Let's not forget why we're here

One of the reasons I started Speira is to fan a flame. Anyone who’s been through a deep transformational awakening knows well the realization that follows. You really only have one job in your life and that is to constantly orient it, again and again, around the things that really matter: connection, relationship, love.

That realization often starts as a blazing fire of awareness. Over time, as we get pulled back into society, that fire may turn into a small but enduring flame. Tended, perhaps, through whichever practice you carry out that keeps your soul connected.

If you have a mortgage, small kids and a busy schedule, maybe the flame reduces to just a hot coal. Still there, still giving off warmth, but softer now, maybe a little less certain of it’s own power.

If through debt or some obligation you are thrown back into working a job you are bound to, one that feeds the darker veins of our civilization’s superorganism1, or worse, you still find yourself reaching for never-ending wealth, status or external approval, then perhaps what was once a fire now survives only as a few glowing embers.

And there are some that are so swallowed by society’s currents that even those faint remaining embers are snuffed out. I’ve yet to personally meet anyone who’s actually succeeded at this. The empirically supported theory of quantum change may at least partially explain why: after a true awakening experience, certain gene expression patterns shift, ie. you are quite literally not the same person at a cellular level.

Indeed, living with awareness is like living with a parasite made of light. It seeps into everything you do, it feeds on your illusions and your delusions. You can resist, but doing so will just make it harder on yourself, and either way the eventual end point is the same: that blissful moment when you really have nothing left to do but surrender.

I say eventual, because it is inevitable that each and every one of us will reach it, in those sacred final moments prior to our death.

Having tasted that moment while Im still relatively young and healthy, I’d rather not wait until my deathbed to taste it again. And honestly, once you’ve truly been there, who doesn’t want to live in surrender as a constant way of being? It’s entirely liberating.

Easier said than done, of course. Even for those with the inclination and the means to make lifestyle changes that might help fan the flame of awareness, it’s not an easy thing to do.

The obstacles are plenty. An obvious one is money. There’s a deep and largely unexamined tension in our relationship to money. One that, I have no doubt, is one of the most pervasive spiritual barriers. There’s a rich and fertile ground of healing for the world there, if we can only find ways to examine it honestly.

There are fears and fears. Of scarcity, of failure, of lonliness, of not-enoughness. Our longing for truth competes with our dependence on the very systems that distort it. We need to honestly sit with the discomfort of this, contemplate, allow the slow friction of cognitive dissonance to do it’s work and dissolve our conditioning.

I speak from experience when I say: this is especially not easy for someone who has the drive to do something in the world. That’s why meditation retreats, plant medicine, and spiritual teachers are so popular of course. They all promise a touch point to something greater, a re-filling of an empty tank, a bellow for the flame. Sometimes, sadly, they just act as a distraction from the grind of integration and maturation.

You can, of course, just as easily move in the opposite direction.

Once a person has touched the transcendent it’s tempting to abandon any attempt to balance it with everyday life, and simply lean wholly into the divine. But leaning too far inward isn’t without risk. Many who touch God also brush against psychosis.

Over the last few years I’ve done my fair share of leaning, and I cannot overstate how important it is to have a container to hold you, ground you, and keep you centered. I guess in one sense, isn’t that our body’s deepest purpose? To serve as the primary grounding vessel for our soul’s journey through this realm.

With that grounding, and through grace, I can finally glimpse for myself what many of the spiritual traditions point to. That supposed divide between transcendence and the material world is just that – supposed.

Careful here. That’s not to say that it is one or the other. How to put it best? I am sure you have heard the saying “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience”?

Well I don’t buy it anymore, not fully anyway.

The paradox only begins to harmonize when I fully realize that despite the fact we are obviously spiritual beings, we are, indeed, equally human beings having a spiritual experience. And on many days – maybe even most - we are simply human beings having a human experience.

It’s both. Always both. And if you don’t believe me, go and touch a hot stove and report back.

Still, I’ve been endlessly fascinated by this tension between transcendence and day-to-day life. Maybe it’s a case of morphic resonance2, because the theme seems to be surfacing everywhere I look. It’s showing up in the emergence of new world views that are reconciling spirit and matter, and in the mainstreaming of new philosophical greats seeking to integrate the inner and outer paths. It’s there in the coining of the term the ‘World Wise Web’, and in more personal ways, in my crossing paths with Tom Morgan, leading to the spark that is becoming Speira.

For me, Speira is an experiment in exploring this tension. A community of highly agentic people who do want to do something in the world. That want to live, create, and lead within society and not apart from it. To do that we need more than ideas. We need an ecology of practices that helps us meet the hard realities of this world as they are. Ones that remind us how to stay awake and grounded, in our cities, in our jobs, in our relationships, in our creative work, even on our phones. Life is made of all of it.

I want to orient my life around the things that really matter: connection, relationship, love. To do that in a world lacking all three can be hard. My hope is that Speira becomes a place where walking this path feels a little lighter, a little more possible, and to fan that flame to burn a little brighter.

If this resonates, please reach out to me as we are in the early days of building the foundations of Speira.