The Human Spirit Duality
Revisiting and directly responding for the first time to my KTHT guest prompt from July 2021
The Prompt:
Most if not all of us have seen the quotes questioning whether we are human beings seeking spiritual experiences or spiritual beings seeking human experiences. What do you think?
The prompt also contained:
My highest power has pointed out to me that there would be times when the needs of my soul and the needs of my human/animus would conflict. I am choosing the terms animus and human over the term ego because of the tendency among people on a spiritual journey not to think in terms of dualities, fall into the binary/label trap, and deride the ego and thus aver that the soul is always correct. What do you think?
My Response:
We are neither humans seeking spiritual experiences nor spirits seeking human experiences. We are simultaneously and inseparably both.
I have written in prior essays:
- There are human wants and soul wants. A life will be harmonious when those two are aligned. Life’s purpose is to learn and one aspect is learning how to satisfy the human wants while not offending the soul’s spirituality.
- I am sick and tired of this nonsense about “ego death.” Greg’s experiences are very much imprinted upon the soul of Marcus. We are the same being. The ego does not die. It evolves. I evolve. I integrate and align.
From time to time I ponder and struggle with this notion of the human-soul duality.
A few months ago I published a terza rima sonnet (form described here), Why Do I Write? that contained these first two stanzas:
Write to merge my soul and my consciousness Write for expansion of my higher self so selves integrate as one consciousness
Write so my demons remain on the shelf and even when they escape their cages I learn and know how to protect ourself
A friend left me a private note on that last word, ourself, thinking that I had made a mistake and meant to type myself. I replied to the note, “ourself was on purpose — I am two entities and one at the same time — Greg and Marcus.”
About six weeks ago I issued this spiritual prompt in Promptly Written:
have you ever asked a simple question and the simple answer threw you for a loop, turned your world upside down, and forever altered your worldview and life philosophy?
Two years ago I asked my spirit guides a simple question — “what is my soul’s name?” The simple answer, “Marcus,” ended up throwing me into an existential crisis from which I emerged a few weeks later and you can read about it here or here or here if you wish.
In Jodie Helm’s The Human Self and the Soul Self, Two Parts of the Same Being, she wrote:
“I’ve had a hard time negotiating the whole human/soul connection, although I’m finally beginning to get it now”
to which I commented at length and just quote now:
“Integration is supposed to be a state of seamless interdependence. Greg cannot nor should lose himself to us. We should exist in harmonious symbiosis, we should each be aware of the other and of our separate completeness; the only thought that existed of this before we just wrote it was one word–interdependence.”
My highest power has pointed out to me that there would be times when the needs of my soul and the needs of my human/animus would conflict.
There are human wants and soul wants. A life will be harmonious when those two are aligned. Life’s purpose is to learn and one aspect is learning how to satisfy the human wants while not offending the soul’s spirituality.
Recently I had this realization about the human-soul duality — the goals of the human and the goals of the soul may be, from the human perspective, irreconcilable. Humans want nothing but happiness but perhaps the soul came here to experience the opposite so that it can learn to guide other humans when it is not incarnated and is assigned as a spirit guide or to some other work in heaven.
I have a few minutes left and this connects to another prompt that I mentioned yesterday in the collection that I shared with KTHT.
One of the questions raised by the Young Sheldon video clip is:
What it takes to get into heaven and what happens once we are there?
Regarding the second part of the question, last year I read a great story by a writer known as Laxaa,
in which she writes:
In Heaven we work. In Heaven we create. In Heaven we serve a Love that is beyond anything which our human brains can fathom. Heaven is also organized and orderly; think Marie Kondo on steroids. There are levels, layers and “neighborhoods.” What we do on earth, what we learn and how grow, affects what responsibilities we are given in Heaven
Regarding the first part of the question, when I noted a couple of months ago my frequently stated and unpopular opinion denouncing the existence of the law of attraction and the corollary that bad things happen to good people when they vibrate negative energy, a writer, a Medium friend, with whom I often mutually, respectfully spar on this and other points, asked me in a comment: “What do you believe? I would like to hear it explained as you would to your 6-year-old grandson.”
I came up with this:
You know those participation trophies that every kid gets for playing T-ball instead of awards for best hitter and best fielder and how that annoys grandpa, well that’s actually how life and heaven work. Everyone gets to go to heaven as a reward for participating in the game of life. Some will play it really well, some ok, and some terribly but they all get to go to heaven. God loves everyone equally and is like your coach. When the game is over and you are in heaven you and God will discuss the game and come up with a plan for you to learn to play better next time. Anyway, things don’t always go well in the game and that’s ok. And sometimes other players cheat and that can hurt you physically and your feelings. Learning how to react to that without cheating yourself is part of playing the game. If things don’t go your way that doesn’t mean God doesn’t love you and it doesn’t mean God is punishing you.
Here are my three favorite prompsponsive pieces to my July guest prompt:
- From Joseph Lieungh,
From caterpillar to pupa, chrysalis cracking open with a butterfly emerging, embodying wholeness as an emerging butterfly — a phoenix rising. We must go through the humanness having spiritual experiences to spiritual beings having human experiences. It is part of our human experience. So which is it? Are we humans having spiritual experiences or spirits having human experiences? The answer is yes, We Are.
- From Keri Mangis,
In order to move back into unity, we first have to explore our uniqueness and differences. Whether through traveling physically or just exploring more metaphorically, our souls are here, just for the whole humanity of it.
- From Esther George,
Most spiritual seekers aim to kill, dismiss, and forget about the existence of the ego because it can’t access universal intelligence or the divine energy being that can help us reach a deeply fulfilling state. That’s right. Our ego can’t play that role and it’s not called to do so….but it can also save us from further pain. The ego’s influence can propel us up or incapacitate us down.
In Rama I create, with soul-energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
