Ask The Council

How is It Possible There is No Separation Between Spirit and Human?

Jose’s Comments and Questions

Several months ago after reading one of our blog posts about how every human being – as a spiritual being in a human body – creates every aspect of their human experience (pleasant and unpleasant, wanted and unwanted), a thoughtful reader named Jose asked The Council whether humans have the free will and power to create a better-feeling human reality when we feel spirit is creating a reality we’d rather not experience. Jose also asked some additional questions about the nature of spiritual reality and it’s relationship to our human experience.

In response to his questions we did a session with The Council and published 5 separate posts describing The Council’s information and guidance for Jose and other readers interested in this information (links to these sessions at the end of this post). Recently Jose posted a comment expressing appreciation for the information in those 5 posts and how they opened his mind to some new questions. This post is the first in a series that describes two new sessions with The Council on Jose’s recent questions. This post was originally published on July 5, 2013 and has been revised several times as our understanding of these sessions evolved.

Feeling Separate From Spirit

Jose says The Council’s teaching that spirit sometimes creates challenging or difficult human experiences leaves him feeling like a slave or a pet; and spirit seems like an uncaring master who creates negative human experiences (like pain, loneliness, fear, lack, desperation, etc) to satisfy a selfish desire for spiritual expansion. Jose compares spirit to a matador who enters the bullfighting ring for the adrenalin rush, but has no compassion for the bull (which he equates with his body/mind/ego) that is physically hurt, humiliated, and is ultimately killed in the process. Jose concludes, “the mind/body has no choice but to follow blindly and painfully without knowing what the lesson or purpose was, is, or will be” in physical reality.

Jose also asks 3 questions related to these comments: one about why spirit would chose to be born as a child without limbs, one about why a buffer of time is needed between our human desire and our manifestation of what is wanted, and a question about whether it’s possible for spirit and its mind/body/ego to both simultaneously have free will to do what is wanted. Jose politely ends his comment with an apology if his questions sound too harsh, “but would love to know The Council’s opinion on the matter.”

Overview

The two sessions on Jose’s questions generated a lot of thought-provoking information and guidance from The Council – too much to comfortably include in one post. In this first post of the series, we focus on The Council’s advice regarding Jose’s feelings that spirit doesn’t care about the difficulties humans experience, and we address aspects of his question about a child born without arms and without legs.

We plan to follow this post with additional posts on Jose’s questions, and in each post we’ll focus on how you and Jose can feel more connected to spirit’s unconditional love when you feel like spirit, or something else out there, is giving you a hard time.

Praise for Jose’s Questions

Although Jose’s question may seem harsh, The Council offered the following praise for Jose:

“And we applaud him for his thinking, and how he is trying to explore different ideas. And so we hope, as he comes to the reading of this material, that he will begin to let [in] the feelings that will come with the words.”

Mind/Body/Ego is One with Spirit

If you’re looking for some uplifting spiritual reading and you’re not particularly sympathetic to Jose’s point of view, you may be wondering if you made a wrong turn with this post. But The Council says that from the point of view of who you are as an eternal spiritual being, there are no wrong turns in your human experience, only opportunities to use your free will and power of choice to find better-feeling ways of focusing your attention, and allowing more of the feeling of love you are in spirit into your human experience. And that’s a big part of what this post is about.

Here is The Council’s initial reply to Jose’s comments and questions:

“First we want to say here, you [Jose] speak of the spirit as something completely unattached and something completely separate from mind and body, when it is all one.

“So the spirit works through the body it has created. There is nothing that is going on that the body wants, that the spirit has not planned for. Is that understood?

“It is all one… the mind, the body, and the spirit… it is all one. And as Jose is speaking of it, he speaks as the body being the slave to spirit… as if the body is separated from spirit and must do what spirit says.”

–The Council
(The formatting above throughout this post represents The Council’s comments during our session. Text [in brackets] in these quotations has been added to improve readability and clarity when this seems useful.)

You Say Potato

It’s one thing to be told or reminded there’s no separation between spirit and the human mind/body/ego, and it’s another thing to believe it and feel it, particularly if you feel let down by spirit the way Jose describes. At one point during the session I (Bob) commented that Jose may feel like The Council’s point of view is a case of “you say potato and I say potahto.” (The Council laughed and offered a reply that we include later in this post.)

Nothing Going On That Spirit Hasn’t Planned For

When The Council asked if I understood what they were saying (in the quote above), it may have been a rhetorical question because they didn’t wait for an answer. But in listening to the session recording, the idea there is nothing going on that the body wants that spirit hasn’t planned for, was sufficiently intriguing that we did the second session, in part, to get more clarity on this idea. More on this in a future post to answer Jose’s question about whether humans have free will.

