Insights and Inspirations 4: The slow but steady decline of spiritual awareness

A new series examining aspects of spiritual life you may not have considered before.

Part Four: The slow but steady decline of spiritual awareness

Concept by Michael G. Reccia and R. Jane Kneen. 

One might assume that the countless material and technical advances humanity has made as it has ‘evolved’ through the ages to the present day have contributed much that is positive and vital to the wellbeing of all human souls on this planet. For example, generally speaking we are now infinitely more comfortable, better sheltered, wealthier, more able to communicate effectively across distance and to traverse that distance quickly and safely; privy to a year-round supply of a wide variety of life-sustaining and palette-pleasing foods from around the globe, and so on, than we have ever been in this current cycle of civilisation. From a spiritual standpoint, however, the intellectual and technical achievements of civilisation can also clearly be seen as the slow smotherer of spiritual consciousness and higher-consciousness-connection as the deification of the material increasingly blinds us to our Divine origins and capabilities… relentlessly distancing us from who and what we really are, clouding our true reasons for being here, denying us our rightful place in the scheme of things and ignoring our connection to all things.

To substantiate this claim, let’s hop into the ‘time machine’ and journey way back to a point in our ancient history at which modern science and academics would refer us as being ‘primitives’. ‘Primitive’ we may have been when compared to the academic ‘accomplishments’ and material opulence of the modern world, but at that time, having, in terms of the Akashic history of this world, only ‘recently’ begun to revisit the Earth as spirits in physical form following the most recent ‘Fall’ of civilisation (for a complete explanation of this cataclysmic cyclic event and its origins I would strongly recommend you refer to Joseph’s landmark book the Fall) we also, as ‘innocents abroad’ as it were, unpolluted by yet-to-unfold millennia of complexity and overthinking, happened to have a far better equipped spiritual toolbox than any 21st-century human does. We were, compared to ‘today’s model’ of the human being, infinitely more in tune with ourselves and our non-corporeal origins, with our true nature and with the natural world around us. Consider that we were capable of conscious communication with deva spirits; we acknowledged the rhythms of the Earth and lived and worked in harmony with those cycles; we established and revered sacred spaces… and community and family – the strength and value of the tribe – were recognised as vital factors that allowed us to survive and to thrive.

Crucially, there was a far more active connection to our heart-minds in that distant-past era and, as a result, to opportunities, taken by activating that built-in spiritual interface, to explore and maintain a real-time link to the Divine and to seek, obtain, trust and rely on spiritual inspiration and guidance from within. Further, and while understanding it was not the be-all-and-end-all, we embraced our physicality more consciously… our head-minds – those fight or flight computers in our skulls – being gainfully occupied by the concerns of our day-to-day survival. The head-mind had not yet appointed itself as the ruler supreme of our physical consciousness; had not yet taken over from the heart as the prime focus of our being and the prime motivator of our actions.

Next, our personal connection to the Divine, already struggling to maintain itself having been severely weakened and clouded due to the effects of the Fall, was muddied even further as organised religions became more established and grew increasingly complex and power-hungry, many of them vigorously enforcing the man-made dictate that a holy ‘go-between’ was essential in presenting the concerns and requests of the individual to the Divine. Slowly but surely individual and community-based reliance on the God-within began to wane as religions grew in influence, a percentage of them actively discouraging their members from examining – or even daring to think about – the greater mysteries for themselves, simultaneously marking out strict mental parameters for their flocks to adhere to and to be confined within, the penalty for not doing so being exclusion from their religion, from society and from heaven – and/or worse.

In relatively modern times – the past few decades up to the present – the new religion of ‘convenience’ has further distanced us from our spiritual origins, blossoming at an alarming rate during the past handful of decades from that seed first planted at the time of the industrial revolution which introduced us to a brave new world offering us commodities we previously didn’t know we needed and comforts we previously didn’t realise were lacking in our lives; a shift in core aspiration that has moved us even further away from spiritual contemplation and into an ever deeper focus on the material. The natural world and our connection to it has increasingly taken a back seat, with us concentrating instead on getting our hands on the next shiny bauble; on that must-have acquisition that promises so much yet can deliver only a sudden but temporary high – a transient rush of contentment that leaves us panting for more.

