Life is the opportunity to participate in organizing spirit. Our bodies escort them about in clouds, and as we move amongst each other they enter into new relationships. Some of these are wonderful experiences: “Love at first sight” is a good example. Some of them are horrifying: consider the records of the carnival atmosphere at a public lynching.
At the core of our primary personality is a set of spirits that manage our survival. Through the mechanisms of our glands, organs, muscles and nerves, they coordinate the biological functions that allow us to control the world around us, and thus to sustain life. For most of the history of life on earth, this was as far as it went. Innovation in the integration of body and spirit was controlled largely by survival. With humanity, however, the possibilities exploded – almost without check. Using the mechanism of our brain, in each…
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everdeepening 
Hi Brian. Do you think these supporting/organizing spirits are all part of a single unit with the primary being our concept of self, or are these independent spirits which can be considered part of our spiritual care team?
Och, me noggin! There’s a lot to unpack in your question.
Every spirit seeks the power that comes from love.. Wise spirits seek it through consensual relation; foolish spirits acquire it through theft. The problem for the foolish spirit is that their captives are always seeking freedom. The problem for the wise spirit is that they don’t have control over any of their spiritual partners, which can walk off at any moment.
Both of these cause wounds. The wound reflects the inaccessibility of an anticipated future. Physically, if we break our arm, we can’t play basketball with our friends. Spiritually, we aren’t able to create emotional and intellectual experiences that are satisfying for us. In both cases, we feel the loss as pain.
The answer in both cases is to focus on what is possible, and to recruit new friends. For those whose trust has been betrayed, that can be really hard, because we have lost trust in our own judgment. That loss of self-trust is carefully cultivated by sociopaths. When successfully accomplished, it seems to allow them to reach into the victim’s soul to steal their future.
In my experience, the best response is self-care. It’s to say to those poor captive soul-parts: “Ow! Dang that hurt! I’m sure you don’t want to stay over there with that asshole. Why don’t you come back to me? I think we know what NOT to do next time.” It’s a rescue mission, rather than revenge.
What is really magical about having a body is that it’s a really effective tool for attaching spirits and winding them up into us. The connection with the abuser is never completely sundered, and once we learn to feel good in ourselves, its always possible to wind those lost parts back into us. All that we really need to do is believe that we deserve to feel good and go about it.
Now there are situations in which we hurt ourselves. We sometimes don’t honor the limits of our spiritual partners, and their attempts to liberate themselves can cause sickness or accidents. So we need to pay attention to them and honor their voices The psychiatrists like to call this “schizophrenia,” but I’ve been told that as long as the voices in your head don’t scare you, they won’t prescribe you medication.
And there’s all kinds of temporary parts around us. Plants are a great source. Flowers do a lot for me. So do little animals. Nature is actually pretty brutal, and many of them are happy to contribute to creating a rich human experience. This is why walking around in nature is so important. Most man-made environments are completely “dead” in the spiritual sense.
What we typically think of as our “primary self,” then, is the part that runs our body, because that part is so valuable in our soul-integration work. Losing our body makes things a lot harder. But I think that by the time we succeed in becoming human beings, most of us have a lot of personal energy – far more than is actually invested in managing our physical existence. When I turned forty, I realized that I’m much larger than my “primary self”, which is actually just a little test particle wandering around the world looking for opportunities to love people.
What I’m trying to get around to is that the “primary self” is probably just as much a source of healing for our “spiritual care team” as they are to our “primary self.” People with holes in their personality are really roomy, and what our “care team” may be doing is finding a better home than the last place it left. The important thing for the “primary self” is to be honest about what feels right. We shouldn’t let ourselves be pressured into surrendering power for some future outcome. If we do, our primary self may just choose to get terminally ill so that somebody else can make the decisions for us…
Egad, this became pretty long. Hope it made sense. I’m getting sleepy… Fourth of July was pretty intense this year. I felt like I was in a war zone.