Finding the Stars
by Jeffrey Pierce

I crossed a continent to discover the stars.

Living in my native Oregon, I was used to brilliant night skies richly scattered with stars, like someone had spilled a bottle of glitter over a black velvet cloth. Standing in the mountains, looking up at the night sky, you could see not only the planets of our solar system and suns from systems light years away, but the very arm of the Milky Way stretched before you. Saturated with the beauty of nature, it was easy to be blinded by the abundance, to lose sight of the bigger picture while you were marveling at the details.

A lifetime later, standing watch with a fellow soldier while on maneuvers on an East Coast military base, it didn’t seem possible that I would learn more about the night while wearing combat boots than I could from a pristine Oregon mountaintop.

But there I stood as an infantryman from Texas pointed out the constellations, showing me how to read the sky as easily as I had learned to read a map. Beauty became patterns, patterns became places, and those places filled the three-dimensional space that I lived in, teaching me not only where each of the stars radiated from in their distant corner of the galaxy, but where I stood in relation to those far-away suns. I suddenly understood that I stood on a planet, looking beyond the atmosphere that made life possible, gazing across unfathomable distances to see sunlight from another solar system.

Standing there, I realized that to those solar systems, my existence was nothing more than the light from a distant star twinkling in their own night sky.

In much the same way that I came to understand both the night sky and the place my own star took in the heavens, so I also came to understand the patterns of spiritual reality. It was a rainy Saturday in March 1987 when I knelt in prayer and made a pact with God. I would follow, wherever I was led, walking through any door that opened for me, but I wanted to see the divine firsthand. "I will go wherever your lead me," I prayed, "but I want to see you face-to-face. I don't want someone else's interpretation of you. I don't want to follow the words of another man. I want to know you, as you are, for myself."

It wasn’t someone else’s interpretation that I sought. I wanted to know, truly know, the face of God – regardless of the cost.

To hold up my end of that agreement, I would wander the spiritual globe, from West to East and back again, from new thought to ancient paths, learning from both prophecies of things to come and the history of events long passed. The path led me from one religion to another, seeking the truth and comparing what I discovered at each stop to what I had previously learned. I shed my ego, always willing to learn, to tread a little deeper, to appear the fool in order to gain wisdom. Along the way, I was trained as a shaman by a Native American woman, studied magick with an old Roma crone, and discovered the heart of Jesus clearly displayed in the Gospels yet somehow hidden in plain sight. Over the course of two and a half decades, I studied religions from the East, forgotten traditions from the West, and considered both ancient spiritual paths and new emerging thought.

Spirituality became the same lesson that I was taught by the night sky. It was a process of learning the patterns around me. In the same way the constellations had opened my eyes to the physical universe and my place within it, so my eyes were opened not only to the spirit realm, but what it meant to be a spiritual being.

What I discovered was that, in the most ironic of twists, spirituality has been lost to us. The irony isn't that it's beyond our reach, but that we no longer know how to see the path and navigate where it leads us from one lesson to the next. Instead, we give our power away. We allow others to lead us, misusing and abusing the concept of faith. We find a single sliver of the greater Truth and hold on to it, no longer moving forward on our path. We twist the core concept of spirituality away from love and instead direct it to any of a number of misleading concepts, from pride, to anger, or simply to fear.

Five Simple Concepts

When I stopped to look around me with the new eyes I had gained, I realized that spirituality can be clearly expressed in five simple concepts.

God is everywhere. The challenge in coming to truly know the Divine isn't in fitting that concept to our preconceived ideas, but in embracing the challenge of understanding how each moment is sacred and what it means to allow the Divine to be big enough to encompass all of reality.

God is love. If God is everywhere, in every moment and God is also love, then everything that happens to us happens for a reason - and that reason is both beautiful and for our greatest benefit. While that may seem like an enormous concept to comprehend, the tools to understanding the truth in that perspective are very simple to employ. Our challenge isn't in understanding God, but in understanding the full extent and definition of love. The problem isn't in the core truth of the concept, but in our lack of an appropriate framework from which to understand that perspective. Once we embrace our strength and the power that is found at our core, we see everything in a very different light.

We are God. The obstacle isn't that we're separate from God, but that we are God. That means that we are such powerful, divine beings ourselves that our own disbelief is capable of convincing us that we are far less powerful than we truly are. To open ourselves up to the fullness of spiritual (and by extent, mystical) reality, all we need to do is slow down and allow ourselves to be open to boundless possibility - which is both easier than it sounds and one of the greatest challenges we face in this lifetime.