As we journey back to the here and now – today – we discover the final misstep in the process of allowing ourselves to be incrementally divorced from the spiritual. The gravest threat to maintaining that essential connection to our spiritual roots in this cycle is snapping at our heels at this very moment, with many of us completely unaware of it or choosing to ignore it as we opt for ultimate convenience and non-thinking ease in all aspects of our lives.

We shop online rather than visiting a store. So convenient. We wave our cards over readers rather than choosing to punch in our PIN numbers, themselves once regarded as a convenience when compared to those oh-so-troublesome bank notes we used to carry around and had to heft out of our pockets and wallets with great physical effort. We are willingly handing over ‘menial’ tasks, and many not-so-menial ones, such as the blessing of actually being able to think, reason and form moral opinions, to our AI systems, trusting in the unfeeling machines we have created to take the decisions big and small we would hitherto have taken for ourselves as individuals.

Unable to look away we gaze enrapt into our mobile phones and other devices day and night, ignoring the beauty and potential of the world around us… the world that is also a living, feeling spirit; the world that we are here to interact with and which, through its generosity and patience, supports and maintains our physicality…for now. We are even planning to surgically implant chips into our God-given brains to dispense entirely with the inconvenience of the decision-making process. These procedures are already being hyped and touted as ‘enhancing the human being to the next level’. Hmmm – could it possibly be, seeing as how we were designed by the Divine, that our quest to improve on the already-perfect is not only ill-advised, but also highly foolish and dangerous?

So – here we stand. We have arrived at a pivotal point in our history where, step by step, we have all but eradicated our ability to think, to examine logically, to reach out with our hearts, to consider anything greater and ‘wiser’ than ourselves. We‘ve done this willingly and naively as a global society. IF we take the final step, blending ourselves with our machines and handing over our spiritual sovereignty to them, the disconnect with our earthly raison d’être will be complete and absolute – and at that point the brutal truth is that there will no longer be any reason for us, as spirits, to incarnate here.

Humanity teeters at the edge of the precipice. The path we tread over the next few years – perhaps over the next few months – will either reestablish and reinforce our spiritual roots, leading to a reinvigorated society that has much in common with that of our ‘primitive’ ancestors, or one in which we face a Godless, and perhaps mercifully short, future as mindless worshippers of technology and materiality, unthinking slaves of convenience always choosing what is easy for us over what is good and right and harmonious and spiritually-based, permanently disconnected from our greater selves, our greater purpose and the bigger picture.

The key to ensuring this does not happen lies in keeping our heart connection alive and strong, recognising and applying a greater power, a higher energy, to our lives and having the strength and moral fortitude to say NO to and reject anything that could cause our moral compass to fail and us, as a result, to become shipwrecked on the rocky, treacherous reefs of rampant materialism and inflexible head-mind thinking.

To conclude, and to contrast with our current ‘civilised’ lack of spirituality, allow me to return you to that time when we would be regarded from today’s standpoint as ‘primitives’, and in doing so to illustrate just how advanced, how spiritually-minded we were then with a trio of short excerpts – truly beautiful words – taken from addresses given to us by the soul group member we respectfully refer to as ‘The Aboriginal Gentleman’ (featured in the book Many Voices, One Mission).

‘We understood about the ‘secret places’ of the world, and to us they were not secret because at that time we communicated with the Earth. We spoke to the Earth, and we knew there were places where you could talk to the spirits of the Earth and that the spirits of the Earth and the Earth itself would speak back … would tell us if it was happy …what was wrong with it …and what we could do to restore a balance and to ensure that energies flowed as they were supposed to flow.’

‘We were aware of the nature spirits and the great devas, and would commune with them. We would ask them if they would take care of our crops and our animals. They would, when we were not directly speaking to them in the sacred places, talk to us through our animals and inform us of anything they wished to communicate to us. So, it was quite natural for us to commune with the planet and with the planetary forces that sustained the planet in a state of equilibrium.’

‘…And nature was our byword and the yardstick by which we lived because everything we did was designed not to disturb nature – not to disturb the natural path of the evolving planet that would sing to us. And the devas would sing to us and show us, in the dreamtime, a picture of the destiny of the Earth and of the evolution of the planet, the solar system and the heavens.’

…I think you’ll agree it’s high time we worked together to regain so much that we have lost … high time we re-established a spiritual approach to our lives, to each other and to our world.