How do we grow spiritual instincts?
Grow Truth and Love
While life evolves from instinctively primitive to intelligently blended, spirit gently tugs.
Spiritual Animals
Some things are obvious and others are not, as life is both physical and spiritual.
Spirit is everywhere, within all living things and beyond, regardless of whether or not it is perceived or valued. Spirit is comparable to unheard radio waves or invisible television signals that reveal interesting sounds and sights when tuned-in with a physical device. We are physical devices receiving and broadcasting spirit. Many seek to tune-in spirit, but some are unaware of spirit, particularly when distracted by self-serving instincts, fears, and desires. Poor transmission and reception often cause signals to lack clarity as some may be somewhat aware, but experience interference. Spirit is a positive energy of love that we can learn to tap into, with or without religion. With a positive spiritual focus our reception improves like adding an antenna. A positive attitude enhances the spiritual signals we receive and broadcast. A loving energy can amplify spiritual energy like the passionate harmony of a rich and thunderous chorus. Spiritual energy resonates like sympathetic vibration that resound and reverberate within strings of life. We broadcast spiritual signals that bounce around and echo as shared energy within life’s networks.
A purpose in life is to grow and evolve. Our awesome powers to create and destroy comes with responsibilities. Spiritual energy within each individual is minuscule in relation to the spiritual energy within all life. While each life has inherited self-serving instinct, spirit common to all life, powers each life, with a responsibility to all life and environments. As evolving life grows physically and spiritually, the less evolved are more instinctively driven and the more evolved become more spiritually driven. Life happens to primitive beings and life generates from evolved beings. The same Divine spirit within each individual is within all life but at different levels of physical and spiritual evolution.
All life is related; it is just a matter of how far back on the family tree one must go. All life can be traced back to simple forms of common ancestors, while all life is interrelated as elements are recycled. Our breath is an example of one continuous cycle between plants and animals, whereby plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, which is then inhaled by animals and exhaled back into carbon dioxide for plants. Plants store energy from sunlight as fuel, thereby initiating a food chain that dines on sunshine. The eternal physical world of particles flow through, nourish, and constitute ever-changing physical bodies. From microscopic to huge, the interdependent journey through physical worlds within physical worlds is a diversity of relativity, with spirit, survival instincts, and potential to evolve.
Balanced growth from an instinctual animal to a spiritual being requires learning the difference. Instinctual beings are self-centered with cares for others determined by benefit to self, which generates outward as closeness loses intensity. Spiritual beings value the spirit within all life and serves the greater good in growing truth, love, and a healthy world. Instinctual beings will attack to conquer and attaches importance to revenge and vengeance strategies. Spiritual beings will defend as peacefully as reasonable and attaches importance to love, tolerance, and forgiveness.
Instinctual beings are primarily driven by fear and desire, while spiritual beings are primarily driven by love and caring. Physical life builds security and develops methods of physical control, while spiritual life learns sensitivities to others and develops the soft power of love, which eludes physical control. Primarily physical beings are more predictable in seeking desires, avoiding fears, and asserting power; while spiritually driven beings are more creative and caring. Primitive beings tend to have little interaction with offspring, whereas the more evolved beings tend to nurture offspring and have caring relationships. Physical life tends to compete in zero-sum games to determine winners and losers while spiritual tides lift and lower altogether. Physical power tends to grow, peak, and then fade, while spirit may steadily progress during the ups and downs along the way.
Setbacks are the norm as progress rarely precedes in a straight line. Short-term imbalances and unfairness are commonplace, but life eventually overcomes or begins again. Oscillations and growth trends will vary, but the long-term flow is from primarily physical forms of life to primarily spiritual forms of blended life. Eventually, the physical body dies and decays, while spirit proceeds untethered and retethered.
While a common religious approach is to accept everything as God’s will, this easy answer is deficient. While comforting acceptance seems appropriate in unsolvable situations, problem-solving generally requires actively searching for reasons and remedies. Discovering solutions and understanding causes is more likely to occur with curious effort. Life’s growth and longevity are not predetermined, even as each individual’s eventual separation of body and spirit is inevitable.
