thoughts and
feelings, not just as a result of what happens to us in the outside world of sense, but
also as a means of expressing something greater. You have seen and experienced and felt a
lot in this lifetime, but none of it had the power to harm the "I" of you. The
essence of you is still there, perfect and whole and the same. No matter how your body has
changed through the years or how your thoughts and feelings have come and gone, the same
"I" has observed them all and remained unchanged because it is what is real and
eternal in you.
Moses was a basket case who
grew into a great work. He was placed in a basket, set afloat on a river, found by
Pharaoh’s daughter and raised as one of the royal family. What a clear
image—from our real home in spirit to birth in physicality. Consciousness of
ourselves as physical beings is like living in Pharaoh’s house. He represents
materialism and a perception of life from an outer point of view. When Moses was about
forty years old, his perception began to change. When he saw one of Pharaoh’s men
beat an Israelite, he was so outraged by the injustice that he killed the Egyptian. After
forty years it was time for change. Forty represents the time it takes for completion of
some life cycle. The Egyptian’s death represents the death to physical consciousness.
Some of us have lived in Pharaoh’s house for twenty years or seventy, or however long
it takes us to begin to see that there is more to life. Then it is time to follow Moses to
the next phase of awareness.
After Moses killed the
Egyptian, he fled to Midian to escape Pharaoh. Midian is not the promised land of
spiritual consciousness. It represents the mental realm. Here Moses worked as a shepherd
tending sheep to acquire a wife—Zipporah. Sheep represent thoughts and Zipporah
represents the emotional nature. This signifies a shift from physical consciousness to the
mental. If I am not just a physical being, then I must be mind. After another forty years
Moses had a vision. He transcended the physical for the mental and then entered some deep
thought state to break into a whole new awareness. He had a spiritual experience at a
burning bush. The bush commanded, "Take off your shoes; the ground whereon you stand
is holy ground." Of course we have to take off our human understanding and free
ourselves from the limits of human consciousness as physical or mental beings in order to
see the reality all around us.
After he removed his shoes,
Moses heard, "I AM that I AM." I am I—a spiritual being. This represents
our spiritual awakening, a preliminary step which eventually leads to the fullest
expression of the highest within us. Aware of this reality Moses went back to Egypt, not
as a slave or a captive but as a savior to lead his people out of bondage to limited
beliefs and concepts and into the limitlessness of spiritual awareness.
Each of the three forty-year
periods of Moses’ life represents a level of awareness—physical, mental and
spiritual. The total time of his life was 120 years, which is a multiple of 12, and
represents spiritual completion—the end of our journey and the beginning of our real
lives. At this point in your life, where are you? What avenue of awareness are you
following now? Is it leading you to the experiences you desire? We do live in each of
these lands—the physical, mental and spiritual—and each has its reward. But the
body will never be the best, express the highest and healthiest that it can until we see
it as the expression of divine spirit. Our thoughts and feelings will never reflect the
highest and most sublime until we know our source in spirit, expressions of the One. It is
the spiritual alone which makes the physical and mental complete.
Life is
consciousness and how we shape it is up to us. To identify with spirit at every turn is to
open the door on a greater world—the transcendent kingdom of heaven all around and
within. Moses entered into this world when "his face shone because he had been
talking with God." (Exodus 34:29) Jesus experienced it on the mount of
transfiguration when "his garments became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller
on earth could bleach them." (Mark 9:3)