William Bloom: Welcome, everyone! So glad you're joining us for this wonderful conversation and presentation. I'm very excited to introduce our special guest today, David Spangler. David has been a spiritual teacher for over 50 years. He was co-director of the Findhorn Foundation, which is Europe's leading eco-spiritual center, and then co-founded the Lorian Association based in Seattle, through which he teaches numerous classes. He is the author of many books, including Apprenticed to Spirit and Journey Into Fire. I'm very excited to be having a conversation with you, David, welcome. How are you today?
David Spangler: Thank you, William. I'm excited too and I'm fine today. Thank you.
William: Your work at the moment is primarily associated, in my mind anyway, with something that's called Incarnational. Spirituality. Could you tell us what it is and how you got involved with it in the first place?
David: Incarnational Spirituality has its focus on the sacredness of incarnation itself, of the embodied state and our presence in the world. I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment, but the way that I became involved was in a two step way, I guess. When I was 17, I was preparing to go to the university–I had just graduated from high school. A friend asked me what I wanted to do with my life and I said “I want to be a molecular biologist.” I’d no sooner said that when I suddenly had a vision and this subtle being appeared and said, “Actually, you're going to be involved with a spirituality of the incarnate state, a spirituality of being embodied and part of the earth.” I thought, well, that's fine, but that's something I'll do when I'm very much older and after I've been a successful molecular biologist.
William: Let me ask you a question immediately. You say this happened when you were 17?
David: It did.
William: So how come you took notice of this voice? Were you accustomed to having messages of this kind?
David: I was. I've been aware of the subtle dimension for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of connection with non-physical reality and with the energies that surround things in the world. I've always experienced everything in the world as being alive in a non-organic sense. So having this being appear, it wasn't like it was a regular daily occurrence, but it was not something with which I was unfamiliar.
William: And was this just inside your psyche as a kind of intuitive sense, or something more substantial?
David: In this particular instance, it was an interior experience. It was like having my attention shifted away from my friend with whom I was talking and suddenly I was having this interior vision. I was seeing what looked like a department store mannequin, a kind of representation of an embodied person. And this image would morph–it would change into an image of a grail or chalice and then it would shift back to a person. This happened three or four times and then I was aware of a being standing next to me and saying “David, your future is going to be involved with a spirituality of the sacredness of incarnation."
William: When you had this experience, which you trusted…I’m assuming–correct me if I'm wrong–I’m assuming there was a vibe, an atmosphere that was something you could trust. It was loving it was…
David: Oh, absolutely, yes. Very much so.
William: When people are trying to discern whether or not they should listen to the messages they receive, there's a criteria that’s applied, which is you check first of all whether it's loving or not loving.
David: Absolutely. Yes. I had had a very, very few experiences with running into non-loving energies–particularly around certain people whom I’d met or certain places. But for the most part, what I’d experienced as a child–and I grew up in a very loving atmosphere with my parents–what I'd experienced when I had these encounters with the subtle dimension was a sense of benevolence and caring and compassion and also playfulness. There was always a sense of joy, a deep sense of wonder and delight in life itself. If that wasn't present, if I did not feel that, then I would be suspicious of what it was that I was tuning into.
I had this experience and it wasn't like I then said, “Well, I'm now going to not go to the university, I'm going to go out and be a spiritual teacher.” I just thought, “Well, okay, that's information to put on the shelf. I really don't know what to do with that. So I'm just going to go ahead with the plans that I have”–which in fact, I did. It was three years later when I had this growing intuition that it was time for me to start a spiritual work.
William: What did that spiritual work look like? Because you were very young–you were in your early 20s.
David: Yeah, I was 20. At that time, my dad and mom had joined a metaphysical group in Phoenix, Arizona. We had moved there and they joined this group for various reasons. That was the first time that I actually encountered other people who were having clairvoyant experiences or psychic experiences of one kind or another. It was also the first time I realized that that was not something that people did normally. I just thought these were experiences everybody had and just simply didn't talk about. At that point, I was 14. I’d been part of the culture of groups in the Phoenix area that were studying metaphysics and UFOs and esoterics. It was the very beginning edges of what later became known as the New Age Movement.
William: How did that young man become a spiritual teacher and then go into evolutionary incarnational spirituality? How did that whole process happen?