Like Hide and Seek

It’s been our understanding from earlier Council sessions that the reason spirit incarnates part of itself into a human body and allows it to go through challenging and sometimes painful human experiences, is to expand the love we are as spiritual beings into physical reality. When I mentioned this to The Council, hoping for some confirmation and possibly some elaboration on this idea and its relationship to Jose’s comments and questions, they chose to take the discussion in a slightly different direction.

“The fun part of coming into the physical reality is… as spirit we know what we want to create and we create what you in the physical consider as negative, [but] the spirit never considers what it creates negative.

“It [spirit] comes in knowing… I [the mind/body/ego] will forget what I am creating. It’s almost like if you were playing hide and seek, and know where everybody is – it’s not that much fun. So you have to go out and find them… the adventure is to find them.

“When spirit sends a part of itself into the physical reality… that particular part of itself [mind/body/ego]… it knows will forget what it’s trying to create. Do you understand that?”

Bridging the Gap

I said I understood, but during the session I didn’t really appreciate what The Council was saying here because I was focused on my own idea of what Jose’s issues are. I replied by suggesting the issue was to help Jose bridge the gap he’s experiencing between his mind/body/ego and who he is as a spiritual being. And I added that he seemed to be thinking about spirit the way many people have been taught to think that god is something outside themselves rather than part of who they are.

The Council appeared to overlook for the moment that I didn’t respond to their hide and seek analogy. They politely agreed with me and then circled back to their original advice for Jose.

“Exactly. So the first thing to readjust… or open your mind to… is that it is all one – there is no separation.”

Later in this post we address the comment that spirit never experiences what it creates as negative, and the idea spirit knows its human part will forget it is part of spirit.

If at First You Don’t Believe… Pretend

I commented that The Council’s advice (there is no separation) sounds like a good reminder for people already open to this idea, and I suggested that people like Jose experiencing a lot of resistance to spirit are probably looking for more convincing advice.

“Many who do not believe they are a spirit in a physical body, still hold on to the thought that what happens to them comes from an outside source – be it god… or something negative – that there is something outside that is creating what it [the human] goes through.

“So until you come to that understanding of who you are… which is why all of us [in spirit] have come in to give the new message, or to give the reminder… it is important to just start – if not believing – pretending you know you are spirit in a physical body, and that you do create what happens to you.

“Eventually, for the people who do not believe this, spirit will find another way for it to change its life (or deal with what is going on) by prayer: asking whatever you believe in to help you, and then with the belief that god or the source hears your prayer, you begin to change what you are experiencing. You will find a way – if you truly want to change your experience – to make that happen.

“The fun part of it is that you send part of yourself in [to a human reality]… forgetting who [you are as spirit]… and how powerful [you are]… forgetting whatever it is you [as spirit] want to experience… whether it is something joyful, or what you consider a challenge.

“And in that [human] situation the is: How will [I] handle it? And how will I bring love into that situation? And that is what every spirit is trying to create.”

Who (or what) is the Creator of Your Life Experience?

The idea that each of us is the creator of what we experience in our life is a relatively recent idea for the two of us. It was probably the teachings of the spirit guides, Abraham, in the Fall of 2009 that opened us to this idea.

It seems a lot more common for people to believe what happens in their life is coming from somewhere outside themselves. For example, when something good happens it’s common to think that god, or some other external source of goodness, has rewarded us, maybe for good behavior. And when something people think of as bad happens, it seems common to either imagine an external god is punishing us (maybe for what we think of as our bad behavior), or maybe there’s a belief in an external source of badness in the world, and it is responsible for experiences in life we think of as bad.

With so many people apparently believing the opposite of what The Council (and other spiritual teachers) are teaching, it’s easy to imagine that a large majority of people can’t be that wrong about something so fundamental, and it’s easy to doubt that a small minority have gotten it right. When thoughts and doubts like these occur, it’s useful to remember there was practically no doubt in anyone’s mind until around 1500 that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and the Catholic Church banned books advocating the Earth revolves around the Sun until the mid-1700s . This helps us put into perspective the likelihood a vast majority is capable of believing something that becomes just as unpopular in time.

Interestingly, The Council says that even if you believe what happens in your life is caused by something outside yourself, who you are as spirit will always find ways to make the most of whatever you believe, either by helping you deal with difficulties in your life, or helping you change what’s going on in your life.

Giving the New Message

We like this idea that lots of spiritual beings are interested in helping human beings remember we are spirit in human bodies. And we like the suggestion that if you don’t actually believe this, then practice pretending what it might feel like if you do believe. Use your imagination. There isn’t really anything to lose, and there’s much to gain. You always have the free will to go back to believing something outside yourself is creating the reality you experience.

