The Spiral of Wisdom and the Four Layers of Understanding and Awareness
There are four levels of spiritual understanding and embodied awareness.
These four levels can be studied in almost any spiritual tradition and spiritual text. The Qur'an, the Vedas, the Torah, the Christian Bible, and Odu Ifa (Exegesis, Black Earth Wisdom, Leah Penniman). They can also be attuned to through the elements, the four directions, the menstrual cycle, the life cycle of seeds, and the study of the seasons.
Each level contains a door into the next. As you stay curious to your experience, you will walk through each door until you find yourself immersed in the realms of the nameless, faceless, effervescent and then, eventually start over again at the first layer whether through death or an experience of humility.
Each of the levels are sacred and are to be respected as their own complete realm of awareness. They are not levels of worthiness, holiness, or perfection. They are simply about our awareness and our willingness to get closer to the Essential Divine that we can all sense and feel, but that cannot be contained or named.
The doors of each “level” are each their own invitation into a more expansive intimacy with the “moreness”, the radical aliveness, the essential spark that contains in everything that exists.
They are this:
The Common Layer → the literal, direct, and surface-level of meaning
The Symbolic Layer → the allegorical, referential, metaphorical, and archetypal understanding
The Subtle Layer → the nuanced, relational, intimate, somatic, and felt-sense experience of meaning
The Esoteric Layer → the mystical meaning as given through direct revelation from source
The first layer can be taught, but the other three must be observed, felt, revealed, sensed, and integrated beyond our intellectual understanding.
The symbolic layer can be integrated into the mind and understood through the lens of archetypes, pattern-making, metaphor, and construct. The subtle, however, must be felt through the body and understood through a felt-sense of receivership through relationship. The esoteric layer, the deepest layer of intimacy with the ineffable, can only be received through the eyes and the heart of a soul that is available to listen and receive direct divine revelation.
There is no hierarchy to these four layers of understanding, but they are, however, rungs of a spiral.
The Common Layer of meaning is a literal, tactile experience. It is face value. It is the texture of bark. The stickiness of pine. It is what we are told. It is what we learn. It is the first level of understanding. The “this means that”. The intellectual. The practical. The innocent erotic. The childlike wonder in us.
The Symbolic Layer is more distant from the literal, but still connected to the usefulness of linear time, tangibility, practical. At this layer, we see things as “this is like that”. It is metaphorical. It is the first experience of poetry. It's the way we feel when we watch a good film or listen to someone sing a love song.
In the Subtle Layer, we begin to touch the intangible and we also become it. The invisible becomes visible through our other senses. The imagination takes on a new function of transfer--meaning that what we see in the etheric can become real. We begin to feel and experience what cannot be measured or examined. We begin to touch and taste and know and understand what cannot be referenced. There is no “this is like that”, but there is “undying love” and “irrevocable belonging”.
When you reach the Esoteric Layer in your understanding of things, it becomes very, very apparent that nature, the divine, the ineffable is in direct conversation with you. And that there are parts of you that will never be able to translate your experience into words. You won't be able to “describe” what happens in that place where your experience touches into divine awareness. You just become a vessel. A hallowed bone. A participant. An observer. You dialog in offerings, worship, and ritual. Facts are fluid in this level of understanding and “truth” is something your cells and bones and organs within you know more about than your mind can comprehend.
The esoteric layer is a humbling layer where you can begin to see where parts of you still in the Common, more literal layer of thinking. And how, sometimes, you even prefer it. Why? Because there is no ambition here. Just a willingness. A beingness. And sometimes, because of the way our modern world is setup, you may prefer the innocence, the simplicity of thinking that there is more to know, achieve, and become. In the esoteric layer, your whole life becomes a dialog with the Beloved. A vision. A poem. A love language. A story that you choose and unchoose again and again.
And through that choosing, you know that you must come back into the Common layer of thinking and move through (initiate) the doors of each layer again.
This is no different than Winter breaking into Spring. Or how the fungi, through their decomposition of process of turning organic matter into soil, will repeatedly make room for new life to grow.
There is no hierarchy in these layers, but there is the spiralic experience of soul maturation.
Each time you move through the spiral, you receive some part of your soul self that was lost in a history or a memory or even another person's body. Each walk through the spiral becomes a whole conversation not only with your future self, but with the land, the skies, your community, and the heart of the faceless, nameless Beloved divine.
There are no games of ascension in this. There are no rewards for achieving the subtle and esoteric layers of understanding. It's just that when you see it, you can't unsee it. When you feel it in your body, you can't unknow it. It becomes a dance of remembrance. A soul understanding.
And suddenly, our offerings and our rituals and our songs and movement and soul shapes become animate. They awaken to life beyond the linear thinking and the static symbols that humanity have created. They become apart of the living nectar of nature, the gods, the goddesses, of flowers, and soil, and wind, and trees. Through this lens, our souls become an intimate, symbiotic, and integrated aspect of the All, regardless of where we are in our journeys of maturation and consciousness. We start to see ourselves and each other through eyes of lovingkindness and interrelatedness. We start to create with and for each other instead of just for ourselves.
There is no ladder to climb in the living out of these layers, but there is a certain kind of driven love that gets created and nurtured to care for, serve, and anoint the Earth and our communities through our vision and our offerings.
And this natural desire to offer is what we're exploring inside of the Creative Rites. During this live 2-hour workshop, we're asking…
How do we meet each door, each threshold with profound respect, honor, support, and care?
How do we know when it's time to come back into the practical, common, and simple layer of understanding after we've met ourselves, the divine, and our non-ambition in the mystical experiences of revelation?
How do we nurture new communal rites of passage for meeting each other (and respecting each other) in each level of awareness?
How do we nurture and honor ourselves as future elders and caretakers of these spiritual and psychological thresholds where vision is often born and materialized?
What are the Creative Rites our futures need us to develop in order for us to nurture truly healthy and soul-centric, ecologically rooted societies?
Join us here as we explore. We're going unapologetically deeper to nurture each threshold and honor every part of where you have been and where you are.