David: One of the people we knew was a very famous psychic in those days, named Neva Dell Hunter. She was famous for doing trance channeling of past lives. She was kind of similar to Edgar Cayce. She'd been an advertising executive and then she developed this psychic ability and this ability to channel and that had become her work and she traveled around the country giving readings and holding conferences. Her inner contact was a man named Dr. Gordon and he said to her, “You need to do a conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and you need to have David Spangler as the keynote speaker.” She knew my parents, but she did not really know me. At that point, I was in college, and I knew her a bit. She contacted me and she said, David, I'm doing this conference that’s going to be on youth in the New Age and I'd like you to be the keynote speaker. I said, “Sure!” I thought it would be an adventure. I was the token youth. [chuckles]
William: Had you ever given a talk before?
David: I had–not on spiritual topics, but I had given talks in school and I felt comfortable doing that. The long and the short of it was I prepared for this talk–I had all these three by five cards with my notes and everything. I got up in front of this audience to give this talk and I just shifted into an altered state of consciousness. I was suddenly overlighted by a much larger version of myself in a kind of collaborative or collective mind. I felt myself in touch with two or three other subtle colleagues. I basically threw away my notes and I delivered this talk entirely spontaneously. It was about the changes going on in the subtle worlds as a consequence of this passing into the Aquarian Age.
As a result of that talk, I was invited to come to Los Angeles and give a series of talks. At the time, I said I wouldn't be able to do that because I was at the university. But there was this growing pressure within me that I should do this. I kept saying no, and there were a number of reasons for it. The Vietnam war was at its height and my father was very concerned that I might be drafted. I had scholarships, I had all these things that kept me in university and safe from the draft. And then one morning, I woke up and I literally couldn't think, I couldn't remember. I would go to class and I would have absolutely no comprehension of what the teacher had said. I would read a textbook and close the cover, and I couldn't remember what it said or what I'd read. I began failing in all my classes. I’d have these exams and I couldn't make out what they were asking me to answer, much less know the answer. And this was stuff that I've been getting straight A’s in until then. [So I finally relented and said] “Ok, I get the message, it's time for me to leave the university.” As soon as I had set that into motion, all that kind of loss of memory and everything disappeared. I answered this invitation to go to Los Angeles to do a series of talks, and one thing led to another and that's what I've done for the past 50 years,
William: You were forced into an altered state of consciousness over which you had no control?
David: I think part of me knew I needed to move on, that it was time for me to start doing this work, and my personality was resisting it. It's the only time in my life that I've had something like that happen. Some things stepped in, so to speak. It didn't feel to me like it was an intrusion from outside; it felt like something in me said, okay, we're going to say no to continuing with the college experience, and you really do need to pay attention and take this step.
William: When you were giving your first talks, did you know what you were going to say? Did you understand what was coming through? Was it part of your own wisdom, psyche, intuition speaking or was it something different, bigger?
David: Well, I didn't always know exactly ahead of time what I was going to say, but as soon as I stood up and began the talk, then I would know, I would have a sense of what it was I needed to say. What I needed to do, William, was I had to tune into the audience and I had to tune into the field that the audience and I created together. Once I'd done that, then I knew what I needed to talk about. The result of that is that I've always spoken extemporaneously–I’ve never been able to use notes. I find that they interfere with that process of tuning in and having a sense of what I need to say.
William: But let me ask you a question, then, which I'm sure will intrigue everybody: How do you tune in to your audience? What do you do?
David: Fundamentally, it's an act of love. I stand up in front of the group, the audience, and I quite consciously and deliberately look at them and just open my heart to them and feel I am here to serve them. Because at a very deep level, there is love that unites us; it’s an act of mutual support and upliftment. And so I'm here really as the servant of the audience, and I'm here as the servant of what wants to be a blessing for all of us in this occasion. That creates the sense of resonance with the field of the audience.
William: That is very beautiful, and I wish every teacher would do that. I wish every teacher would do that. So let's move us on now. Explain to us what Incarnational Spirituality is. What is it?
David: In the latter part of the last century, in late 1990s, I was visited by a subtle being–one with whom I had not had much contact with. I had been thinking about all the challenges that people were facing in the world and so on, and he came and he said, “The challenge for humanity is not that you are too incarnated; it's that you're not incarnated enough.” And then he left. I thought this was like one of those Zen koans. But I realized that he wasn't saying, “you all have to get more physical, you're just not in the body.” He was referring to a deeper process, or a deeper state of being.
