The spiritually inclined person can take one of several approaches towards this world. The extreme mystic can reject it altogether claiming all truth is in spirit and everything else is illusion but in doing this he is taking a very limited approach because he is restricting reality to one aspect of it, formless being. That may be the most fundamental part of it (it may not, we don't actually know) but this does not mean everything else is without meaning. Moreover, everyone who claims this in theory is inconsistent in practice. If you really believe this you may as well kill yourself now. You would also ignore crime, violence, murder etc, seeing them as nothing more than transient ripples on the surface of eternity. It turns out, when you analyse this approach, it is really a rather self-centred one. One, moreover, that denies the reality of God other than as a synonym for pure consciousness. Not to mention the goodness of creation or any purpose to existence beyond simply existing. As for good and evil, what's the difference?
The opposite of this is the person who claims religious or spiritual belief but interprets that in a worldly context. He seeks validation and/or fulfilment in the framework of this plane of being and for himself as he is here and now. Thus, he may either be a loyal and unquestioning member of a church (an earthly body) or he may look to spirituality to bring him peace and happiness in this life, spirituality as therapy rather than self-transcendence. Neither of these people understand that the spiritual has to do with the well-being of the soul not the earthly individual. They are not the same. Sometimes they are almost opposites.
The right attitude to take to this world is to see it in the light of the spiritual world. This means it is important as an expression of the spiritual world but not ultimately important. And yet it is part of the totality of life and has significance in that respect. The two are intertwined even if there is a hierarchal relationship between them. The material is an aspect of the spiritual and feeds back into it so what happens in this world matters - no pun intended. At the same time, the material has no true significance in and for itself.
When Christ died he showed that the material was not important for itself. But when he ascended into heaven he took his resurrected body with him and showed that the material was important as the vehicle through which spirit is glorified and can express itself. The proper attitude to this world and to the body (they are more or less the same thing) is to see them as the physical manifestation of divine being. As such, they are real but they exist to serve the purpose of divine being not for their own purpose or fulfilment. They are part of the wholeness of life, not illusion, not evil, not corrupt, not false, but they can become all of those things if they become detached from proper orientation towards spirit.
5 comments:
@William. Excellently argued. This matter of the relation between spiritual and material seems ultimately important to me, yet it is not something that is part of the easily available public discourse - even among Christians.
In particular; I get very frustrated that those who espouse pure spirituality "all truth is in spirit and everything else is illusion " - do not seem able to notice their own incoherence when (as they invariably do) they assume that murder is evil, kindness a good thing, and that it is better to be happy and serene than miserable and tormented.
If they Really believed that "all truth is in spirit and everything else is illusion", they would notice the contradiction.
The attitude you mention is often said to be a misunderstanding of classical Indian non-duality but it does seem to be very common in the West, and in fact even proper advaita has all sorts of problems with regard to creation and the soul which it doesn't accept except provisionally. It is way too absolutist but I've written enough about that in the past - see all the posts on non-duality.
As I said to one Advaita orientated person: If it's all an illusion, it's still God's illusion.
Excellent point, ted. And what is illusion anyway? Maybe it's illusion that is the illusion!
Perhaps Mastery may be explained as having as few categorical boxes on the shelves of the mind for organizing thoughts. War and peace belong in the same box, as with love and hatred, material and spiritual, inequal and equal, each share the same boxes.
To take any one of these dualities as an explanation for the whole causes a very difficult life to live because there remains an inseparable lack throughout one's life by choosing to live according to oppositions. There can not be one categorical box containing only war and another separate box for peace. There is no harmony in that.
Chaos and order are only reflections of the mind in reaction to reality. At the end of a very long day, we humans are going to be much better off by having each of us placed according to one's own God-given nature. (A Gemini statement if there was one XD) It must have occurred before time immemorial so that the mass of us truly ignore the obvious and take life for granted.
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