Stepping Out of the Frame
Part Nine
You’re Never Alone — Meeting Your Spirit Guides
Some art historians believe that the above artwork was del Caso’s attempt to show that the culture’s perspectives were robbing the world of its vitality. We don’t want to be criticized for being different, so we conform and stay in our “box.” Too often, those of us from religious backgrounds find that the influential message and customs of a religiously oriented youth that shape us have put a frame around our lives. Scientism does the same thing by claiming that science alone can render truth about the world and reality — a decidedly unscientific claim. Our inner wounding affects it all with its distorting internal framing of how we view the world. These frames limit our freedom to experience reality, especially mystical reality.
Jesus not only stepped out of all frames — he broke them!
It seems to me that this is one reason why spirit guides have seemed so important to me. The earliest Christians held many different views about what came to be called Christianity. The first significant controversy between different views was whether the Jewish Christians should welcome Gentle Christians into the Christian fold without becoming Jews. For Christianity to step out of the historic Jewish framework and became a separate movement from Judaism, it took about a hundred years.
As I understand it, the most significant, admitted to or not, controversy in Christianity today is around the mystical dimension of following Jesus. Marcus Borg articulated this by saying that, first of all, Jesus was a “spirit” person. By “spirit person,” Borg means that Jesus was a “mediator of the sacred” for whom God was a reality that was experienced. This is his language for what I would call “mystical Christianity.” The framework of numerous beliefs and doctrines and their seeming importance to many Christian groups obscures the mystical heart of Jesus and his call to us. I think Catholic theologian Karl Rahner had it right when he said, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or he will not exist at all.”
What one believes about Jesus is less important than how one relates to him as a spiritual being personally present with us now. This is how one connects to him and merges with him (or his evolved equivalent). Is Jesus a great teacher, a prophet of justice, social, and environmental change, or one who shows us the way to God and how to live? Yes, to all of those. However, I believe, first of all, that Jesus wants to be our guide and friend in mystical communion, which can merge into union. This is Jesus as our transforming friend who is so close that we are one. Everything else finds its most integrated place after that. This makes Jesus the prototype, mystical, spirit guide for me. That does not mean he is the only highly evolved being of love and light. Rather, he is one who has widened the cosmic path for all such high-level guides to do their work in all healing traditions and loving spiritual paths.
Having Jesus as a spirit guide and talking to him does not necessarily mean that you are a Christian. It just means, in my opinion, given the option of the untamed Jesus, that you have excellent taste when it comes to spiritual matters!
For over 30,000 years in many cultures, a spirit guide has been considered a nature or animal spirit – encountered by a native shaman – to bring healing or guidance into the spirit world. In New Age circles, a spirit guide is often seen as a heavenly being who offers spiritual guidance and cheerful healing energy. This radiant angelic guide is there to bring you whatever you want – like Aladdin’s Genie – no strings attached. This is a bit too removed from spiritual reality.
I find in my life and research that Jesus comes as a loving, hugging, being of love and light, but also as one who is earthy and grounded as a former physical being. He has been wounded and vulnerable like us. He guides us through the darkness. And he sends us out as spiritual guides ourselves to assist others – to heal and bless. Different from many new-age spirit guides or shamans, he offers us a loving family of those on the same journey. Other evolved guides fit this description, too.
My own journey of healing with Jesus and my spirit guides speaks to this, and I’d like to tell you a little more about that now.
My journey in connecting to my healing companions
I’ve had two significant challenges in my life. One that I was aware of, the other, not so much. The one seared into my early childhood showed up in the panic attacks that started in the fifth grade. I had to be tutored for five months until I was finally able to attend class. I had no idea why I was so anxious at the time.
Looking back in later life, I could see that my anxiety came from my parents’ constant state of conflict. As an only child, the trauma of overhearing the frequent late-night arguments between my mother and father affected me deeply. The arguments were over Mom’s constant berating Dad and Dad’s constant affairs. Needless to say, the place I felt least secure was home. I didn’t consider talking to my friends or other adults about it because I assumed this was the way life was. I ended up feeling very alone with my embedded anxiety.
Church afforded me a place of security because at least my Sunday School teachers cared for me on Sunday morning (even if they beat their wives at home!). As a teenager, I spent as much time as I could at church. However, taking a streetcar and a bus to get home meant I often missed one or the other and had to wait past the time Mom wanted me home. I would come home to find her in tears, hysteria, or at times, banging her head against the wall. She also had diagnosed hebephrenic episodes of bizarre behavior where she would be curled up in a closet laughing uncontrollably, out of touch with reality. Rather than offering me a safe place, Dad didn’t know what to do, and I would have to get a relative to call the doctor who would come to the house and give her a shot of something.
My panic attacks continued in college, where my doctor put me on a tranquilizer, and in seminary, where I added counseling to the mix. Both helped some, but I was still agoraphobic, having episodes where I was not able to leave home. For a while, I had to stop going out of town to speaking engagements because of the panic attacks. My twenty years of therapy and medication did not seem to significantly solve this problem.
When I discovered Ken Wilber and meditative prayer over twenty years ago at age 60, for the first time, I began to get a handle on my anxiety and panic attacks. Not that I didn’t pray before. However, it was more the traditional “mental” prayer, saying words to a Jesus I hoped was somewhere near enough to hear.