Then I thought back to two things. One was an experience I'd had when I was seven years old that was really, for me, the thing that, if I were to say what really got me on the track of this work, that was it. I was living in Morocco at the time. My dad was in the military. We were stationed on a base in Morocco. I had this experience of going out of my body–it was the first time I'd had an out of body experience–and just uniting with my soul and feeling that presence of love and then recapitulating the act of will and love that brought me into incarnation. I experienced the process of incarnating and the joy and the love that was behind that–love for the earth, love for this world and for becoming part of it. I remembered that and I remembered something that my first ongoing spiritual colleague and partner and mentor said. He was a being I called John, who appeared to me for the first time when I went to Los Angeles and started doing this lecturing. He said it’s important to realize that we do not incarnate only into a body. A soul just doesn't step into a body the way a driver steps into an automobile; you incarnate into a system, you incarnate into a pattern of relationships–some of which are with the body, some of which are with other physical and earthly elements like the family and parents, but also just the general characteristics of the world. And others are more subtle–subtle forces make up some of what I call the incarnational system. He said when you think of incarnation, you need to think of being part of this system of connections and relationships, which extend both physically and non-physically into the material world and into the subtle world.
So when I had this experience with this being who said we weren't incarnated enough, I went back in memory to both my experience of incarnating and also to what John said, and I thought, well, I'm not sure what to do with this information, but I need to start exploring this and see what we can do to be more incarnated. Then, of course, I remembered the vision I'd had when I was 17 about being involved with a spirituality of incarnation. Putting all the pieces together, I said I need to find out or explore how we can be more incarnated as a whole system, not just simply being more in the body–although that's an important part of it as well; it’s part of a whole system.
I began teaching this and realized that a number of the people who came to my workshops and lectures were struggling with being embodied. Their spiritual teaching, you might say, or the information they had picked up over the years from various traditional religious sources or otherwise, was a need to get out of the body, out of the physical, out of the human and into some transcendental realm. Years ago, John said, the problem is with the transcendental–you don't understand exactly what that is and so generally as human beings, you tend to privilege the transcendental over the physical. You tend to privilege what is out there in the subtle worlds over what you are experiencing in the physical world, when in fact, they're one great wholeness and you need to have honor and respect for both dimensions, for both sides.
I found in working with people that I needed to address this issue of not honoring and not appreciating the spiritual dimension of their own incarnation and their own being, their own personalities–the sense of being in conflict within themselves, of trying to get away from parts of themselves rather than seeing how can I deal with myself as a wholeness, recognizing that part of that wholeness extends out into the world and is part of my connectedness to the life around me. So Incarnational Spirituality deals with that whole process of discovering one's wholeness within the world and as a sacred being. Incarnation is not an exile from our true home, it's not being sent away to someplace we'd rather not be.
William: Is this then the foundation out of which evolved what you call alliance space?
David: Yes, in a way it is. It’s definitely the foundation for it. I mentioned John, and when John first appeared to me, he actually showed up as what I called a “tweedy professor.” That is, he looked like someone who was part of the faculty of the university–he had on this kind of traditional tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows–it was my stereotype of a professor (and in fact, some of my professors at university did dress that way). So that was his initial presentation to me, except that he was a being of great energy and great love. And then he said, it's time to drop this and I just will appear as I actually am, which, as far as I could see, was this kind of sphere of light. I needed to come into alignment with his energy, and he with mine. This took about a month of meeting twice a day in the morning and in the afternoon. I would meditate and we would come together and our energy fields would begin to blend. Eventually, I realized we’d created a kind of third state. If you think about a Venn diagram, it's that area in the middle where two circles overlap. There was a place where his energy and mine could meet in harmony and in synchronization without one overwhelming the other.
