The concept of destiny seems to require a vehicle through which to effect a particular outcome in a person’s life. According to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 83% of Americans believe in a soul or spirit which exists in addition to our physical selves. Perhaps these are related to destiny. While writing Return of the Mourning Dove, I experienced an insight into the possible nature of the soul, and concluded that the collective soul could be interpreted as being the heart of God, while the individual soul, possessed by each of us distinctly from one another, as being a portion of that heart. Even a tiny portion of the heart of God must be deeply relevant, and thus we are granted an undeniable significance to our lives. Each individual soul, then, would have its own distinct orientation to the collective heart of God, or to the collective soul, and thus even spiritually we are unique. In terms of destiny, then, this orientation would be implicitly contained within our individual soul, and realized to its fruition through our communion with the Holy Spirit. Thereby, the individual soul likely serves also as a prism, filtering away those portions of the Spirit which may not be directly relevant to us…that is, to our spiritually assigned destiny.
Being in harmony with this destiny means establishing spiritual right relation, and prerequisite to this is the surrendering of one’s heart. This allows the Spirit to use our heart toward the fulfillment of our inborn destiny, and God will not rest with us until we have achieved this. Perhaps only a third of the world believes in reincarnation, but in terms of the ultimate fulfillment of destiny it is not difficult to imagine that this process might require multiple lifetimes. It would not be the body which reincarnates but rather it would be the soul, picking up where perhaps the previous lifetime left off. Hindus believe that when a soul is finally ripened it will not need to be returned to this life, and it boggles the mind to imagine what might happen when the collective soul itself becomes ripe. This suggests that maybe God is developing alongside of ourselves, and that we are, in fact, contributing to this development. Therefore, God needs us, and the realization of this is deeply liberating as well as motivating. Allowing my soul to be ripened means contributing to the development of God’s own heart, and nothing could be more relevant to my existence.
The unique orientation of each of us in terms of collective spiritual reality might seem to suggest that we will inevitably be in each other’s way, and that it will be impossible for us to sufficiently cooperate. There is possibly nothing more nuanced, spiritually speaking, than our relationships with one another. How do we allow space for another to develop without feeling hindered ourselves? Instinct will often be aroused here, insisting that we be self-centered, or even submissively deferring to others, and discerning between the assertions of instinct and the legitimate voice of the Spirit can be a full-time job in itself. It is part of the discipline of living the spiritual life to allow enough space for one another, while not mindlessly deferring to the unspiritual, or demanding more than we need. God knows how to make it all work out, and we must trust that this is what will happen.
It might follow from all of this that the Earth itself has been destined to serve as a foundation for the development of souls. Personally, I believe that souls may travel the phylums before they reach humanity, and that humans themselves might not have been possible until there were souls mature enough to benefit from our enhanced capabilities. I owned a cat for nearly twenty years, and I would die in front of a firing squad before I’d confess that she didn’t possess a soul of some kind. Clearly, however, humanity must be at the cutting edge of Earth’s spiritual development, and if Earth is to be a healthy place then we must take seriously our roles as spiritual pioneers. It is not all about humanity, however, and even my cat would giggle in her grave if anyone would venture to assert this. Anthropocentricity denies the relevance of the hundreds of millions of years required to bring us to this place, and it threatens to degrade us to the lowest form of life on the Earth if we ceaselessly destroy too much. We contentedly applaud our own progress, but what are we returning to the Earth? Without spiritual profitability accompanying economic profitability, then our progress is not only hollow but also fruitless and deadly.
It may be, however, that from God’s perspective we have been spiritually profitable to this point, and that we are merely at an appropriate stage in our development. Economic prosperity has created the space for us to enjoy a new kind of freedom, and surely this must be beneficial to the soul. Wherever we go from here it must be the Spirit which leads us, and if the Spirit so wills something then it will be so. Surely we will suffer cultural contortions as our societies struggle to advance, but given enough time inevitably the soul will prevail, for we cannot defeat the heart of God.
I once had a vision of two angels gliding one behind the other through my field of vision, from approximately the ten o’clock position to approximately the four o’clock position. These were not humanlike in appearance, but resembled four-winged butterflies with simple facial features, seemingly extraterrestrial. What followed were the sounds of chuckling primates and the crudest of expletives, along with other wild sounds but no images. Then there were galaxies spinning at an accelerated rate, and at some point there were visions of what seemed to be the future Earth, except that there was a deep red surrounding everything from off into the distance. The Earth appeared lush, with very impressive engineering accomplishments sporadically displayed, such that it seemed as if the Earth were in capable hands. One of the constructions had a whole bunch of long grass growing around and underneath it, and seemed in retrospect as though its purpose might have been to filter something from the atmosphere. I had unusual capabilities in this context, able to soar quickly from place to place and even plunge into the ocean depths, almost as if I were inspecting but maybe just enjoying the tour.
That this happened on December 20, 1996, has always fascinated me, for it was the morning after Carl Sagan died. He had been my science mentor, having influenced me significantly in my late teens and early twenties. I often wondered if the angels were returning from bringing him to his rest, as he seemed most worthy of some form of post-mortem reward. Carl Sagan was defiantly agnostic to the point of being atheist, and yet I feel significantly indebted to him. It was an intellectual liberation associated with a liberation of the heart which explains his influence over me, as well as over millions of others. He took us beyond the stale dregs of culture and toward something compelling and vast. Though he never credited God, he nevertheless honored the splendor, and if we would at least do likewise then we will be brought to a deeper understanding of reality, and of our place in the matrix of the divine.
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