Awakening as a Human*Divine Being

Overview

This book is based on three series of classes given by Don and Diane Weiner: Birthing Your Resurrection Body; Living in Your Resurrection Body; and Becoming a Human*Divine Being. In addition, six meditations from separate classes given by Don are included.

In this book, we incorporate wisdom from Zoroastrianism on the angels of transformation and the Archangel of the Earth; from Ibn ‘Arabi on the barzakh (the interface between manifestation and subtle reality), creative imagination, and the human*divine relationship; from Hazrat Inayat Khan, Pir Vilayat, and Pir Zia on contemporary Sufi teachings which state that every desire begins with a divine impulse and that the purpose of spirituality is awakening of divinity in life; as well as from realizations from the authors’ meditations, inspirations, and spiritual dialogues which form the basis of what they call The Gabrielite Work.

Many practices with divine names are included, along with a number of guided meditations, and these are all printed in boldface. On the recommended resources page of this book, there is a link to an online site with a pronunciation guide for the divine names.

We intentionally repeat descriptions of challenging topics from different perspectives throughout the book. Our hope is that the readers of this book will discover tools to unfold their own unique spiritual journeys to help fulfill their purpose in life through whatever means is their dharma. Hazrat Inayat Khan says the purpose of spirituality is to become a natural human being. Ibn ‘Arabi says that we are human*divine beings. We each have the capacity to awaken to a much deeper way of experiencing and relating to the world we live in – awakening as a human*divine being.

Awakening as a

Human*Divine Being

Since early human history people have sought to understand the nature of the universe in which we live. Different methods have been adopted by scientists and followers of various spiritual traditions, with a sharp contrast between the two.

The most significant breakthroughs have occurred when someone was able to free themselves from fixed assumptions about reality. Creative imagination has been a powerful tool. In science it led to discoveries ranging from the structure of the benzene molecule and Einstein’s theory of relativity. In spirituality, metaphors and allegories have been used to translate experiences of higher states of consciousness to make them understandable to others.

We live in a universe in which everything is interconnected. The world in which we think we are is limited to what is perceived by the physical senses, what can be objectively studied and measured, and how we interpret our experiences. Both science and spirituality state that the universe is multidimensional, and that consciousness is fundamental. In order to understand and study consciousness, we have to be able to work with our own consciousness and become capable of modulating it to different states. There have been methodologies developed by many spiritual traditions over the course of centuries to accomplish this.

Spiritual traditions state that consciousness can transform manifest reality. Research has shown that an intention can be stored in a simple electronic device that can alter the pH of water, even when it is not in direct contact with it. Theories about information from science can shed light on what spiritual traditions call alchemy – a transformation from one state to another.

In this book, we will be presenting ways to help you bring about a radical shift in your perspective. You will learn ways to awaken a means of perception beyond your physical senses, experience subtle levels on which you exist, and eventually realize yourself as a multidimensional being. You will discover how to work with what we call the imaginal faculty of the soul – creative imagination – in order to not only open to revealed wisdom (in contrast to acquired knowledge), but also to creatively participate in the process of evolution of what is possible in manifestation. We will draw from the wisdom of different spiritual traditions, including Zorastrianism, ancient and contemporary Sufism, as well as from discoveries in science that contribute to deeper ways of how we understand and relate to ourselves and the world. We hope that this book will serve as a guidebook to help you carve out your own unique spiritual path of unfoldment in life.

In this book you will learn to develop your resurrection body, which is the spiritual body of the soul. It is produced by alchemical work through awakened life experiences. It is the presence of itself mirrored in itself with no boundaries.

PART I

Birthing the Resurrection Body

Introduction

In this book we hope that you can begin to discover what the Sufis call revealed knowledge, knowledge that doesn’t come from a book, but rather from direct personal experience. Hazrat Inayat Khan brought Sufism to the West in the early 1900s. He stated that the aim of spirituality is awakening in life, the awakening of our unique divinity in life. What is the life that we awaken to and what is the world that we awaken in? We will discover that the world is a totally transformed one, and not only that, your being is helping to bring about further transformation of everything that you encounter, whether it’s in this realm of reality, or in more subtle realms of reality. We want to discover and access the truth in the fullness of who we actually are, and also awaken to the reality in which we already exist, but in our limited perception, we are confined to the tiniest sliver or shadow of what that reality actually is.