I didn't think much about it; it was a process that I learned in working with him. But in working with Incarnational Spirituality, there came a time when my subtle colleagues said they’d like me to begin teaching how to be in contact with subtle partners. The way to do that, I felt, was through the creation of this overlapping synchronized field, which I called alliance space. The reason I called it alliance space was because for me, an alliance meant a partnership between two potentially unequal partners. Kind of like today, we have the the alliance between the United States and Ukraine, and yet, within the context of the alliance, both partners are equal. John had me experience coming into contact with beings whose energy was much greater than my own, but recognizing that the commonality we shared was one of mutual sacredness, it didn't matter what I was or what this being was; we were both part of the One, we were both part of sacredness and we could come together through that link and find a place where our energies would not be mutually disruptive to the other. And so I call that alliance space. And yes, I teach classes on that.
William: It would be very appropriate now if you could advise us on how do we take ourselves into alliance space. Can you give us some hints or take us into an exercise that does that?
David: I can. I can take you through the process. First I want to say that alliance space is unique for every individual. For each of us, our relationship with the subtle domain is going to be unique just like it is with any relationship or any friendship or working partnership that we have. The way I might partner with somebody would be different than how you would or somebody else would. It's important, I feel, to understand this individual aspect of it that each person will experience this in his or her own way. I’m not giving a recipe that you have to do this exactly this way, but here’s how I would go about it:
The first step is what I call to stand in my own sovereignty, and this is honoring myself as a unique physical embodied individual. If I think of the connection with the subtle worlds as a kind of bridge between this dimension and another dimension, then each side of that bridge has to be anchored and its foundation should be strong and clear and supportive. This honoring of myself, of my spirituality, of my sacredness is giving honor and expression to the foundation that I'm creating in this moment. It is fostered and assisted by being able to love oneself. It’s starts out as a sense of opening my heart to myself and honoring this embodiment, this incarnation, recognizing that taking incarnation is an act of courage and love and intent on the part of the soul shifting into this really strange [chuckles] and at times challenging dimension. I want to honor that my soul has taken that step.
I'm emphasizing this because in workshop after workshop, I have found that one of the most challenging parts to this whole process is for people to love themselves, to honor themselves in a non-narcissistic fashion. It’s a way of saying I am glad to be who I am. One reason that is important is because what I'm going to encounter in alliance space in encountering another being is the strength of their identity. If I'm not strong and clear in my own identity and my own boundaries, their energy could be overwhelming, it could lead to my losing a sense of myself in the presence of the other. So I want to anchor in my own identity.
The next thing is to extend that field of love out from myself to my immediate environment–the chair I'm sitting, the room around me–because all these things are alive, they all possess subtle life, they're all part of the One life, they all are a part of sacredness. I'm attuning to my surroundings as an ally, as a partner. This was something again that I learned from John. There were times when I would struggle with holding his energy–it was like he was bouncing off of me like a balloon. He said, “Anchor yourself into your environment, do that through love and that will enhance and expand your field.” It’s like making a wider chalice or a broader base on which the chalice can rest. So the second step is extending love and appreciation and honor and to one’s environment.
The third step is one of expanding your sense of presence out into the space around you–that is, to have a sense of your body as being bigger than your body. It’s a proprioceptive sense, it's a way of body mapping. It's the same process that we might use when we’re, say, driving a car and after we've driven it for a while, it's like the car becomes an extension of our body and we just instinctively know where the boundaries of that car are as we're moving through space. That's the same process of using our proprioceptive sense of body mapping except now we're mapping it out into this larger space and extending it into the subtle dimension. I say to my students hold the will and intent that you're expanding into the subtle dimension and just be still and be sensitive to what you're experiencing as you expand your edges out. What is the felt sense of that experience? What is that like?
As they become familiar and comfortable with that, the next step is I ask them to create a dedicated space through their imagination. It could be part of their field, it could be a bubble to one side, it could be like an oval in front of them–it can be whatever they're comfortable with. It’s a designated space that's built partly from their subtle energy and their will and intent and, eventually, the energy of whatever partner they're inviting into this alliance. I have them hold the sense of this space in their imaginations and in this kind of proprioceptive field.
And then I say you now want to fill this space with hospitality. You fill it with love, you fill it with a sense of hospitality, but you also fill it with intent. This is why this space is here, this is its purpose, this is the kind of alliance that I seek to create, this is the kind of ally that I'm asking for. In terms of the feel of it, I use the metaphor of preparing your home to receive visitors. Not just willy nilly visitors, but people you've invited, the kind of people you would like to come into your home. How would you prepare your home with this spirit of hospitality, but also, what is your intent in terms of who you invite?
