Finding meanings

What is spirituality? We often hear this word being used, and the world offers us more and more paths that are described as “spiritual,” but what does this mean? Through Damanhur, I have gotten to know a new way of defining spirituality, that is, “knowing how to give meaning to things.” This year, our journey of exploring different divinities gives me a wonderful opportunity to look for meanings behind some divine concepts. Researching different divinities, I go on a journey with them, seeing the world through their eyes, and through the peoples who were devoted to them, finding meanings behind everyday aspects, which I have discovered to be very profound. Just by asking myself about the meanings of a divinity’s characteristics – as Lugeilan has inspired me to do – gives me a fascinating vision of life and the opportunity to ask myself important questions and explore life more deeply.

Since adolescence, I have felt a desire to research in the field of the spirit. At that time, with the transformation of my body and my psyche, I had several mystical experiences that were beyond my control. To describe these events, I will use a poetic language, because they are experiences that you live through or rather, they overwhelm you, and then you decode them for years to come, sometimes even for a lifetime. These experiences were triggered in ordinary moments: sitting at the table with my family, on the tram to the university, in the central square of Zagreb while I was waiting to meet my friends on Saturday night… It was all very normal, but all of a sudden I had the feeling of entering into a different space. I was in another time, which usually flowed much slower. All of a sudden I was swimming in the universe. I was not only myself, I was the entire planet. I had the visceral sensation that I could detach from myself at any moment, become the planet and vanish into the immensity of the cosmos. This description does not convey the vastness of my experience, although I hope you can sense at least some of the emotion that I felt in those moments.

After these experiences, I felt the need to study different spiritual paths. I was in a university psychology program, but I studied the subjects of the program as little as possible. All my attention was placed on reading books by Richard Bach, Osho, Yogananda, and other spiritual teachers who helped me to understand the meaning of my experiences. Teachers who spoke about spirituality. This thirst for books that nourished my soul was especially satisfied by Falco’s books. One, in particular, was Dying to Learn, which I read during my first visit to Damanhur. It is one of those books that do not make any sense if read with your head, but on an emotional level, it helped me to experience true spiritual openings. When I read Learning to Die to my mother during her passage to the Beyond, I shared strong emotions of love with her until her last breath.

Returning to Lugeilan, here are the meanings I have discovered:

The divinities – in this case, Lugeilan – are players. They need to experience this world as a playing field in order to imprint the knowledge that is inherent in them on matter. Culture is also a playground for the gods. The beginning of agriculture has transformed the relationship with the land, with time, with animal and plant species, and with a place, creating new stories, new myths, new spaces of exchange and knowledge.

The body is a magical three-dimensional sign, and in some cultures, tattooing is considered a way to mark signs of knowledge on oneself that connect humans to divinities. In this way, the body takes on a new meaning, even becoming an instrument of divinity itself. In tribal cultures, this transformation also came about as the conquest of pain, as a door to more expanded states of consciousness. It was never a random act or just decoration.

Hair is like an antenna, so the art of knowing how to use these antennas gives human beings the opportunity to tune into increasingly higher frequencies of knowledge reservoirs. On the other hand, the priestly roles of containment required the absence of hair to maintain energy and knowledge within oneself. Today, it seems that knowledge about the use of hair as an antenna is forgotten. Who knows how we could open our perceptions if we knew how to use it?

Bertuccia Bietola