Primal Spirituality is the spirituality that we are born with, that is innate to who we are before we ever encounter any kind of religious training or teaching, or any kind of spiritual path. This is the spirituality that is built in, for each of us. Our Primal Spirituality is meant to blossom and expand over the course of our life. We are designed to grow into the wisdom and understanding that a little baby does not yet have. We are made to grow in strength without losing our Primal Spirituality so that our ability to bring power into the world—the power to create, the power to manifest—increases over the course of our life.

To some degree, that happens for everybody. But what I am passionate about changing is the way that, for most people, their blossoming gets stunted in some way. Sometimes religion helps a person in their growth; sometimes a spiritual path helps. And then sometimes they don’t help. Sometimes limited beliefs about who we are and how we are made and how life goes, brought to us from the religions and spirituality, actually make it more difficult for a person to blossom and grow.

This can be true of all religions and spiritual paths in the world. I own the fact that this can happen in the context of Emissaries of Divine Light. So I am not simply pointing my finger at others, but owning the fact that we need to do something about it.

Most often, at the beginning of what has become a religion, somebody has seen something true. There has been real understanding, real vision and clarity, a true teaching, and a firsthand experience of Reality. But all too often, that firsthand experience fades, and the teaching comes down through history and then ends up containing a rigidity of belief that no longer carries the light of understanding that engendered the belief in the first place. The true purpose of any real spiritual teaching is to awaken awareness and understanding and experience and knowing, and then the blossoming of the person. The blossoming and growing are so that the person can truly become a sun, so that they can become on the outside what they already are on the inside—a being that emanates the warmth of love, the light of the sun, the gravity of the sun that is meant to manifest in a person’s life.

There are so many beliefs about the nature of life. Speaking of Primal Spirituality, I am speaking about our intuitive, innate understanding of how things work in the creative process that includes how things work in our life, what the cycles of our life are about, how we navigate the things of life and how we create. This is wisdom that rightly grows and blossoms in a person’s life.

There are the more crude and backward religious beliefs that stunt people’s growth. For example, there is the belief that you go to heaven after you die. It is easy to see that behind that belief there is truth. The truth is that there is part of us that is, in fact, eternal and transcends our incarnation this lifetime. But knowing that to be true is very different from the belief that you have the opportunity to go to heaven after you die if you are good. And it is a far cry from the belief that if you are really, really good in this incarnation, then when you come back next time you will incarnate at a higher level.

Growing numbers of people have walked away from religion almost totally in their life, or so it seems. Who could blame them, given the restrictive, deadening beliefs often taught by religion? Still, even for a person who has walked away from a religious practice or a spiritual path, there tends to stay in the background of consciousness certain beliefs about how life is and how life works. Often the person has just chosen to be less conscious of those things. I suppose maybe they are less rigid, and so there is more opportunity for something to change for them than for somebody who is rigid or fundamental in their spiritual beliefs. But still, there can be limiting beliefs in consciousness, like believing in your heart of hearts that you are a sinner, or that you are a bad person; or believing that the only sure things are death and taxes.

So how about you and your real understanding and experience of how life works? One of the really awful things that has pervaded the consciousness of most people is that life is a mystery. You cannot really know what life is about. God is a mystery. Maybe God used to talk to people a long time ago, but you cannot really know God today. The philosophers talk about the great existential questions, like “Who are we?”—as if we will never know the answers. “Who are we?” “Who am I?” These are the great existential questions. Or, “Where are we going?” As if it is not possible to know.

I have been surprised in my life to find out it is possible to know. It is possible to know who you are and why you are here and what your life is about. And it is not as if that knowing is a finite thing, as if I could write it down for you in an essay and tell you, and then you would know too. It is an infinite thing, but it is possible to know that infinite reality right here and now—to know who I am and why I am here, and how life is made and what life is all about. I think for some people their grandest belief is that they cannot know. They believe deeply in their own ignorance.

True knowing in no way takes away from the wonder of life. In fact, it opens the door to participate in that wonder right here and now. And the way life works is that wonder is never the same from one moment to the next. It is an unfolding magical journey.