Forgetting We are Spiritual Beings

It didn’t take long for The Council to come back to this idea that we forget we are powerful, eternal spiritual beings in a human body, and we forget our spiritual intention for choosing to live a human experience. This can be a challenge to understand, particularly when The Council repeatedly emphasizes the point there is no separation between spirit and human.

If you’re someone like Jose who experiences a lot of doubt about there being no separation, it can be easy to justify these doubts. After all, if there really is no separation between spirit and human, how is it possible for the human part to be so unaware of its spirit part? In a follow-up comment to this post (in the Comment section below the post), Jose says this is exactly the reason it’s so difficult for him to believe there is no separation between spirit and human.

When The Council talked about the fun part of coming into a physical reality, they seemed to be talking more about what’s fun for spirit than for human. This appears to be a big part of what’s bothering Jose – the idea that spirit is having fun, but often at the expense of what we experience as a human mind/body/ego.

How Will I Handle It?

Asking how you can handle a situation in a way that lets an increased feeling of love come through you into the situation, may be the most important guidance we’ve received from The Council lately. In our experience, this guidance has the potential to dramatically increase your experience of well-being and manifestations of what you desire in your life. It’s difficult to overestimate the emphasis The Council places on this guidance in our sessions.

Spirit Knows Exactly What It’s Doing

Spirit In Control

We love the guidance from The Council up to this point in the session, but it felt like it wasn’t enough to persuade Jose to loosen his grip on beliefs that spirit doesn’t care about the human body/mind/ego. I thought it might help if I understood better the beliefs that inspired Jose’s questions, and mentioned this to The Council.

“Why does someone come in with no limbs, or cannot walk, when it wants to be like everyone else? Because the spirit part of that body knows exactly what it is doing. It wants to experience this, and so it creates this type of body.

“The body eventually – if spirit decides ‘I want to change it’ – the body will find a way to change [to] what the spirit wants to experience.

“So you are always in control.”

Here we begin to get into Jose’s first question, which boils down to: how can spirit have unconditional love for a part of itself in a human body, if spirit apparently forces the human part to live its life in a body that doesn’t have any arms or legs? Here is The Council’s reply to the potato/potahto comment mentioned earlier in the post. It sheds some light on the issue of the control that spirit has.

“Spirit is in control [and] it will create situations that it knows it wants to experience. You have a mind that will react in (shall we say) human form with human thinking, and the spirit wants to be able to take that part of itself that has free will… free thinking… and bring that into the light. And so then the separation is not felt.”

We like the idea it is spirit’s desire to influence human thinking and free will to come into the light of spirit.

Human Challenges as Opportunities for Expansion

I mentioned to The Council that Jose doesn’t seem likely to appreciate the idea that spirit is always in control, given his beliefs about what spirit does with this control, and I asked them for guidance that might help Jose feel the love he has, as a spiritual being, for his mind/body/ego.

“Spirit, when creating this situation or other challenging situations, does not look upon it as negative. It looks upon [a challenge] as something that will help the body if [spirit] decides it wants to heal the body to expand, or to go through life living this challenge and accept it… to bring love into it… and to expand that way.

“It is always for expansion that we set up these situations. And sometimes what you feel is maybe something unfair – why did I set this up? – you may have been willing to live that particular life to help others that are involved in that life.”

This sounds like more good guidance if you’re open to these ideas, but it’s easy to imagine Jose feels like The Council is just making his point for him: that all spirit is concerned with is its own expansion and not the well-being of the human mind/body/ego.

The Council repeats the idea that from spirit’s point of view, difficult, challenging, and even painful-feeling human experiences are not negative. Spirit experiences these situations as opportunities for the expansion of love, which The Council has been teaching us is the primary goal and purpose of all existence. (Our post, Why Would Spirit Choose to Be a Human Being Who Experiences Pain? has more on this idea.) But these days, from most human points of view (not just Jose’s), it can be difficult to appreciate the idea that painful human experiences are not negative, particularly when considering Jose’s example of a child without arms and legs.

And the Council gives two examples here of different ways expansion can be experienced. In the first, expansion occurs as a physical healing takes place. In the second example, The Council suggests that similar expansion also occurs as a result of going through a challenging human lifetime and finding ways to accept the challenge and bring love into the experience, even if a physical healing doesn’t take place.

Helping Others

The Council also suggests we sometimes choose, as spiritual beings, to live a difficult human lifetime so others involved in our life may share our difficulty and bring love into the experience. An example might be family members challenged to find unconditional love for another family member who is difficult to love, for reasons that might be physical/medical, emotional/psychological, financial, etc.