When I began to sense Jesus’ presence in meditative prayer, it was transforming. I began to feel his hand on my right arm, which has remained with me constantly for years and calms me in a way that therapy and medication did not. I was not alone anymore. Next, I asked John, the beloved disciple, if he would be one of my companions of light and love. He now stands behind me, touching me on my right shoulder.
Changing Parents
More recently, following Jesus’ model, I began calling the personal presence of God, “Abba, Daddy.” That very naming carried a mystical sense of a protective, nurturing father that I had longed for all my life. I now had a new father, and I felt safe and secure in the loving presence of my heavenly dad.
This seems to be a spiritual form of what some psychologists call “reparenting,” the process of getting a new, internal parent figure that could give my inner child what I missed as a child. These three heartfelt presences have been my most potent mystical friends for years now.
A New Guide
Recently I have been sensing that it was time to explore the possibility of another guide. As co-founders of ICN, Luke Healy and I meet every week to share, talk about ICN, and engage in ever-developing Integral Prayer together. One day, after we had finished connecting and listening for one another in Integral Prayer, we, as usual, shared what we saw, heard, and sensed. Luke said he saw a dark-skinned man in a golden robe who was connected, not with my heart, but my gut, my spiritual womb. Wow! That rang all kinds of bells.
A few weeks later, unlike Abba, Jesus, and John, whom I have never seen in a visionary way, I saw this new presence appear as a younger, black man. Since coming out to myself at age 60 as a gay man, I have primarily dated younger, black men. Ivan, my partner of over twenty years is a beautiful African American man, 28 years younger than me.
Now, on my own, if I had seen a gorgeous, young black man appear, offering to be a spiritual guide, I would have immediately assumed that was my libido at work, not my mystical sensibilities. But Luke’s initiation of this connection made me take it seriously. I asked this being of light for his name, but all I could hear was that his name began the letter “Z.” I did some research and found the name “Zadkiel” has often been associated with just such an ancient spirit being.
In the rabbinic tradition, some texts claim that Zadkiel is the unnamed biblical “angel of the Lord” who held back Abraham to prevent him from sacrificing his son. He is linked with freedom, benevolence, mercy, and the amethyst whose color is a rich purple. That struck a chord in me since I have had a large geode cluster of beautiful purple amethyst crystals sitting in my study for fifty years. I knew nothing about amethyst but recently found some associate it with easing fear with peace and calm. Ha! Imagine me needing that!
My other three primary companions of light and love are connected to my heart center of spiritual knowing. But Zad feels connected to my gut which seemed strange at first. I have never felt any romantic attraction to the presence of my other three guides. However, as I relaxed, it was clear that I was attracted to Zad in a way that was charged with the energy of eros. As I worked with this energy, I realized this was part of the healing of my second challenge in my life, my sexuality. Until the age of 60, it had never occurred to me that I needed healing there because I assumed I was a straight man who didn’t have strong sexual feelings.
That changed when the gays in my church asked me to reread the Bible and see if I could change my mind that being gay was not a part of God’s plan. I concluded I had been entirely wrong about homosexuality and the Bible. The Bible says nothing about homosexuality, and the word and concept as a natural orientation did not exist back then. (See my article The Bible and Homosexuality)
Now, at age 84, I am still being healed of decades of sexual abuse in the rejection of my natural orientation by traditional Christianity. My loving relationships with my partner Ivan and close friends have been incredibly healing. The last piece in the inner spiritual healing that God has provided for me seems to be in the form of a spiritual guide that understands, shares, and actively blesses my sexual feelings. This vital, erotic gut energy feels like it radiates from my spiritual womb-like rivers of living water. It is a spiritual resource that I never imagined or expected.
The final image below is something of my impression of how Abba, Jesus, and John appear to me and how Zad looked when he appeared in an open eye vision to me. These four guides have responded to my trauma and need for healing, and I experience their presence this way, every day. I always hesitate to share my experience since everyone is different, and your guides will come to you in the way you need them. However, I advocate the collective benefit of sharing our spiritual experiences with one another, and these are mine.
At ICN, we invite you to step out of the limiting frames of traditional Christianity, the unscientific claims of scientism, and the inner wounding we all deal with. Then you can encounter the mystical Jesus and other beings of light and love in the spirit world who want to be your friends, healers, and guides.
My Four Companions of Healing Love and Light
Surrounding me (Paul) in the center are God’s Abba Daddy presence on the left, Jesus on the right, John behind, and Zad in front.
Our mystical companions are offering us an invitation today to rediscover their loving and guiding presences, reclaim the 2nd-person relational connections of mystical spirituality, and rediscover the joy, wisdom, and healing that they long to bring to us.
In this event, Paul Smith will first open our minds to understanding the history and ways spirit guides come forth to us through teaching to our minds, followed by a time of question and answer. Then we’ll open our hearts to receive experiences of connection and guidance through collective practices and group processing afterward.
This experiential day of discovery, opening, awakening, and deepening will be a time of responding to the invitation from our invisible friends. A time to engage with our mystical companions, whether they be new, unmet friends or life-long companions on the journey.