Life is a learning process. If each of us is God, if we are powerful spiritual beings and everything not only happens for a reason but happens in love, then our greatest spiritual classroom comes not from holy texts, but from our interaction with each other. What’s more is that in most situations there is not one answer that is right and another is wrong – there is the lesson and where we decide to grow with it.

This life is but a heartbeat in our greater existence. Our deepest well of spiritual power, understanding, and wisdom comes from a simple shift in perspective. We aren't physical human beings who will one day be blessed with a beautiful afterlife. We are beings from that afterlife who are briefly experiencing what it means to be a human being.

Finding Where We Begin

There are as many ways to approach the truth of spiritual existence as there are those of us who are drawing breath on this planet. Understanding the reality of God requires that we both embrace the divine and tear down the misconceptions that separate us from that Truth.

If we were to pause for a moment and ask ourselves, “Who am I?” we would come up with a wide range of answers. Some of us would state our name; others would describe our profession or our place in our family. But that isn’t the fullness of our being. That is who we are now, at this fleeting moment in time. The first step in understanding who we are is to go backward, seeking our origin, the seed from which we sprang into life.

It’s easy to say, “I’m the son of Mr. and Mrs. Parent,” or “I’m the daughter of Mom and Dad.” But our parents weren’t the beginning of who we are at this moment. Something or someone came before them. So we go further back.

We go backwards in time, through our parents to our grandparents, tracing our family tree farther and farther back until names give way to nationalities, to the regions where we can trace our ancestors’ origins. But something predated our ancestors as well – so we go even farther back.

If you believe in evolution, you can go back to the dawn of Homo sapiens, to the moment when our species first appeared on this planet, but that still isn’t the beginning of the journey of origins. Even our species came from somewhere. You can go farther back, to the first mammals, to the first spark of life on our planet, but even those materials originated from somewhere else. Farther and farther back we go, past the creation of our planet, beyond the disc of cosmic dust that would one day form our solar system, to the moment of the Big Bang. And while that moment represents the building blocks of all life springing forth into our universe, it too had to have come from somewhere before that moment. That energy, those raw materials, didn’t simply exist; they came from somewhere.

If you go back to the moment before the Big Bang, before physical existence was birthed into being, by the very definition of that moment there is nothing tangible, nothing physical. There is nothing there that we can touch, measure, or quantify. But every bit of our universe, our very reality, came from somewhere. And if there was nothing physical present in all of existence, then we have to agree that it came from something that wasn’t physical.

And that leaves the spiritual.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a shaman or a priest, a witch or a monk, a holy person or someone who thinks of worn out jeans when they hear the word “holy,” we can all agree that there was something indefinable that gave birth to reality, something that had to have been the origin of the energy behind the Big Bang, behind Creation, behind whatever title, framework, or understanding that you place upon that process. Call it “God,” “Spirit,” “Goddess,” “Tao,” “Energy” – call it whatever you’d like, there was a non-physical source that gave birth to physical reality.

What we often fail to consider isn’t this process – or even the origin of the material existence we live in. What we fail to consider is who we are. Just like we can go backward in time and say, “I’m the son or daughter of my parents” we can also say, “I am part of my parents because I came from them.” The first step in understanding the flow of spiritual reality is to understand that when we go all the way back to the beginning, to the moment before the Big Bang, we can also say, “I’m part of what came before existence.” Or, to put it simply, “I am part of God.”

It is not the intent of God, Spirit, the Universe – whatever term you choose to label the divine expression of reality – that we were born to blindly follow those who came before. That would be like being taught to paint by a master artist and choosing not to wield your brush because other painters came before you. Each of us is a unique expression of the Divine. Each of us holds a color to add to life’s mural, a hue that is our own and which no other person possesses. We were born here, in this lifetime, to add our voice to the world’s chorus, not to sit quietly, too shy, too ashamed, too small to sing the song we hold in our heart.

For most of us who have made it to adulthood in a Western Culture, no one told us we were unique. No one told us we had a purpose. No one told us that we are a conscious expression of the Divine, here for a reason, here not just to live, but to become that expression of the Divine in human form. No one tells us that we’re spiritual beings experiencing reality from a physical experience. But if you think about it, it makes sense. In the fullness of eternity, this life we live is but a single heartbeat. It is our existence as a spiritual being, where we come from before we entered this life and where we go when we leave it, that holds the majority of our experience. It’s where we live. And yet we’re told that this life is all that we are and we should use the scant decades we live and breathe as the criteria by which we live. We learn to hold love at bay, rather than embrace it. We’re taught to fear instead of to trust, to second-guess ourselves rather than to aspire to be the best we can be.

