Learning from the Spiritual World and Acknowledging the Self

Photo by Josh Hild

From Childhood to Christhood is a phenomenal book about a spiritual journey and spiritual growth, teaching readers that redemption begins by accepting the vastness of human consciousness.

You might not have asked this out loud, but subconsciously, people constantly strive towards self-discovery—Who or what am I? What do I believe?­—these are some questions that populate the mind in the hours of quiet and introspection.

Self-discovery is an essential facet of self-improvement.

How can anyone attempt to truly better themselves if they are not acknowledging the self?

Self-improvement without self-analysis is like heading into a dark forest with neither a light nor a map. It is delving into a deep cavern, unprepared and untrained.

Empiricism and scientism are the rocks upon which contemporary modern society anchors itself, but those two cannot help you discover the Self.

According to Jungian psychology, the Self represents the union of the conscious and unconscious minds through individuation. The parts of an individual’s personality are combined into a whole.

With how complex and, sometimes, irrational the Self can be, cold empirics and hard science are imperfect tools to use in the journey of self-discovery.

In Jocelyne Ranucci’s From Childhood To Christhood, a book about a spiritual journey and spiritual growth, she discovers this fact firsthand.

Through an arduous spiritual journey that followed after pain, heartache, and abuse, she transcends, finally attaining a life worthy of perfection.

Touching, profound, and deeply intimate, Ranucci details her journey of searching for the greatness that exists inside everyone.

Though it has the word, Christ, From Childhood to Christhood is not necessarily Christian.

Ranucci’s story is about the path that takes you towards the Christ consciousness, the gestalt spirit of humankind that unites people with life, and the transcendent divinity of love (which some cultures refer to as the Buddha consciousness, the Atman or The Great I Am).

The Lessons of the Masters

In From Childhood to Christhood, Ranucci gracefully shares with the readers the tools and knowledge she gathered from the masters of theosophy and mysticism and the ascended sages:

• Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891). A Russian mystic, she outlined in The Secret Doctrine the evolutionary progress of the universe, humanity, and both the seen and unseen worlds of manifestation where life persists in almost limitless shapes. Madame Blavatsky also discovered that an Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless, and Immutable Principle is beyond the range and reach of thought.
• Alice Ann Bailey (1880-1949). An English spiritualist, she posited the idea that everything is merely a form of energy, including spirit, matter, and psychic forces. To her understanding, man is a soul whose personality contains the mind, emotions, and body.
• Gautama Buddha (563-483BCE). An Indian prince, he noticed that only self-realization led to enlightenment. His most famous lesson is that life is ultimately about suffering, and that is caused by craving. The only way someone can liberate themselves from this is to accept that reality is temporal and that one must strive for permanence with the Buddha-consciousness.

Acknowledging the Self with the Spiritual

If you have never tried to define yourself, you are limited by others and by the roles they have assigned to you.

While it is good to be dedicated to a role and provide for your community, life itself cannot be limited to only those boundaries. If you are stripped of this identity and are not acknowledging the self, how can you navigate life?

The inability to comprehend your desires and ideas leads to dependency and weakness, akin to a sculpture made of sand that stands because there is a wall that stops the waves. Take away the wall, and the sand sculpture is swallowed up.

There should be a balance between the outward and inward selves so that the proper Self can blossom.

But, of course, the Self is not where self-discovery ends.

After discovering the Self, you should also connect with the spiritual world that surrounds everyone and everything: the Christ consciousness.

By establishing the Self before the Christ consciousness and becoming enveloped within It, a person is filled with the totality of existence and acknowledges that life and love are singular and touch everyone and everything.

The Christ consciousness is not the egoist version of love that manifests primarily within an individual but the omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent love of divinity.