Just How Incarnated are You?

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Girl reaching for star

Remember when you weren’t quite all here? As very young children, we are not fully incarnated, meaning one’s sense of self has yet to clearly form and firmly connect with the external realm. At that formative stage, much of one’s experience is internally generated, dream-like and imaginary, blurring the boundary between fantasy and reality. That sense of individual separateness — me as distinct from everything else — has yet to fully form.

The word “incarnate” means to be the living, breathing embodiment of something. But what? Viewed spiritually, incarnation is a process whereby the soul gradually attaches to and identifies with the body. Eventually, the theory goes, the soul often forgets it is a spirit in a body and identifies almost entirely as a body alone. We no longer perceive ourselves as spiritual beings having a physical experience, but as physical beings who sometimes have spiritual experiences.

In psychological parlance, incarnation means ego development. Slowly, one’s identity coalesces into a distinct and durable form, like a dust particle that gradually accumulates ice to become a hailstone. One’s cumulative experiences create an ego based, for the most part, on dealing with the external world. Generally, we incarnate gradually as we age. Increasingly, consciousness attaches to the body and its interactions with people and the immediate environment, while that earlier feeling of oneness and the sense of fantasy and mystery often fade. 

As this occurs, one’s identity solidifies. The murky awareness of “me” that emerged in our first inklings of self-consciousness slowly aggregates into recognizable personality traits and idiosyncratic behaviors. But we don’t all incarnate at the same pace or to the same degree. It’s a very individual process. Agnes was a case in point. She came to me concerned about her frequent experiences of spiritual transcendence and oneness, episodes when her sense of self grew porous and mercurial. When in these states of awareness, she felt in confluence with what the mystics call “the all,” but later worried it might represent an emerging mental imbalance of some sort.

Through a Child’s Eyes

“I have another way of looking at your experiences,” I told her. “Perhaps you didn’t fully incarnate. You stopped at a point that left more of your childlike and highly intuitive senses intact.”

That doesn’t mean Agnes is not a person of the world. She navigates the logistics just fine. However, she carries a set of eyes, a perceptual lens, more like a child’s, meaning her consciousness can occupy the spiritual realm as well as the pragmatic one. As my Aikido sensei once said, “Keep one foot firmly planted in this world and the other firmly in the world of spirit.” Good counsel for those who seek to connect with capacities such as imagination, creativity, mindfulness, intuition and transcendence. Many artists and mystics are of this ilk. Often, their creativity and perceptiveness flow from a deep spiritual awareness, as one might expect in people who do not fully incarnate nor experience the world in an almost exclusively concrete and nuts-and-bolts way.

So, being too much “all here” is not always a desirable state of being, robbing us of the capacity to perceive magic, mystery and awe in the world. I say “magic” because there are many forces beyond our comprehension that populate and inform this existence. When we incarnate too fully, leaving little space for our spiritual consciousness, we no longer catch glimpses of these mysteries. 

And that’s a profound blindness all its own.

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