The act of asking the questions and seeking the answers that resonate with truth is a right that each of us is entitled to embrace. This process, called active spirituality, is an incredibly simple concept with lessons that unfold, challenge us, and inspire us with every breath. Life becomes our teacher. We learn to see our spiritual journey in each moment, no matter how mundane that moment might seem to us. Whether it’s making love, arguing with our spouse, dealing with rejection, raising a child, struggling with a co-worker, laughing at a story, or being cut-off in traffic, each moment is saturated, not only with the divine, but with lessons and insight into both our journey and what makes us unique as an individual.

Our Source of Power

To undertake this process, first we seek to manifest love in every aspect of our lives. Many of us in this modern world think of love as some wimpy romantic concept, all rainbows and unicorns, cotton candy and sappy pop songs. What we fail to realize is that love is the most powerful force in all of existence – so powerful that everything else fades before it. It’s love that we call upon to protect those closest to us in the face of impossible odds. Love is what inspires us to transmute pain and darkness into art. Love is found, not only in our best moments, but paradoxically in our worst. It is pride and humility, power and gentleness, anger and forgiveness. Love is power. Love is deep. Love is the loom that weaves the fabric of every meaningful moment in all of existence.

Love is power – plain and simple.

And our first stop is learning to love ourselves.

Love is not about surrender. It is not about laying down and taking it. Love is about finding the beauty in any moment and becoming the champion of that beauty. Sometimes, that beauty comes in the form of a kind word in the face of aggression; sometimes that beauty comes in the firm stance and the even-handed declaration that states, “You cannot do this to me. I am worth more than this.”

For our lives – and by extension, our community and the world around us – to function appropriately, we must live from our core outward instead of allowing the outside world to suppress our core. We have to discover who we are, the song that our soul sings, and learn to sing that song. It is not enough that we learn to raise our voice, but whether that voice is bellowed or whispered, whether our song becomes a solo or simply a voice in the choir, we need to discover the beauty that our unique music embodies. This is a journey in itself and one we will take together, step-by-step, as the first portion of this book unfolds. Once you truly know your core self, your world changes, dramatically and dynamically. It is in that journey that you find your power - a deep and timeless power that is uniquely yours.

With this concept in place, we take the second step and learn to wield this power. We discover the importance of responsibility, of boundaries, and how those two concepts intertwine to provide us with the answer to every dilemma we will ever face. Using love, we can heal ourselves and others; we can grow and teach; we can deconstruct every secret in the entire expanse of reality, regardless of whether we’re untangling an ancient mystery, the inner workings of miracles, or simply understanding the face we see in the mirror.

Not only have we learned to tightly close our eyes when we want to see, to blindly follow another’s voice when we seek our own answers, but we have learned to give away our power at every opportunity, to hide in false impotence, when the power to rewrite reality is already literally within our hands. If we are an expression of the divine, then we are what we are created from – divine energy. By a simple extension of logic, if we are divine energy then we are therefore divine. And if we are divine, what dream, what hope is truly beyond our grasp to bring to life?

Our Calling

And with that power at your fingertips, you can join in the simple act that every spiritual being is called to embrace – create.

How much of our lives are based on defending ourselves, holding perceived threats at bay, or working to destroy those threats? We lay waste to our environment, to each other, and to ourselves. What if we chose to create instead? We’d still have conflict, because we do not share a universal vision – and that is the way that it should be. A bland homogeny would destroy innovation and stifle new ideas. It would quickly become a repressive regime where the vision of a chosen few would dictate the appropriate approach to creation for all. That’s one of the key reasons why it is so important for us to discover our core. We will see in the chapters ahead that growth typically happens in one of two forms – surrender or defiance. You have to be strong enough to willing set your own ego aside and submit, brave enough to throw off the shackles that bind you in an act of rebellion, and to know yourself well enough to know which is right for you and your path and when it is the appropriate time for you to choose one of the two and act.

You can begin to see how active spirituality differs from the spiritual paths that you’ve been introduced to in the past. Not only are you encouraged to ask questions at every turn, but you’re empowered to find those answers for yourself.

Initially, this leaves us in a quandary. If we are encouraged to question each concept, to find the answers for ourselves, then how do we find the evidence that we are truly divine? How do we test the idea that we’re spiritual beings experiencing reality from this physical existence? If the fullness of who we are is found in the realm of Spirit, how do we begin to perceive the realness of that concept?

If we are part of God, then by the simplest application of logic, then we are also divine because God is divine. And if we are truly divine, then we have the power to create our own reality right at our fingertips.

The question isn’t, “Can we learn to experience our divinity?” but “How do we embrace our divinity?”

And the answers? They’re all around us.

Continued in Part Two: Reaching Your Core Self

Thoughts? Comments? You can contact us at connect@oldways.com or interact with Jeffrey, Briana, and the Old Ways community on our Facebook page.