Hazrat Inayat Khan has a beautiful image of a divine central sun, and emanating from that sun, each of our souls is like a ray of light that reaches all the way through the different realms of existence, down to physical manifestation. Our identification typically is at the furthest end of that ray, the physical realm. We think that’s all there is to our being. The goal in many spiritual traditions is to return to where we came from, to merge into the One with a dissolution of any sense of individuality. In contrast, Hazrat Inayat Khan taught that the purpose of existence is awakening in life, awakening to the fact that we are the totality of that ray. Our experience is always based on the two sides of where we are on that ray, the relationship between the manifest and transcendent aspects of our being, which in spiritual traditions is referred to as our human and divine parts. Sufism sometimes refers to the divine part of our being as our Rabb, or personal Lord. Some physicists state that we are actually multidimensional beings, so this would be the relationship between our self manifest in the three dimensions of time and one of space in relation with the higher dimensions in which we also exist.

The path of discovering all the ways of relationship along that ray is not linear. Sufis use the term fana to refer to shattering or annihilation of the self-concept, and the term baqa to refer to rebirth or resurrection. This process of shattering and rebirth does not occur just one time. You can probably think of many times in your life when you went through major shifts in your state of being, which may have been brought about by a deep spiritual realization or by tragedy or trauma, loss, or serious illness. Regardless of the cause, something seemed to pull the rug out from under you so that it no longer worked to feel or believe that the world was the way that you thought it was. Following the shattering of the old ways of looking at things, there’s always a period of in-between time when you don’t know what’s going to emerge from that. It’s a kind of hatching. A higher state of being or a higher state of self-organization then emerges. Much of what we’ll be covering in this book is what happens in that in-between state, between the release of your previous sense of identification and the emergence of a higher state of identification.

Hazrat Inayat Khan has said that the human being is the only being in the whole universe that has its existence in every realm of being, in every plane. Our function in those realms is dormant and latent for most people and generally has no connection with what’s going on when they’re walking around in the world. We can become capable of what Pir Vilayat, a contemporary Sufi teacher, described as stereoscopic consciousness, being able to experience two sides simultaneously. We call this multimodal consciousness, which means that we can have even more than two levels of functioning of our being all working together, all circulating together. It doesn’t mean that our consciousness is going to be able to understand what’s going on in all these different places simultaneously, but we can still have the experience of the vastness of our self and be firmly grounded in manifestation. A caveat - manifestation is much more than what you think it is. We like to say that we have our feet on the ground, but the ground that we have our feet on is a much more expansive world than we think it is.

William Tiller is a professor emeritus from Stanford who for decades has done very credible research on subtle energy. One of his most famous experiments involved taking a group of four experienced meditators and asking them to try to store an intention in some simple electronic circuitry so that when it was placed in another laboratory it would raise the pH of water by one point. When the circuitry was put at a short distance in another laboratory from a beaker of water that had a pH meter hooked up to it, the pH of that water gradually increased by one point with no contact with the circuity whatsoever. This experiment has been replicated many times. In addition, a basic principle of thermodynamics was altered in the laboratory that the circuitry was placed in such that entropy decreased, which means that order increased. This should not happen according to the second law of thermodynamics Dr. Tiller stated that when there is a linkage between a subtle level of reality with what he calls ordinary reality things become possible that were not possible before. He states that the space of the environment becomes conditioned with subtle energy and the usual laws of physics are changed.

This may be a scientific way of describing what happens anytime that we have a deep experience which could be in meditation, doing spiritual practices, but it could also involve being in a beautiful place in nature, listening to wondrous music, looking at art, or hearing poetry that’s very moving. In any of these states there is a feeling that the whole space that we are in is transformed.

In Sufism there is a term ta’wil which means seeing that which transpires behind that which appears. Another meaning is harmonic perception. Oftentimes when someone has a transcendent experience there is a feeling they are seeing something through a microscope or telescope, revealing something that’s over there and seeing the true reality of it. In fact, someone could not possibly have a transcendent experience unless they were in the same state of being as that which they were experiencing. After having a transcendent experience, a person may feel as if they had taken a periscope and looked around in a subtler realm of reality, but in actuality the person realized an aspect of themselves that’s always there, but it had been latent or dormant.