That's as far as I can go with the Alliance Space because the other part of it, the other end of the bridge has to come out of the subtle realms. In my classes, people will do this and they may or may not initially feel any kind of contact. I don't encourage them to have a contact initially; I encourage them to focus on becoming comfortable and secure with the sense of this expanded space for this alliance space. And then at a certain point when they feel ready, then I say, who would you like to invite and for what purpose?
The overarching theme is that there’s a need in the world for us to create alliances that serve the world, that serve Gaia. There's so much that a subtle being who may wish to be helpful in our world can do, but there are limitations because it's not a physical being. It can't affect the world in the way that we can. Conversely, there are things that we might like to do that are enhanced and made stronger through cooperation and collaboration with a subtle being. In this sense, I see alliance space as a kind of force multiplier. It enhances my ability to act in the world, but it also enhances the ability of my subtle partners to contribute to the world as well. This isn’t exactly going through an exercise, but I thought I needed to explain the steps to make them clear.
William: That’s very profound and helpful, and I'm sure everybody will have followed it. What strikes me about it is the deep relational aspect of it that the energy worker, the healer, the person who has some psychic skills, is not egocentric in the way that they reach out or do their work. They're very, very carefully, as you described it, pausing, coming into the sovereignty of their own physicality and their constellation of energies, and then meeting in equal relationship the other beings that may be smaller or bigger.
David: Exactly. That's exactly right, William, you have put it so succinctly and clearly.
William: Well, I can only do that because you explained it so beautifully and it's such a beautiful strategy for people to do this kind of work. I get concerned with people coming into energy work and psychic work, who are kind of very human about it as opposed to relational. I think what you're saying is very, very deep.
David: One thing that I’ve learned is that we have what we call our special senses like sight and hearing for which there’s an organ dedicated to that sense–my eyes, my ears, my olfactory senses in the nose, and so on. But then we have all these senses that are full-body-based like proprioception or our sense of balance, in which the actual sense is not located in a specific organ, it's in the body as a whole. That has been my understanding of the deeper nature of psychic senses. If we're looking to replicate sight and sound as a psychic experience and say that I need to see something or I need to hear something in the way that I do physically, then I'm actually limiting the range of possibilities. I'm cutting out all this other full-body awareness and full subtle body awareness that's possible.
When I work with my companions in my classes, I ask them to be aware of the fullness of the sense of their encounter with a subtle being. A subtle being comes in the fullness of its presence and it interacts with us along a wide spectrum of sensation, of encounter, of information; not just narrowed into sight or hearing. I have people that say over and over, “I don’t see anything.” And yet when you question them about what they're experiencing, they're actually experiencing, if they stop to think about it, a lot of information coming to them in non-physical ways, in subtle ways. So I think that sometimes when we talk about psychic abilities, we narrow the range too much and and in the process, deny what we're actually capable of.
William: Yes. I think what you're saying, if I can interpret it, is that people need to be still and to trust the subtlety of their whole body impressions. There's a saying isn't there, that God talks through feelings, not through words. Listen, David, we're coming to the end of this beautiful conversation. I found your description of the exercise very moving and useful–very practical and useful. As we end this session. I would love it, we would all love it if you'd give us a blessing to round off and close this particular session.
David: Thank you, William, I appreciate that invitation. I often use, particularly if I’m starting inner work, what I call “four blessings,” but they work equally well for ending, so here they are:
Let us bless who we are. Bless the love and the will that brought us into being. It gave us this embodied identity. It is unique in the world and no one else can bring its gifts to the world. So let us bless who we are.
Let us bless those with whom we are in relationship. Let us bless those with whom we work. For together we create a field that none of us can create on our own–a collaborative field filled with promise and richness and power. So we bless those with whom we are engaged in work and in relationship and for the field that we create together.
And let us bless the place where we are. It holds us, it is part of our world, it is where we have our immediate impact, where our presence can make a difference and its presence can make a difference for us. And so we bless the place where we are.
And let us bless the work that we do. Let us bless the activity in which we are engaged. Let us bless our contribution singly and together to the wholeness of the world.
William: Blessed be, David!
David: Thank you, my friend.
William: Thank you David Spangler for your time and your participation in this wonderful conversation. It's much appreciated. Lots of love to you and gratitude.
David: And to you my friend, and to everyone watching.
William: Indeed.