Here is how Dr. Jane Anetrini describes this magical journey: she calls it the “wash, rinse, and repeat” of life. She is naming the repeating cycle of creation: the fire of love, followed by the light of understanding, bringing life. In the repetition of this process, a person has the opportunity to know ever-deepening love, increasing understanding, and a more and more glorious experience of life in manifest physical form. Wash, rinse, repeat. And each time you do, there is more life being brought.

This pattern shows itself in a person’s spiritual awakening. Reflect on your own experience. As you began to awaken spiritually, isn’t that how it happened? Somehow the wonder and miracle of Universal Love touched your emotional body. And the warmth of love set you on fire with the wonder of that. You did not have a Ph.D. in spirituality at that point. You were just there, in the wonder of what you had touched. I know that is how it was for me. It was not, particularly, a mental experience. I fell to my knees and sobbed when I felt the majesty of Universal Love.

There is an opening of the heart to the reality of spirit that is the first part of a truly creative process, and it’s as simple as that. That experience of love in the heart is the first part of the “wash, rinse, repeat” cycle, and if that is not a daily experience for us, if we’re not finding some ongoing way of dipping our heart into the warmth of love, where are we going? What are we creating? And if we are on a spiritual path, what is that spiritual path about if it is not about the deep reception of Universal Love in the heart?

My experience is that the next thing that happens is an awakening understanding of what is happening, how it is happening and why it is happening, and how you could maintain it. There is learning going on. A person begins to understand that when they open up in this way or do these things, then they are opening themselves spiritually. They are learning something about how spirituality works in their life. They are learning the art of living.

In that learning, a person is exploring how they can let the reality that they have touched find practical application. They are learning to manifest things that are based on the new reality they have touched. There may be a lot of falling flat on the face; there’s a lot of tripping up in the process. We do not always get it right. But that’s the wash, rinse, and repeat of life.

It’s interesting to me that this is a descending process. We’re not starting from the bottom of things in a continually ascending experience of spirituality. That is the idea for many people—higher and higher; we’ll just keep moving up the spiral. If you’re from a tantric tradition, it’s the Kundalini rising from the base chakra, and it is always rising up to higher and higher levels. That is an example of a spiritual belief that has truth to it, but which has gotten stale in the minds of many people. Because in actuality, in the living of life, it’s wash, rinse, repeat, and that’s a descending business of taking the wonder of the spiritual and letting it manifest in the earth of your life—and then doing that over and over and over, day-by-day.

When there is this descending process that brings life to the world, out of the generation of that, there is an ascending generation of energy. That’s the Kundalini rising. There is something generated out of the earth of our being when we are activated spiritually. That generation rises up into the heaven of our being, into higher and higher levels of our awareness. So there is something that ascends. There is magic and wonder and there is realization and awareness that come out of that. And who knows where that takes us? But I can guarantee you, if you stop the wash, rinse, repeat of life—the processes that bring life to physical form—all that was ascending is going to be descending.

I am passionate about these things because I believe that real awareness of how life works is crucial for anybody, and it is crucial for humanity. And ignorance kills. It’s deadly and it’s not fun. There are people living in misery all over this planet, and in the circle of my own life, because they are suffering from ignorance around the most foundational knowing of their Primal Spirituality.

I want to come a little closer to home related to the teachings of Emissaries of Divine Light. We have taught that there are seven Sacred Schools that relate to seven levels of consciousness available to us as human beings, and that the evolution of human consciousness started at the First Sacred School. So humanity started at the First Sacred School, which is the physical level of things. And then, in the evolution of consciousness, humanity moved to the Second Sacred School, which is the mental level. And then the Third, which is the spiritual expression level. We teach that the ultimate destiny of humanity is to go to the Seventh Sacred School.

Like most spiritual or religious teachings, there is a truth to this. There is the ascension of consciousness that is taking place. But Emissaries around the world have suffered from a foggy, misguided understanding of what this teaching means. That misguided understanding is rooted in competitive spirituality, the Olympics of spirituality. “What Sacred School are you on?” This kind of spiritual arrogance and elitism does not just go on in Emissary circles. It appears in spiritual paths around the world. “I’ve ascended to the Fourth Sacred School,” and somebody else comes on their blog with their message to the world: “We’re at the Fifth Level.” And somebody else claims to be at the Seventh level. At that point, we have to invent some more levels. “We’re at the Fourteenth plane of cosmic consciousness now! Oh, we’re just going to get higher and higher and higher and higher.” Really?