When attempts are made to describe transcendent experiences, metaphors are often used to describe something that is beyond words. Because we tend to identify with our usual modality of consciousness which is based upon input from the physical senses and our concepts and emotional responses to what we are perceiving, the realm in which a transcendent experience takes place seems to be separate from who we are. If we are to fully awaken in life, then it is essential to develop the capacity to experience the subtle levels of reality in which we exist, and eventually to develop multimodal consciousness so that we can experience a unitive identity in which we simultaneously exist in many levels at once, with our consciousness focalized in a particular aspect of our being. Many spiritual traditions have developed tools to foster this process of awakening and we will be sharing practices and meditations in this book to help you do so.

In addition to the steps involved in the process of awakening, the question arises as to what is our purpose for awakening. Ibn ‘Arabi, an ancient Sufi teacher, stated that every soul has access to a unique part of the divine wisdom that no other soul ever has or had or ever could have access to. Sufis say that the purpose of creation is for the divine being to know him/herself. Seth Lloyd, a computer scientist at MIT, states that the universe is a quantum computer seeking to compute itself. If what Ibn ‘Arabi says is true, then the discovery of the unique part of the divine wisdom that each of us has access to contributes to the overall purpose of existence. In Hinduism dharma refers to a person’s sacred duty in life. Dharma is different for each person and there are many different ways someone fulfills their dharma, whether it’s through the life of a scientist, merchant, business person, philosopher, musician, poet, artist, or a religious person. Dharma is fulfilled by that which brings the greatest fulfillment to a person’s being in their expression of what comes from the awakening of their connection between the manifest part of themselves with the transcendent or divine part of their being.

An essential tool in the process of awakening is what Sufis have described as creative imagination or active imagination. This can be thought of as the creative faculty of the soul and is very different from the way you are probably used to thinking of imagination, which often is the same as fantasy.

When an artist or musician creates a piece or composes something, they start with some kind of framework, but if they really get inspired, something comes through that they didn’t consider to start with. We are always operating from a particular frame of reference or vantage point. It’s how we understand ourselves and how we are in relationship with whatever it is that were experiencing. Generally, we start by feeling a sense of separation: this is me, and here’s everything else out there. We are having a dualistic way of relationship with whatever it is that we’re experiencing. It is possible for us to have a much deeper connection to with what we are experiencing, and a term we have used to describe this is relational unity. This is a state of mutual co-presence with whatever we are experiencing. Something is born from that state of connection which Sufis describe as a light upon a light, a third presence that arises. This way of experiencing can happen in our daily life in relation to how we perceive situations, and how we derive meaningfulness from what we are experiencing instead of reacting to our experiences. We can discover that everything is a potential portal to the sacred. It’s our way of relating to our circumstances that creates a space in which sacredness can come through, or causes us to feel even more reacted and separated.

Meditation: Your Illuminated Self from the Future

Let’s begin to exercise our faculty of creative imagination by experiencing a guided visualization. Hazrat Inayat Khan stated that every atom will have its moment of awakening. We’re made out of countless atoms, so if that’s true for the atoms it must be true for us. If you believe this, then at some point in time in or beyond this lifetime, eventually however far into the future, you will achieve illumination. Close your eyes and imagine yourself at that time in the future, perhaps beyond this lifetime, perhaps in some subtle realm of existence in which you have achieved illumination. You have become an illuminated, realized being. You can prime the pump so to speak by imagining some other realized being such as Buddha or Christ. Then remember that Jesus said, Everything I’ve done, you can do and more. If you believe what he said is true, that’s true for you and eventually you will be in that illuminated state of being. Imagine that and give yourself permission to jump into that state without trying to work too hard to figure it out. See yourself as fully illuminated in the future and feel that you are experiencing that now. You realize yourself as a being in a transcendent space and time. You can function in any and all the realms in space and time and beyond. You can to connect with great beings, angels, archangels, and other realized beings, including the spiritual hierarchy of which you are now a part.

From that state of illumination, you have access to the awareness of your existence prior to becoming illuminated at any point in the past, including this particular time, wherever you are right now as you are reading this. Imagine your illuminated being in the future is contemplating you in the present, realizing that the you in the present is very much part of your illuminated being in the future, because that being encompasses all of the times of your existence. Now shift your vantage point to yourself in the present, wherever you are, experiencing your illuminated self from the future right there with you, right in front of you. You can feel all this light and this expansive consciousness, the divine countenance, the unique divine face shining through clearly and radiantly. Now something begins to dawn on you, a huge aha moment as you realize you couldn’t possibly perceive the illuminated state of your being that seemingly is in the future unless that was something available to you right now. You discover that it is your true being, and it’s like you have looked into a mirror and you can see your true self. It’s like seeing God seeing you, seeing you seeing God, and you feel a powerful transmission, an awakening of the energy of spirit.