Problem-solving becomes easier when we break down root issues into physical and spiritual parts. Are physical or spiritual needs being neglected. Was an issue caused by something that happened or is it about how we chose to react to it? Is there something we should accept or something we can change? Was there a physical injury, spiritual injury, or both? Were animal issues driven by fear or desire? Are spirit values being neglected causing us to suffer anger, depression, regret, or some other issue? Were there simple mistakes due to lack of focus, misperception, or misinterpretation, or more acute physical problems caused by chemical, electrical, storage, or retrieval issues? Did a violation injure our spirit or damage self-identity? Did reactionary instincts fail or an overly emotional interpretation blur understanding? Was fear and intimidation confused with respect and admiration? Was physical desire confused with spiritual attraction or vice versa? Did spiritual wisdom fail to override inappropriate instinctual drives? Did guilt become debilitating or denial delusional? Is this problem just a temporary setback that can create lessons for future growth as it is overcome? Can we learn from bad choices that occurred? Real problems can germinate and grow as root issues can be physical, spiritual, or both.
Cognitive abilities influence our growth. Physically-based sensory inputs vary in strength and sensitivities as humans typically identify five senses, while some people claim to have extrasensory perceptions as well. Various animal species might sense magnetic fields, smell in color, employ radar, and much more. Various plants communicate and pass needed nutrients via interconnected root systems. Sensory inputs provide valuable albeit incomplete information even with sensory-boosting mechanical aids like microscopes, telescopes, hearing aids, and more. Interpretation of sensory information can influence emotions and reasoning.
Instinct drives the physical mind, while the spirit-driven mind exhibits healthy growth when fortified with love. The evolving mind resolves physical and spiritual conflicts, often by imagining and then pursuing better ways. Physical beings build upon instincts and past knowledge to grow new knowledge and develop intelligence. Basic instincts react from want or fear while evolving beings must often overcome basic instincts to proactively grow spiritually. Evolutionary growth continues in a spiritual direction as knowledge blends with spiritual love to produce gains in wisdom.
Successful life pursues physical and spiritual balance for healthy growth. Those leaning too far in a physical direction struggle in a cold distrustful competition for survival while those leaning too far in a spiritual direction may be overly emotional or seem blissfully unaware thereby naively vulnerable to predators. Disastrous imbalances in truth and love include potentially deadly scenarios like the loving gullibility regarding lessor evolved predators that prey on the vulnerable or great knowledge without compassion. Doomsday scenarios are even scarier like possessing great physical power, such as nuclear or biological weapons, without compassionate concern or loving restraint. Balance requires gains in physical power to be matched with gains in moral conscience as physical truths hopefully grow in tandem with loving spiritual truths. During uneven growth, a primarily physical being may lack spiritual growth and a primarily spiritual being may lack physical abilities, but gaining balance will increase chances of survival while contributing to a more loving world.
Evolving human beings grow through stages of physical and spiritual development. The pace of evolutionary change seems to accelerate exponentially as spiritual animals develop a mind that seeks to understand and love. A loving spiritual baby quickly changes into a vulnerable physical baby when distracted with discomforts of hunger, thirst, a soiled diaper, or feeling unloved. Primitive life is often preoccupied with physical challenges, while evolved spiritual life becomes more inclusive in expanding definitions of us. Shared spirit grows outward as physical identity expands beyond self to family membership and to ever larger groups. Life itself as the largest living group to which we have membership. Physical and spiritual vulnerabilities are always present in our constantly changing world because new challenges arise as old vulnerabilities are overcome. The successful adapt and change.
Evolutionary change favors traits that are environmentally compatible. Natural selection explains traits that are physically favorable in a competitive environment, but does natural selection explain traits that are spiritually favorable in a cooperative environment? Absolutely, as species evolve within more evolved environments, success requires cooperation. Reproductive systems, essential for lineage continuation, have evolved from simple to complex and from impersonal to intimate. As life evolves from simple lifeforms that can clone themselves with asexual mitosis in binary fission with no cooperation required, evolving life escalates in complexity and cooperation. Stages gradually progress, as with the incidental cooperation of pollinators advancing methods beyond impersonal remote fertilization that occurs in drifting currents or winds. Species evolve within evolving environments with gender differences that merge for internal fertilization after which nurturing continues long after birth.
Natural reciprocities can enhance cooperative life with complementary differences, such as with plants and animals, males and females, or others. The spiritual mind rules the animal mind when compassion overcomes instinct and caring collaboration advances life with all symbiotically linked.
Depending upon levels of spiritual evolution, life can seem heavenly or hellish as environments shape life and vice versa. Growth occurs in phases with setbacks, mistakes, and temporary imbalances. Imbalances often over-correct like a swinging pendulum. Stages of development occur over lifetimes and also over countless generations. Changes occur at differing rates, while physical growth or decay will not necessarily correlate with spiritual changes. The continuous push and pull of change can prove to be interesting, albeit challenging, but that’s life.
