Spiritual Self, Animal Self, Dream Self

One often hears people say that God created all of our animal appetites and so therefore all of our animal appetites are tantamount to being sacred. Well, this completely misses the point of the distinction between spirituality and carnality.

After all, most Religious and Spiritual Traditions come to us with mythologies that very well indicate the distance between spirituality and carnality. Carnality is often depicted as a decline from some original pristine spirituality. Well, to be candid, if the truth be told, there probably never was any original pristine spirituality. Indeed, it is likely that we have arisen and evolved out of the basest animal materialism. But the mythologies are there not so much because they are literally true, but because they are trying to make a point. We can see ourselves as spiritual beings, or we can accept ourselves as simple beasts.

We can see this in not only the religious mythologies but also in the spiritual practices, where in all of the various ascetic traditions we note the intention of controlling, mastering and even transcending the physical appetites, all the things of the animal body.

You know this distinction between animality and spirituality is not so cerebral, not so obscure, as one might assume. I had once read an essay by a French author who argued that there were two basic elements of humor – two things that people find funny and make people laugh. The first was ambiguity, a double meaning. We could also have what is a corrupt form of ambiguity, that something simply not make sense… that it be merely stupid, which would be enough to make idiots laugh. The second element of humor is any suggestion of human mortality or animality. You see, most people live with an innate assumption of being Spiritual Beings, and so when it is suggested or indicated that one is actually mortal, actually an animal, then that evokes a laugh. Sex humor, poop humor, pratfall humor, it all confronts and challenges our almost universal assumption that we are spiritual beings. Well, those who have no sense that they are spiritual beings probably don’t have much of a sense of humor. Indeed, even ambiguity is something of an attack on our sense of spirituality, that our minds – our spiritual discernment – can be tricked with a play on words.

Indeed, by the way we say we are Human Beings, so as to distinguish ourselves from the animals, is another indication of our inherent spiritual pretensions.

But we still have people who say that since God had created us with all of the animal characteristics and animal appetites, then we should be delighted to be animals. Well, here let me argue that since God can only be understood in terms of His Eternal Being, and since Eternity is not nearly over yet, then God’s job of creating us can not be considered to be done and over with, not yet. We may have started as animals, but we should consider that we are all in the process of being made, by God, ourselves and the Universe, into Spiritual Beings, like the Angels.

Also, we should take the long view and consider that we will not have much of a future as animals, since the longest we may hope to live for is about 70 or 80 years. Death destroys the animal. Now, if we apply ourselves to our spirituality, then we can survive death and continue on as Astral Beings, or whatever. But those people who delight that God had made them into wonderfully sensuous animals, well, that simply can’t last. The identification with the body becomes problematic. Young people may not be aware of any trouble in this regards. You see, it is young people who can so easily glory in being bestial and sensuous, as all of their equipment is working without the slightest hitch. There are no humorous hints to their flawed mortality. But as they get older and sensuality goes into decline; indeed as most of the appetites encounter the problems of decline, then it is no longer so easy to simply assume there is a strict correlation of identity between soul to body.

You know, the spiritual practices from the various established traditions are probably the best way to go, but everyone has something of a built in Religion, if they know how to pay attention to is. We all dream. And dreams present us with messages, quests, choices, tests and opportunities – enough to carry us through a lifetime. Of course, one can waste these dreams by making all the wrong choices, all the wrong responses, taking all the wrong forks in the road. But, as I said, one needs to pay attention. Dreams will tell us when we are wrong. Recurrent dreams will give us second chances if we are smart enough to take them.

It is because of the inherent spiritual wisdom of dreams that many primitive cultures can attain to an adequate enough level of shamanistic spirituality simply by taking their dreams seriously. Dreams give us Angels, Gods and Goddesses, ideals, advice, guidance, and then even the doorway to Astral Projection and out of body experience.

If one becomes accustomed to identifying with the Dream Self and then the Astral Self, then one is less likely to be spiritually weighed down by body consciousness. Now, many people assume that the Dream Self is simply the same of the Body Self, but caught in a purely subjective dream world of what they suppose is a personal subconscious mind. Actually, the Dream Self has a rather large life of its own. Here I will suggest that you try something in your dreams, and you need not have to be entirely lucid to do so, as you can influence your dreams simply by suggesting to yourself to perform certain actions and to make certain choices, though you may in fact become lucid in following these suggestions. Ask yourself to access your dream memory. It need not be any big thing. I once simply wondered to myself during a dream about the last time in a dream I had been to this one certain cross roads. Well, the memories flooded upon me, of numerous dream visits to this vicinity, and then memories of other nearby areas and towns. It was overwhelming. It became obvious that my Dream Self went way beyond the dreams that I could remember, those brief REM experiences. You see, even when we are not visiting with our Dream Self, as we do when we have our Dreams, our Dream Self is still busy and active in its own Dreaming.

I suppose that this Dream Self can be quite primitive at times, though noble in its own way. And so it is that when the Body Self gets to merge and visit with the Dream Self during dreaming, it provides a chance for the Body Self to instruct the Dream Self in certain point of Civilized Wisdom. Particularly if one can attain to the state of Lucid Dreaming, where one can impose one’s Waking Consciousness upon the Dream Self – this gives the Dream Self an experience of the Waking Self and may substantially alter its moral perspective of things.

Now, I am not one to insist that everything from our Waking Life is better than everything in our Dreaming State, so the best wisdom is probably that the Waking Self and the Dream Self can learn from and be informed by each other. Oh, but this does presuppose that one in one’s waking life has acquired to any wisdom – spiritual, religious or otherwise. If not, then the Dream Self may perhaps have a monopoly on all of the good sense.

Well, anyway, what it all comes down to is that one cannot say definitively that God created us this way or that way. You see, our lives are a continuous process of creation and expansion of consciousness, where we have every opportunity to become more and more spiritual, being able to go way beyond simply being two-legged animals.