You realize the truth of something that a Sufi said many centuries ago which I will paraphrase. He said, Oh man, oh woman, if you but knew that you are free. It’s your thought of captivity that has kept you in chains. You can also think, You are free. You are a living embodiment of divinity and a name and form unique throughout all of existence. Now this illuminated self from the future that you see sitting in front of you merges with you, and it’s just you. You realize that you have had your focus on a particular slice of space and time in which you have had your physical body as a precious way to experience the conditions of the physical world. You are a being whose essence is freedom and light and wisdom. You realize now that you are a source of blessing. You can think of a beautiful Buddhist prayer and feel that you are actualizing this prayer with your thoughts into reality. With the thought of love let me encompass the world, and may that love increasing without measure encompass the whole universe up to its confines. With the thought of peace let me encompass the world, and may that peace increasing without measure encompass the whole universe up to its confines. In particular for the state of the world now, With the thought of healing let me encompass the world and may that healing increasing without measure encompass the whole universe up to its confines.

Now every breath is received as a blessing. Every breath is given as a blessing.

Getting Started

Many times, people who are on a spiritual path wonder whether they should be out doing more things in the external world instead of spending time doing spiritual practices. This is not an either/or choice, however. While doing service and working for positive change is important, at some point we discover that the work that we do in spirituality enables us to have a more powerful effect on the change we are striving to bring about in the world, and the benefit of spirituality is for more than just our own growth, development, and awakening. We realize that we are actually awakening our relationship with the deeply interconnected reality of which we are each an integral and unique part. What we do in the process of awakening brings about a transformation in the very world that we live in.

Spiritual awakening is a service to the world. In the process of awakening there are tools that we can use which have been developed by different spiritual traditions. Furthermore, we will be describing different ways that you can look at and experience practices that you may have already been doing.

Over a thousand years ago, Sufis drew inspiration from the Zoroastrians, and further developed a philosophy of illumination that looked beyond the outer appearances of things in the material world to the light beyond that. They developed methods to work with creative imagination. There is another realm beyond that received by the intellect, physical body, and the senses which is called the imaginal realm or in ancient terminology, the barzakh.

The creative imagination must be trained. Anyone who is a spiritual aspirant has been training their imagination for years even if they have not thought of it as imagination. This is the ability to imagine or hold onto an image or hold onto the words of a spiritual practice, such as one of the divine names used by the Sufis. In the process of vocalizing a sacred sound such as one of the divine qualities, we don’t just make the sound of the word, but we imagine an example of that quality or perhaps a being we have known who embodies that quality. If the quality we are working with is mastery, we can imagine what changes in our self as a result of saying the practice and imagining ourselves manifesting that quality in our lives. Working with imagination in this way is more than a passive experience, such as seeing something and then remembering the image of what we have seen later. We want to develop a more active way of working with imagination that produces meditative thinking and eventually a deeper perception of reality and what the ancients called imaginal worlds.

Ta’wil is a term used by the ancients to describe harmonic perception, harmony referring to sensing two or more states at the same time. It involves perceiving the deeper underlying reality behind the surface appearance of what we are experiencing. Initially when we experience ta’wil we tend to think that we are separated from what we are experiencing and, in a way, projecting ourselves into the essential nature of what we’re experiencing but still feeling separated from it. In actuality, however, in order to come to this relationship of harmonic perception, we have to awaken to an aspect of our being that exists at the same level as that deeper reality. We’re actually in a transformed world that’s not up there somewhere, although it may seem like it’s in a higher place. It’s really no place but here, but here is so much more than what we think it is.

