On sovereignty.
Photo by Aditya Saxena on Unsplash
Intellectual Sovereignty
Emotional Sovereignty
Physical Sovereignty
Spiritual Sovereignty
These are the layers of abstraction in which "freedom" has its reigns.
In the normal 3D world, intellectual sovereignty is king, but what we don't realize, is that our interpretation and perception of our own intellectual sovereignty is skewed at best, because just because we possess language to express ourselves on some level, whether articulate and eloquent or not, does not actually mean that language belongs to us.
Our language and our understanding of how it does or does not belong to us is constructed for us as early as 3 months in utero. Our ears develop that early specifically so that we can identify our mother's voice, so that bonding can occur at the time of birth, and so that our cries can trigger a unique and unconscious chord in our mothers to take right and immediate action in order to ensure our safety and survival.
We learn to speak her language, and not that far afterward, also to speak our father's.
And by language, what I mean is we learn to speak our parents' belief systems, as ultimately, that is what governs how we communicate (both with words and non-words).
This happens necessarily and is not something to be avoided or intervened with in anyway. It's a part of our biological wiring.
We tend to pair our existential experience and identities with that of the development of the first phase of intellectual sovereignty (which is to say, the development of our parents' beliefs systems and forms of communication as they exist through us).
Then, we reach "adulthood" and tend to either pair off or matriculate with other "adults" who are at their first phase of intellectual sovereignty too, acting out their parents belief systems, and we connect based on those mutual belief systems without really questioning them and maybe we make babies or maybe we don't and maybe we continue growing or maybe we don't.
But the reality is, is that in the purest sense of the word, most of us are reaching adulthood as intellectual "infants" - barely capable of thinking for ourselves without discerning between the unconscious influences that were bestowed upon us before we were old enough to question them, and thus allowing it to entirely govern our behavior, our character, and our decisions in life.
Even if we "think" we are thinking for ourselves, most likely we're actually not.
In indigenous cultures, rites and initiations exist for young adults precisely to disrupt this sort of occurrence from happening. A young adult reaching adulthood who only has within him or herself the capacity to think just like his or her parents is a detriment to the versatility of the tribe. It would make a tribe vulnerable. The soul purpose of an initiation is for the initiate to discover his or her unique path in the world, aligned intellectually, emotionally, somatically, and spiritually to his or her own destiny, and to then return on the other side as an individual contributor to the tribe. This ultimately makes a tribe stronger.
At this point this person is expected to truly be capable of thinking for him or herself.
In cultures absent of this sort of ritual, like much of the western world where we have been unfortunately severed from these traditions, explicit attention on the development of sovereignty in our children is necessary in order to not royally fuck it all up.
Developing intellectual sovereignty in children can start early, by encouraging their curiosity, by letting them use their imagination to determine the use of things, by doing our own internal work to become more aware of our subconscious and unconscious tendencies, by creating space for children to develop their own language by not imposing ours onto them, and by allowing them to be guided by their own interests as those interests organically reveal themselves to them.
Raise your hand if you had a childhood where your parents were perfect at this.
***crickets***
If we're lucky, throughout this process we are also developing emotional and physical sovereignty, by learning to emotionally express ourselves and our needs using language and words, by having emotional boundaries that both allow us to continue to expand as well as to protect us from harm, and by understanding our physical experience as human beings, learning to feel and attune to our various body parts, skin, organs, relationship to the earth and the sky, relationship between ourselves and others, etc.
Assuming all goes well in terms of the development of intellectual, emotional, and physical sovereignty, we grow as infants to toddlers to children to pre-teens to teens to adults and alongside those three developing dimensions is the development of the fourth dimension of spiritual sovereignty.
Spiritual sovereignty allows us to have a continuous experience of awe, faith in our capacity to know what to do when we need to know, access to a higher power, internally-oriented sense of safety, connection to our ancestral lineage and karmic path, capacity to thin the veil of our perception of time to perpetuate any and all necessary healing as its needed and avails itself to us, etc
My personal experience is that this level of seamless and harmonious evolution is rare if not nonexistent in almost all Westernized humans.
Which means we can all chill the fuck out about being perfect at all the things at once.
But what's helpful to also remember when we embark on an explicit path of healing, transformation, transcendence, awakening, personal growth, whatever you want to call it, is that as each of these layers of abstraction are navigated, as they are wont to do on this path, there is an inevitable experience of INFANCY.
What that means is that as you are discovering true intellectual sovereignty, you may find yourself lacking words to express your truth.
And just like an infant who can't express him or herself, IT IS VERY FRUSTRATING.
The same is true for the discovery of emotional sovereignty which first involves acknowledging you have feelings and that they hurt and then knowing how to claim that you've been impacted and feeling safe doing so.
It's deeply humbling to be a grown adult discovering the infancy of emotional sovereignty because we can be in our mid 30s or mid 60s and feel like a three year old or a five year old and really can only find catharsis and expansion through having a full on tantrum or emotional meltdown on the floor.
The experience of developing physical sovereignty is quite possibly the most complex and confusing, because in that phase of the journey we learn to feel pain and pleasure in broader and broader strokes, along with a variety of textures, temperatures, vibrations, and flavors, and may eventually recognize, depending on how deep we are willing to go, that both pain and pleasure can feel exactly the same. That if you go far enough down the pleasure rabbit hole you meet pain, and vice versa.
During each of these dimensions of sovereignty development, a reorienting and calibration, and ultimately, further refinement of the other dimensions of sovereignty will be necessary. We can experience these as ripple effect awakening experiences.
Emotional and intellectual sovereignty are interdependent, which means that the degree to which you have developed your unique language to express your truth is the degree to which you will also expand your capacity to feel your feelings. A fun thing happens here where you may eventually reach a point in which you discover the opposite curve where there are a multitude of emotional experiences for which there exists no language, at which point, physical sovereignty becomes essential for continued growth, as it involves the tangible felt sense that functions vibrationally.
Physical sovereignty has the same relationship to the intellect as emotional sovereignty does, and in this case functions as a third dimension, as it relates both to emotion and intellect, and then eventually in the outer realms of the physical experience which can only be experienced through more advanced levels of physical sovereignty, we bleed into the fourth dimension, which is spiritual sovereignty.
While it's neither here nor there, this is one of the many reasons why science and spirituality are exactly the same thing (they just use different language). Science (aka: Body of Human Knowledge) and spirit are siblings.
There is something essential and also nuanced that exists along side all of these experiences which acts as an underlying thread or, more aptly put, beacon, that hints that you're headed in the right direction no matter which dimensions you're presently navigating, and that's another parallel attribute to infancy, which is AWE.
The greater your capacity for awe, the greater your overall, holistic sovereignty.
Why do we want this level of sovereignty?
Apart from actually feeling free, which is what most of us really want, what this opens us up to is something I call universal intelligence. It makes wisdom available to us that ignites continued growth and sets us up to receive and use that wisdom responsibly and efficiently in service to humankind and the universe at large; in service to our collective evolution.
Copyright Antesa Jensen 2019, please share only with permission.