She’s an artist, an elder behaving like a teen, cozying up to those with cash, or a free place to stay, and begging her parents when all other manipulations fail. She says she is above work; life is about play, creativity, and self-expression. She says she is free-spirited, but her free spirit costs everyone else in her life.
Manipulating loved ones to get her way has worked for her in the past, but less and less so as she ages. She calls it “creating my reality” when it goes well. When it goes well, she wonders aloud at the mystery of it all, how life just seems to fall into place for her through intention alone. When friends and family stop enabling her, she feels angry and forsaken. The moment she gets her way again, she invariably looks back on her misfortune as a lesson in keeping the faith that good fortune is always right around the corner.
Call it a rollercoaster of highs and lows. Call it a vicious cycle. By whatever name, it is rage infused with, and repressed in, what she calls her “spirit journey.”
***
Are you a spirit? Are you on a journey? Can you afford to be only so long as you are funded by benefactors to whose generosity you turn a blind eye because acknowledging them means you’re using them, which doesn’t fit the definition of “spiritual?”
Let’s ask it this way: Are you Spirit? Does Spirit journey? Does Spirit take?
Spirit is oneness; Spirit is undivided. When we are living in wholeness, living undivided, we are living Spirit.
Spirit lights this vessel or Spirit does not. If not, one may pretend to act on behalf of Spirit, but this is just making up a role and playing it. Spirit does not need actors. Spirit does not need artistic expression or life journeys in Spirit’s name. Spirit is nameless and in that emptiness exist all names. In that emptiness exists all, period. And so there is nothing to take. Nothing to give. Giving and taking exist intrinsically within Spirit as all action must.
You may suppose that since we are within Spirit we need to give and take on behalf of Spirit or as spirits. But these are wrong suppositions, for they neglect the fact that, while our form exists within Spirit, our self-identity, projecting from form, is a partiality that fancies itself the whole. When self-identity is not a body construct—or a construct set apart from the body, such as a “soul” or a “higher self”—but is Spirit, then time and timelessness are wholly and completely undivided.
Being Spirit wholly is our endgame, so to speak, not learning as a voyaging soul, taking as a questing spirit, or giving as a spiritual warrior. Traveling is an action of time. Taking advantage of people is an action of time. Both make sense to do in the context of one who believes she is a spiritual person on a spirit journey, for behaving spiritually holds its opposite, which is also—and often simultaneously—how we behave. Good and bad; right and wrong; seek and ignore. Opposites are the playthings of time.
Spirit has no opposite.