Everything that we experience is by virtue of our relationship to it, or the nature of the interface we have with it. Bekenstein is a theoretical physicist who has shown that there is a physical limit to the amount of information that can be shared between two sides of an interface. The limit is directly proportional to the surface area of the interface. We can imagine that this principle also applies to the interface between the manifest and transcendent aspects of reality which the ancient Sufis called the barzakh. To the extent that we have become capable of realizing and experiencing ourselves as multidimensional beings who exist in many levels of reality, much more information can come through in both directions in the barzakh. If we consider the two sides of the interface as being the human and divine aspects of existence, then there is a finite limit of what an individual can know of the transcendent aspect of reality by an individual. Conversely, there is a finite limit to what the divine can possibly know from beings in manifestation. Furthermore, what occurs in the barzakh is more than just a two-way exchange of information. Something new is created from this meeting of the two sides that could not ever be created by either side alone. Creative imagination operates in a transformative way. If, as Ibn ‘Arabi says, every soul has access to a unique part of the divine wisdom, then each of us has a capacity to bring forth something unique.

In the Zoroastrian tradition there is an initiation that takes place at the age of 15 in which a young man or woman is told that they are a son or daughter of the earth. They take a pledge to work to bring about the transfiguration of the earth. They are asked to keep up the thought of perfect wisdom, which means calming and transformative thoughts. Xvarnah refers to an intensification of light that comes through as a result of having a perfect thought. One aspect of this type of thought is the realization that they are not only manifest beings but they had a choice at the beginning of time, and they chose to be incarnated into life. Zoroastrians were told they were also divine beings who have a relationship with a partner on the other side in the celestial realms which is sometimes referred to as their personal angel or personal Lord.

Meditation: Your Personal Angel

Let us go through a meditation now. Close your eyes and imagine that aspect or face of God that you recognize is your own angel which is before you. Feel the pull of love within you like a magnet between the two of you that aligns your being. There is a recognition from long ago and even now in the midst of your life that you have united your being with this heavenly love. Recognize in your own being that you can release to the angel some experiences, some treasures from what you learned in life. Feel this releasing of your light to the light of the angel, some treasures feeding back to the angel. The angel is taking these impressions and allowing a rearranging or a synthesis. What is created from this is in essence that is returned to the divine. This process works only because the heavenly self is a part of us.

In the process of growing and changing we let go of what we need to release. If we keep back nothing, then the entirety of manifestation is fed back to this angelic realm, and as you feed it, then the process is reversed and the flowing toward the angel becomes the flowing toward the being in manifestation which is you as the manifest angel. Feel this returning light, light upon light, and just experience it for a moment. All the light is reflected one way and then back the other way. A special process emerges as the light shines upon the light. Taking it a step further, turn your attention on yourself and work the substance of your being which is open to this change. Instead of thinking of reflection taking place on a screen which passively receives the image, what if you work with the surface of the screen, allowing it to acquire depth and to thicken. Many of the points that we thought were on the inside of ourself we now see are part of the screen which is a multidimensional screen, enabling a special integration of all that we’ve ever learned.

In this deeper sharing with the angel, you might use your breath to breathe out and breathe in and feel the circulation of light. Notice how you been able to use your imagination as a mediating faculty to change your relationship with your angel and begin something that will continue to unfold for you. Take a look at your angel and think about the next time in the future when you can get together again. Feel some gratitude for this deep experience and open your eyes.

During the early part of our spiritual journey and perhaps for quite some time, we tend to think of it as a process for ourselves as separated individuals and we may feel that we’re bringing something down from a higher level into us or through us. In actuality, we could not have any experience unless it’s something that has existed in relationship, a relationship between how we perceive ourselves and what it is we are perceiving. That applies to everything in manifestation, but it applies every bit as much to our relationship with the angel we experienced in the meditation. Our personal angel or personal Lord is our unique way of connecting with the transcendent, and we can’t have a living relationship with the deeper aspect of who we are and with what everything else is, unless we open up to that relationship. We need to free ourselves from our usual basis of perception and that’s another reason why it’s very important to learn to train the tool of active imagination not operating from the way that we usually think with our mind. Visualizing an apple is a basic aspect of imagination, but we’re describing something much richer. When we can awaken this relationship, then we experience a world that it seems like we’re inside of, but in actuality, we are that whole world. The ancient Sufis say that each of us is a whole universe with its own laws of physics, and in the process of relationship and our connection with how we think about the angel or personal Lord, then something arises from that circulation of light into a full circulation. We don’t have words to properly describe this because it’s not like up influences down or back influences forth. It means that constantly every part is affected by and is affecting every other part. When we consciously participate in this process, then we enable something to be born that could