Divine Spark: the Soul Connection

‘We actually hold in our heart the spark of the Divine’ Archbishop Timothy Dolan of Milwaukee* once said to his congregation. Notice his use of the word ‘actually’ – as if to say ‘contrary to what is commonly accepted’ like we have forgotten or lost sight of a knowing so fundamental and important to our sanity and well-being.

How did this happen? Why are so many people dimly aware of the soul and hardly ever think about their soul?

An increasing number are questioning if we even have a soul. How is it that in the historical past people would refer to the soul like it was a given yet today its very existence is questioned.

It’s another human irony that we wanted to get away from the tyranny of religion and leaders who exploited their position and the truth for their own ends only to fall for the same trap again but with a different cast of characters.

The main reason is our modern society has fallen for the perverse and arrogant thinking that because of our medical advances, social reform, and science & technology we are somehow immune or divorced from the past.

We assume that the past and its history has little relevance for us today. There is also a sense, bar some exceptions, that what was known in the past was inferior to what we know today. This is a serious mistake as we can doom ourselves to history repeating itself one way or another.

The consequence is that we have actually placed ourselves in a bubble prison – a cognition trap. We have unwittingly imprisoned ourselves and let others in power (the modern pharaohs) be the arbiters of our reality.

It’s come about because when we dropped religion as being the main holder of the truth and education, we switched to the mass media and science – both soulless, who serve their own ends and are led by mortal and imperfect people. Now before you say Science has done wonders, it’s true, but much of this century’s efforts in science have gone into new ways to enslave people.

Billions are poured into the hadron collider and some other countries are now building theirs. Yet no mention of how this costly invention improves lives or saves the earth from damage and pollution. It’s really an experiment to see if they can break down the smallest atomic particle into the smallest component part. What for? It sounds like someone is trying to crack the creation code.

The average person is willing to be uninvolved and go through life on autopilot because they believe they are nothing more than their physical body. I will never understand people who dislike being ‘deep’ and want to skip on a superficial surface of life and don’t like to think for themselves. They are mentally lazy or very young souls or humans whose evolution was stunted by their choices or life situation.

All humanity has, to varying degrees, fallen for the illusion that this physical matter dimension is as solid as it gets. That the material world is the only existence that has substance that you can perceive with the five senses.

The very first time this notion started to chip away from my belief system was when a Gnostic teacher who I studied under (and who was an experienced astral traveller) told me this reality is like a clay model. I took it to mean it is not fine but coarse and rough edged. At the time I thought, ‘okaaay, whatever you say’.

Many years later after my spiritual teaching sources broadened, I came to realise and accept that the ego and physical body is like a onesie (if you are a parent you know what that is, if not, let me compare it to a diving suit).

Imagine you are a deep sea diver in a hostile environment with enormous water pressure that you had to wear a double-clad diving suit to survive the conditions and operate within it.

That is what our physical body is like. It and the ego is built to withstand the conditions of this physical world. Our Light Body (which is inside the diving suit) is finer and sharper, luminous and pretty perfect. Any inner beauty we have is reflected in a physical beauty of our light body. In our physical world we have to get to know someone, or be very perceptive, before we can spot their inner beauty.

The mystical side of religions like Christian Gnosticism, Jewish Kabbalah and ancient Sufism refer to a ‘Divine Spark’ present in all humans – like a pilot light that must not go out. This pilot light is the life-line to our soul and heart intelligence so we don’t cut ourselves off completely from the Light of God.

Conventional Christianity refers to the resurrection of the soul after death. In Catholicism this means to end up in either heaven or hell or purgatory. They usually hint that most people go to purgatory with no mention of growth just repentance.

Whereas the mystical side of religion and spirituality open human possibility by saying we can evolve in our current life to higher levels of understanding and awareness. The Gnostics refer to the divine spark as the seed of God consciousness which can be left dormant or sparked to light up one’s being.

Jesus is seen as an Avatar of the Light of God descended to earth to live and breathe among us as an ordinary man and then to ‘die to himself’ to ascend to Christ-consciousness.

It was meant as an example that would guide us out of the dark and ignite the spark in men and women to wake up to their true nature. When the soul is allowed to express itself, the clingy and needy ego no longer dominates with a false perception of a poor shadow version of our true selves. We can return to a much richer conscious awareness that was always ours to claim eventually.

A gift of life is to fan that pilot light to grow into a flame then a roaring spirit fire. It is the return to God consciousness and getting away from being a slave to the society we live in which conditions us to believe we are just gender-bending human organisms living a single pointless life. What a prison that is.

