One of the MOST IMPORTANT ESSAYS of the 21st Century - by Jeff Brown

I, Kevin May have transcribed the first few pages of the Preface of “Grounded Spirituality” by Jeff Brown. He gives a magnificent overview of

1. Where we are as a species in our Emotional and Spiritual Development

2. Many of the flaws and shadows of various Spiritual Traditions that most of us are familiar with

3. How to shift towards a more integrated, grounded way of being.

I transcribed it word for word, and my only changes are using capitalization to highlight parts that I find especially important. I am going to add the second half of the preface (a few more pages) in the next few weeks.

Please, if you are a human being who cares about the future of our species and planet, read this entire essay. Thank you, thank you, thank you ~ Kevin May

HERE IT IS :

“We are a magnificent species. Endowed with remarkable gifts and abilities, each of us carries a profound and luminous purpose at the core of our being. Each of us is here with an unlimited bounty of treasures to bring to the world. This extraordinary human birth, this powerful physical form, this uniquely nuanced personality, all the threads and strands of our consciousness - are not cases of mistaken identity. We are not accidental tourists on this planet. We are here because we are intrinsically valuable and wholeheartedly worthy. We are here because we are needed here. 

And, at the same time, WE ARE AT WAR WITH OURSELVES. It’s a nasty, insidious war, one that has left few of us unscathed. Somewhere along the way, many of us BECAME SEPARATED FROM OUR AUTHENTIC HUMANNESS. 

We became fractured, adrift, severed from what is real. We moved further and further away from the inner wells that nourish us. Our self-alienation is now bleeding out everywhere we look, showing up in the forms of : misplaced aggression, meaningless materialism, psychotropic drug dependency, a perpetual dishonoring of the Divine Feminine, a lack of reverence for the earth that breathes us, and a blatant disregard for those humans we share a planet with. As brilliantly as we have excelled and evolved on a technological and virtual level, many of us are still at war with our humanness. WE ARE STILL NOT AT HOME IN OUR OWN SACRED SKIN. 

In the the throes of this estrangement, it becomes difficult to see through to its source. It is easy to imagine that our self-alienation is caused by something outside of us. But make no mistake - MOST OF THIS MADNESS IS A DIRECT REFLECTION OF OUR UNHEALED AND MISALIGNED INNER WORLDS. 

We are manifesting our individual fragmentation everywhere, and it has now reached a stage of dangerous perversity, threatening our very existence as a species. There is no time left to distract from the core questions of our lives. The present state of the world requires that we dig deep, and get to the root of our fracture. World events have made it perfectly clear that we can no longer find our answers independent of the self, itself. There is real work that must me done now, within each of us, to right this earth ship and to bring us into alignment All self-avoidant flights of fancy must be grounded until further notice. 

At the heart of this war is our fundamental amnesia as to who we are and why we are here. That is, what is our purpose here on earth? What does it mean to live a life of meaning? What is it to be a self-actualized species? What ways of being will bring us together, into co-creative alignment - with ourselves, with each other, and with the natural world? What does it mean to be fully conscious, for this entire human experience? What is it to be fully alive? What is REAL spirituality? 

To answer these age-old questions - we have often relied on systems of belief. This has taken manifold forms across the globe : world religions, scriptures, self-proclaimed masters and gurus, Father God in the sky, and a whole gamut of teachings and methodologies. With unrelenting determination, we have sought many of our answers outside of ourselves. And throughout the course of 2000+ years, these systems haven’t managed to heal our fundamental divide. 

They may have served limited purposes, but they have not remedied our fractured awareness. In fact, many have made our fragmentation more pronounced and taken us further away from a healthy wholeness. One thing has become certain : If we continue to look for our answers and direction outside of our embodied experience - we will not find our way home. 

It is time that we looked in another direction - right at the heart of our humanness. Not out there - in the alleged wisdoms of others - but deep within our own uniquely constituted human blueprint. Not the self-reflective brand of looking within that is confined to our thinking and rational mind, but THE ONE THAT INTEGRATES EVERY ASPECT OF WHAT WE ARE INTO THE EQUATION : our emotional bodies, our flesh temples, our intuitive knowings, and yes, even our often misunderstood ego-self. I am not talking about a narcissistic honoring of the self - I am talking about a healthy and reverential regard towards our manifold components - in the full spectrum of what we are. Deep within our brilliant natural-born selfhood lie the answers as to who we are, and why we are here. We don’t just have those answers - we actually ARE those answers. They make their home at the heart of us, continually feeding us information about our path and purpose. WE JUST HAVE TO LEARN TO ATTUNE TO THE SUBTLE INTONATIONS AND INTIMATIONS OF OUR INNER KNOWING. We have to learn to recognize and honor our inherent wisdom. We carry the information we seek. 

This perspective runs counter to the culturally embedded tendency to diminish and desacralize the self. If we weren’t born ‘sinful,’ we were born histrionic (women) or violent (men). We were born allegedly wild, and the only way to contain our unstoppable life-force was to condition and repress the self, making us dependent on religious institutions and marketing constructs to frame our lens on reality. When we are in a weakened state of fragmentation, it is easy to be subjugated. If you are not standing in the strength of you own embodied intactness, you will invariably seek a sense of wholeness from outside systems. You will have no other choice but to look to them to direct your path and purpose. Someone else’s version of God, someone else’s idea of truth, someone else’s idea of where to spend your money, someone else’s version of purpose, and someone else’s idea of your inherent worth. 

It is time to put an end to this delusion. It is time to restore power back to the individualized self and to see it for what it is - as the only authentic course in miracles. Far too many of us are spending our precious lives apologizing for our wondrous humanness. It has been systemically and collectively shamed - and somewhere along the way, we bought into it. Yet, the truth is - we are no mistake. We are a benevolently intended miracle in process, each here with a uniquely constituted sacred purpose residing in the bones of our being. Our life’s work is not to shame and shun our magnificent selfhood - it is to celebrate and embrace it. It is to plumb its depths for encoded information as to who we are and why we are here. It is to embody and integrate all of the gifts and callings that we came into life to manifest. This is how we regain our sovereignty and how we evolve as human-beings. 

Before we can identify our reasons for being, we have to arrive HERE, in the most inclusive sense. If we are disempowered, distracted, dissociated, or in any way fragmented - our experience of the here, now, will be intrinsically limited. And through that limited lens, we can only access a tiny splinter of possibility for our lives. We can only see the whole picture - and actualize the full range of our destiny - to the extent that we are, ourselves, whole. 

In order to truly arrive HERE, we must first acknowledge something that the powers-that-be often want us to forget. That we are all wounded. That we are all trauma survivors (to one degree or another). That we all long to be healed. The age-old established structures that were built on a maligned sense of self - are dependent on us forgetting this. When we focus on our own healing, it severs their reins of control. It empowers our voice. It strengthens our intuition. It reminds us that our hunger for personal meaning cannot be satisfied by religious edicts, media sound-bites, or substitute gratifications. Our buried wounds and feelings keep us fractured and easily manipulated. Healing them brings us back into a strong, stable and rooted selfhood. Once there, we can no longer be controlled, an we begin to see more clearly the ways that all of us - even those in positions of authority and power - have been imprisoned by a divisive consciousness. It may have served some of us on certain levels, but it has served none of us from the perspective of a wholly integrated human-being…. For more please order a copy of the book by CLICKING HERE or get the AUDIOBOOK HERE.