Before we die, Create and choose wisely
nobody lives forever.
Old people often live vicariously through the young watching them grow and learn. After surviving ages and stages, they have grown from more animal to more spiritual and now truly love living through others. They empathize with the feelings of children who laugh or cry. Old people feel joy when others are happy and joyful memories from youth are often triggered by observing actions of today’s youth. They often seem to know what young ones are thinking due to familiarity with the various growth stages and similar past experiences. Love and feeling connected now defines this old person more than the physical frailties encountered as the end of this journey approaches.
Life is a puzzling journey of growth. People tend to become more spiritual as they overcome wants and fears by successfully negotiating challenges with a growing amount of retained spirit referred to as soul. They eventually become totally spiritual with the physical and spiritual elements of identity dispersing into respective realms. They no longer have fears, physical distractions, or character flaws because those came from the animal side of life. After people die, their loving spirit continues to love and monitor loved ones. Without distractions about self, love shines with healthy hopes for the living. Animal instinct dies with the body, but fearlessly loving spirit continues to exist after death.
When identity ends with physical decomposition and dispersal of spirit, the echoing impacts of individual lives are heard in memories of the living and reverberations from effects on future lives. Secrets are revealed as truth and love are ubiquitous in the spiritual realm. Untethered spirit is now free to directly perceive spirit retained within the living, feel their emotions, and understand their cares because all spirit is part of the same spiritual energy. Still, even within a blissful realm as spectator, spirit is attracted to new adventurous journeys.
With a death, we mourn the loss of a physical relationship with our ability to communicate with each other, but we haven’t lost our spiritual relationship. Upon death, bodies decay, but spirit is home in the spiritual realm where all is one. Spirit goes unnoticed by the living that seeks growth within their blended world of both realms, but spirit is present with the living, caring and sharing the ups and downs with love.
Honor the spirit within all life; past, present, and future.
Hallelujah, praise spirit, value life.
AFTERLIFE and REINCARNATION
There are subtle differences between various afterlife notions. This work both agrees and disagrees with common notions of an afterlife and that life is reborn. Spirit is attracted to life.
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Some religions motivate positive behaviors with promises of rewards in heaven and threats of hell in the afterlife. However, the actual physical remains continue to be accounted for after death, sometimes in a coffin or urn, so this afterlife is for the spirit only. Spirit is eternal, but many afterlife concepts seem to magically include both spiritual and physical aspects of life. But physical and spiritual compositions constantly change, so even a magically recreated individual in heaven would require a specific point in time. Perhaps they are reborn in heaven as they wish to be, but if individuals entered heaven as they looked at the time of death, then heaven would be overpopulated with the injured and geriatric. This religion believes individuality is the blend that no longer exists upon death. This religion does not support traditional notions of heaven or the reincarnation notions that promote a cast system.
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Reincarnation advocates believe individual souls are reborn into new bodies, which are determined by the life achieved in the previous life, thereby justifying inherited status, while motivating positive behavior. However, each individual life is a particular physical/spiritual blend, so when the blended properties separate, the individual dies. The blended individual belonged to both realms, but with death’s separation, the physical corpse belongs only to the physical realm and spirit continues as collective spiritual energy within the spiritual realm. The individual is only a memory. Each new blend of physical/spiritual life is unique.
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Even though eternal physical particles are recycled and the soul is reborn in the way that shared eternal spirit will always power new life, this is not reincarnation. Individuality is a unique occurrence during a lifetime, after which, decay helps the physical particles of the corpse recycle into the physical realm and spirit proceeds untethered in the spiritual realm. The physical particles may quite likely become elements of other individual lifeforms, but this wouldn’t be considered a reincarnation or an afterlife. Spirit never dies and collective spirit is attracted to new life, so in a sense spirit is reborn, but these are new individual blends and this wouldn’t be considered a reincarnation or an afterlife.
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Each soul is an individual’s retention of collective spiritual energy. Soul is the amount of spiritual energy resonant within an individual at any given time. While souls separate from physical bodies upon death, soul is never separate from collective spiritual energy before, during, or after life. While promises of individual rewards in heaven and agonies of hell may motivate behaviors during life for many god-fearing individuals, heavens and hells are experienced during life and the future belongs to successors. Life is a fleeting opportunity to spiritually progress and pass wisdom and improved instincts to successors.