This reminder about helping other souls felt like a turning point in the first session. We are familiar with this guidance from previous sessions, but it hadn’t occurred to us it might have something to do with Jose’s concerns. With this in mind I asked The Council if they can provide Jose with any details, from his spirit’s point of view, why his spirit might be making choices Jose experiences as negative and unwanted.

Change Your Focus

“Jose has lived, and is dealing with now, many of his other lifetimes where he was disabled… a life that was cut short… there was a life of poverty. He has, on many levels, lived what he would consider very unfortunate, punishing lives.

“And now, because he is at a point where he would like to see it and experience it differently, these (as we would say) memories are there within him and he is trying to understand why.

“He is asking these questions about lives that are unfulfilled – or his idea of being unfulfilled – when his true purpose now… and we will help him along with that by telling him his purpose now is:

1. “To change [his] thinking and changing how he looks at the people and the things that happen in his life.
2. “By trying to see the benefit in it [people and things in his life]… [and] how he himself can find something to be grateful about it.
3. “To see how people overcome their challenge – how they handle it.

“And so this is where he is right now. [In] asking these questions he is still looking at these situations as challenging and unfortunate. And we say, now change the focus.

“What can you find in each situation that troubles you, that can help you expand and see more love in it… to see more benefit in it… to see how people can handle these situations with happiness still in their lives, without feeling less than others?”

“So it is a little difficult for him, and he is questioning, which we find wonderful – it will help him with his expansion. But we help him a little bit on his path to tell him [his] purpose is, at this point, to change his focus.

Bob: “To learn to focus his attention on better-feeling, more loving thoughts?”

“And how these people that maybe have no limbs, or live in poverty, or go through what he considers difficult situations… how are they dealing with it?

“And to see that in [these situations]… if he looks… he will see something that will change his focus… [something] that will bring an illumination to him that he has not seen before.”

Jose is Preparing to Teach Others

Now I felt like we were making progress that might help Jose. And remembering what The Council said a few moments earlier about incarnating in a difficult human life to lovingly help other souls, I asked if they can comment on Jose’s spiritual intention for this lifetime as it might relate to helping others.

“Well if he speaks to others – and we feel he does – about these people with difficult lives, and people that seem like they are slaves to spirit, and they’re being punished by an outside source… as he speaks about this, if he begins to look for the positive things that come out of this and then speaks about it differently, there are many that he can help on their paths.

“And so without knowing it, with his questioning and his doubting, he is preparing to help others and to become their teacher.”

First Change the Focus to Help Himself

I asked The Council if Jose is interested in teaching and uplifting others.

“As he would say in his words, is this what his spirit planned? Yes, he has come in to help others, but he must first change his focus.”

I asked if Jose’s negative focus has anything to do with learning from experience how to change to a more positive focus.

“[It is] to change how he deals with it… and to look at the people around him when they are in challenging situations…how are they dealing with it?”

Bob: “And this is going to make it easier for him to help other people do the same thing because…”

“It will help himself first.”

Bob: “Right. And because he’s gone through it, then he’ll be able to help others to go through it?

“Exactly.”

In Closing

This brings us to the part of the first session where we began focusing on Jose’s question about why there needs to be a time lag between our initial desire for something, and the manifestation in our physical reality of what we desire. The Council had some interesting things to say about this and we’ll describe this portion of the session in our next post.

Related Sessions

If you’re interested in the topics covered in this post, you may also be interested in the following posts published a couple months ago that answer other challenging and thought-provoking questions Jose asked:

1. Every Question is Important
2. Why Do People Appear Unable to Fulfill a Spiritual Intention to Have Fun and Remember Who We Are?
3. Does Spirit’s Pre-Birth Planning Negate Human Free Will?
4. Future Lives, Connecting with Famous ‘Dead’ People, & the Importance of the Present
5. What Is Spirit Up To?

Another recent post that discusses the subject of spirit deliberately choosing to experience a challenging human lifetime is: Abortion, Loss, Reincarnation, Life, Love, Expansion – Beth’s Story: A Spiritual Perspective

Thanks, Jose

We thank Jose again for his second round of challenging and thought-provoking questions and we hope he benefits from The Council’s guidance as much as we do. As soon as we can, we will publish additional posts answering the rest of Jose’s questions.

Last updated: Saturday, July 20, 2013 @ 10:45 pm

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July 5, 2013 - Posted by Cynthia & Bob | Beliefs, Challenges, Connecting With Spirit, Exercise, Helping Others, Love, New Guidance, Part of a Series, Questions & Answers, You Create Your Reality | Beliefs, Body/Mind/Ego, Focus, Helping Others, Life Challenges, Negativity, Physical Reality, Spirit, Spirit in a Physical Body, Suffering