The soul is present through every moment of life

 

Elderberries

Washington Valley Road Farm, Morristown, NJ

This week a conversation with a good friend, quite a bit younger with me, highlighted the division that people see between “ordinary” life and spiritual matters. There’s a persistent yet quite false belief in us that they are somehow separated, that spiritual thoughts, questions, attitudes, and actions are somehow separate and different than profane ones.

Let us be clear about this. The soul is present through every moment of a human life. 

We don’t see it. We think we live through ourselves, that we have some kind of ownership here. Yet we only live through the soul, from which God flows into life through us. 

We don’t own anything; the concept itself is delusional. 

We manifest, but we don’t own.

Life is a single thing. Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties with human beings is that everything gets compartmentalized so that we can pretend there’s a difference between our immediate wants and needs and the right thing which ought to be done. The wants and the needs of the moment, the desires, are assigned the imperative. 

This is a false doctrine; yet it’s the doctrine we believe. Almost everything in us proceeds from this initial fallacy; and if we struggle within ourselves for clarity, the struggle always begins here first.

In the abstract, intellectually and in terms of our philosophical constructs, most of us inhabit a world where our intention is to act morally and ethically towards ourselves and in regard to situations. These constructs are aspirational; they represent a wish for goodness within us. Yet because they’re aspirational, they come prepackaged with the idea that they can be put aside for expedience. 

Think about it for a minute. They’re aspirations; they are what we hope for — so we perceive ourselves as not being there yet. And everyone knows that our aspirations don’t always have enough life in them to breathe in and out on their own all day long.

Hence the separation we perceive between “ordinary” life and our aspiration causes us to put moral and ethical action, even in the most minute sense of simple interactions with other individuals, on the shelf whenever we please. Desire trumps aspiration because it’s an immediate thing, of the moment, of the creature we inhabit. The beast is stronger than the man or woman.

How can we be different?

Perhaps there needs to come a moment where we see that spiritual and ordinary life are the same thing. That they’re joined together through the natural action of the body.

There is a natural action that begins in the body. It joins everything through sensation. Here in this place, where there is a natural stillness that is organically engendered by Being itself — everything begins there — God is already present from the beginning. 

This is one of the secret meanings of the comment that opens Genesis, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” This action isn’t some action that took place in some distant past; it is a description of the current birth of Being within the conscious sphere of our own existence. 

We lie within and live within the eternal moment of creation, even now as you read this. The waters, the fish, the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth — all of these are created in our psyches by the inner and outer impressions of this moment. The human Being that we are — the consciousness that has the capacity for awareness, compassion, and love — is also born within this moment and no other moment. If that Being of compassion isn’t born here, now, and in this moment, it will never be born, because this moment is the only one that it consists of, the only moment that it can exist in.

From this we see that we have an extraordinary responsibility within this moment to be more than the beast alone. If we don’t, there’s no one to blame but ourselves for that situation.

In this action, the intellect complicates things. It needs to be let go and the body must receive first. If the attention is placed precisely where the body receives from life, without judgment, only then can the intellect and the feeling exercise the profoundly positive influence that rests within their potential. Otherwise, it’s bumper cars all the way through the ride. Everything within us clashes, there are loud noises and the world is upset.

I come back once again to this idea that the soul is present through every moment of the human life. 

Do I try to sense that in each moment? 

Do I pause before I react? 

Do I remember that I need to make a better effort to Be? 

Maybe I don’t; but at the very least, these questions ought to be provoking me at every moment, because when they do, there’s more time in a moment for the soul to breathe in and out; and when the soul breathes in and out, the natural intelligence of Being prevails over the constructions of the mind.

These are my thoughts for this morning.

On behalf of our search for inward relationship,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.