Spiritual Illiteracy….

If we can read something like this blog, we are what most people would call literate. When we look at literacy, we usually think of reading, language, letters, and being able to make sense of the words those letters form. Most of us went to school, and one of the reasons for that was to learn how to read.

There is also literacy in a specific subject area. If we know a lot about the concepts connected with spirituality, we might consider ourselves literate in that topic. But are we truly literate from a spiritual standpoint?

Spiritual literacy is subtler. On the physical plane, the letters that make up words are representations of subtle vibrations. As young children, we have vibrations that we then call experiences of various kinds. We learn to take in images, sounds, tastes, and feelings from outside and inside, and gradually we put letters on all those vibrations. Those letters become words, and the words form our narrative. We learn the words from the initial caregivers we have as very young children. If we have learned the wrong words to name or describe a particular vibration, we have become illiterate.

There are many people who are certain they had a normal childhood and that everyone sees the world as they do. When faced as adults with circumstances that would objectively be called not normal, these people call them normal. This is a manifestation of spiritual illiteracy.

We are all spiritually illiterate to a degree, because we cannot read properly at least some of the letters that come up from our vibrations. The power in those letters is called the matrikashakti, the un-understood mother that shapes and contracts our view of reality and therefore makes us illiterate. We then cannot discern or hear our vibrations clearly, and therefore just read the letters in our heads and think that works. We miss the name, the form, and the meaning of our vibrations. We speak and do not make sense, though we are sure we do.

Calling something what it is not is the consequence of being unlettered. When we are illiterate, we will confuse numbness with calm. If we are numb, then we can’t read anything at all. We have lost our ability on any level to love. We are completely illiterate and just make things up, creating a false narrative that has no reality. We are connecting dots, but the dots we connect do not make a picture of what really exists. In our numbness, we think we are calm and clear-sighted, so we do not question our perceptions.

In order to move forward, we need to know where we are so we can take the next step. But if we are illiterate, we do not read clearly or at all, so we make up where we think we are. We may be out of our depth, unwilling to learn, refusing agency and responsibility, and clinging to a limited worldview, but we believe we already know all we need to know, so we don’t need to learn, and we should be able to do whatever we want, whenever we want. We believe we are self-sufficient when we are isolated, and consider people who are open to help incompetent.

The truth is, help is a gift, and receiving help is actually receiving the gift. But if we believe that accepting any kind of help is a sign revealing our incompetence, we will avoid help at all costs. This is a sure sign of our illiteracy. We then will perpetuate our own incompetence unwittingly. And we will isolate ourselves, believing we are self-sufficient. Our “literacy” encourages and maintains our illiteracy.

So how can we learn to read? When my children were young, I taught them phonics so they could learn to read the letters on a page. We would sound out each letter one at a time and gradually bring them together into one continuous chorus that made up a word. Each letter had a different vibration, a different sound.

When we begin to learn how to read clearly from a spiritual standpoint, we have to access the pre-verbal stage of manifestation. We have to be willing to actually feel the vibrations we have, be with them, and allow the letters from the vibrations to arise.

For instance, if we have always called a particular vibration “love” but in truth it is actually a vibration of anger, our world and our choices will always be promoting anger around us. We will not know why things don’t work. We will believe we are expressing love, while in truth we are expressing anger. If we are illiterate, we won’t know this. So we need to be willing to be with our experience. Though that vibration has no letters that make sense to us, if we are willing to sound it, feel it, gradually the letters for the word “angry” will arise.

Becoming spiritually literate means undertaking that process for all our vibrations. Once we have done so, we will be able to connect the dots clearly, and see everything in its proper place.