This is the Tower of Babel of spirituality. We are going to get higher and higher and higher—is that really what’s happening for you? Is that really how it works? And by the way, are we “above the physical” now? “Physical—we didn’t even start out at the physical! We started at the spiritual and we are going on from there.” Really?

This path of continual ascension, without grounding, is the path of spiritual imagination. The truth is wash, rinse, repeat—invest the warmth of your love and the light of your understanding for the manifestation of life. And just keep doing it. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? Sounds mundane. Wash, rinse, repeat. That’s life. There’s something to manifest, something to create out of the miracle of Universal Love every day—every day. And if you ever consider yourself above that, you’re going into the No-place-ville of life.

The magic is that if you accept that lowly, humble place in life of simply bringing the spiritual into form every day, what you generate out of the most humble acts of service transcends them. What happens in consciousness now has thunderings and lightnings, all kinds of illumination. And what you find is that you are not just that person who is going through the wash, rinse, and repeat of life. You are actually a being who is in the heaven of your life too, with awareness of all that’s going on in that heavenly realm.

I am not talking about some intellectual awareness particularly, as if you now have all spirituality nailed down. I am saying that a person who is truly living a life of service in the way I have described finds that the whole universe is coming to their support. They are being loved by the universe, because the universe is looking to be of service through their human form. The person who is of service gets to find out, not just on the basis of some kind of spiritual imagination but on the basis of real knowing, that who they are is a being who transcends their immediate experience. And yet they have the humility to be of service as a human being from a spiritual standpoint.

That is the miracle of what is happening for spiritually awake people today. We are getting the big idea that, instead of trying to climb into an imaginary spiritual awareness, we are blooming where we are planted and letting the spiritual find us and come through us into the world that we are in. And now the spiritual reality within us is lighting up our awareness as if it were a lightbulb that has a current of electricity through it. In our humility of letting the Divine come through and do its will in the world, we get lit up by the Divine. And our mind has the experience of the reality of the Divine shining brightly in its awareness.

Somewhere along the line, with enough wash, rinse, and repeat cycles, we come to the understanding: “The reality that is coming through me that I’ve worshipped as a God is me.” I am part of that transcendent reality, not because I’m trying to believe it, not because I’m trying to make more of myself than what I am as a human being, but because I have had the humility to be a servant of a higher reality and to let it come through. And the more it comes through, the more I realize that what is coming through me is the truest thing about me. It is the realest thing about me.

In this process, the largeness of the spiritual reality that is interfacing with our humanity comes into our experience and not only lights up the mind but warms the heart and totally enlivens the body. We are talking here about Primal Spirituality, meaning not just ideas and beliefs about something, but we’re talking about how we’re wired spiritually. And if we are here with all the dimensions of our humanity—our body, our mind, our emotions—do you not think that there are realities of the Divine that are wired into those aspects of our capacity?

I used the word interface. In my own experience, it is a collision between the human capacity and the Divine. It is a wonderful, glorious collision of the human and the Eternal. This is the remarkable encounter that we have as we wash, rinse, and repeat. We are opened up in the process in ways we could not imagine, because we find out that we have a horrible tendency as human beings to close down. All the while, the power that is within us is looking to open us up, and far more than we as a human being ever imagined. That’s my experience.

It is a good thing we didn’t know at the beginning of this how it was going to go, for most of us, because if we knew how radical the opening was going to be that was going to happen for us in life, and if we only knew what it was going to take in terms of the power of spirit, and the dynamics of life circumstance, to put us in a position where we would crack open and allow the majesty and the wonder of the spiritual to come through, we might not have embarked on the endeavor. Some of us are way past that now. It is far too late to stop the process. And we just have to open up and let it continue, and be in this wonderful experience that includes not only what is descending through us but also includes this ascending awareness as well.

So blessings on all who originated true spiritual teachings, whether we consider them religious or spiritual or whatever. And blessings on the truth of the teachings themselves, because behind all spiritual and religious teachings is the truth. But let us embrace the reality of what that truth is and know it for ourselves, and not let clouded concept prevent us from a fresh, firsthand experience of our Primal Spirituality.