In the modern Bible (King James Version) the divine spark is inferred in a few places like the following:

‘He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no [mind of] man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.’ – (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

Jesus says:

‘Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you’. – (Luke 17:21)

But there is also reference to humanity leaving God in droves and completely abandoning the truth:

‘As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.’ – (Romans 3:10-23)

The interpretation of the full Romans verse was that whatever divine spark there was in humanity was snuffed out by sin. This sounds irretrievable and takes a hapless view of humanity leaving it up to ‘salvation’ which sounds a lot like the word salvage. I personally believe no one has the right to declare all humans or any single person as having lost their divine spark. Only their conscience and God can truly know that.

Is it possible to snuff out the pilot light? Well if you look at how some humans are conducting their lives creating karma and damage, it would seem they could only do those things without conscience and only if they had snuffed out their pilot light. I would not be surprised if the soul of these ego personalities may disconnect from them and focus more on the soul’s other incarnations.

Get this, although Buddhism says all souls are meant to be saved in the end thanks to the Wheel of Samsara (karmic cycle of life and death), I wonder if this happens in reality to the very end. A more recent spiritual work I read which has origins in the Theosophical Society suggests that the soul has more than one incarnation at a time simply because outside of space/time of our dimension all past-present-future are in the Eternal NOW.

Now say your soul has five incarnations on earth spread out over history. The most recent incarnation that is this century, you, is meant to be the culmination of the other four whose lives were lived in the past during a younger consciousness development stage.

It’s meant to be that each ego life is an improvement on the previous one. It is also said the Soul will not show interest in the ego personality of a single life until that ego personality shows an interest in the Soul – not the other way around as we are led to believe.

If you were to think of the soul as the palm of your hand and each finger is a soul extension (ie. one ego life), then the soul is able to cut off or disconnect from one of those ego incarnations if the ego personality has used their free will to snuff out their pilot light and completely sever their connection to the soul. So people who willfully choose to disconnect from their soul probably don’t realise that they have set themselves up to experience a real death.

I somehow think that the chance to redeem oneself is offered endlessly as God’s love is said to be infinite and unconditional. That is not something my law-and-order ego likes as I write this but it can be fun to challenge your own ego. The science of Physics provides a clue with its law of the conservation of energy which says energy is neither created nor destroyed.

This means that the energy of a person, if totally irredeemable, (and the proportion of humanity who are like this is truly very small), they will lose their individuality and their energy is returned to an unconscious state like the mineral kingdom or a drop in the ocean. Those very few souls who have no regret for their severe wrong-doing and crimes against humanity right to the very end are the only ones who experience true death.

This is speculation on my part based on bona fide spiritual works that I have read. It takes the view (which I agree with) that we are not sinners but co-creators with God. It makes far more sense since we have free will, are meant to exercise it, and are left to experience the consequences of our actions.

Also, I need to tell you that in Christianity it’s not the norm to dissect and speculate about creation and God’s teachings in this manner. Whereas religious jewish people frequently discuss with passion their teachings, allow themselves to question those teachings and arrive at conclusions (to an extent). It is not wrong to do so provided you are not making a miscreant which can injure others.

New Age spirituality has much to say about the Divine Spark and often these sources specialise in spiritual areas. I’ve found The Summit Lighthouse teachings have this subject covered well. They have this to say about the Divine Spark:

‘The consciousness of the Son is centered in the flame, which is thus called “the Holy Christ Flame.” This Trinity of God’s sacred fire focuses the primary attributes of Power, Wisdom, and Love…to every son and daughter’.

And…

‘The flame that burns within your heart is the seat of cosmic consciousness, the ensign of the son or daughter of God. It is your link to Reality, to Being, and to Life eternal. It is the anointing by the Real Self of all souls who choose to keep the standard of the Law of the One’.

In closing I want to share an interesting example of what most people assume about the soul. In my research on this topic I read an article on the Jewish Practice website, chabad.org. In the web page comments area, a commenter asks Rabbi Freeman:

‘If the core of my being is a “spark of G‑d,” then where is the me in me? In what way is one person unique from another? Is this idea that I have of myself as an “individual” a lie?’

The Rabbi answers:

‘Why do you assume that the divine spark expresses itself identically in all people? Perhaps the opposite is true: It is that divine spark [and how we express it individually] that makes each of us unique and gives us purpose.

–

Sources of inspiration and quotes:

* Catholic Culture, catholicculture.org

Cartoon of God and yes-men from the talented Cartoonist ay Baloo -Rex May-

New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/kindling-the-divine-spark-the-secret-to-awakening

Summit Lighthouse, The Divine Spark That Burns within Your Heart, http://www.summitlighthouse.org/your-divine-spark/

Jewish Practice, chabad.org, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/676238/jewish/Individuality-and-the-Divine-Spark.htm

Source: http://www.gotquestions.org/divine-spark.html