Love God, and Tie Up Your Camel

You likely have heard the expression many times, that we humans are actually “spiritual beings having a human experience” (or incarnation).  With the emphasis on the primacy of our spiritual origin and nature, it is easy to succumb to the tendency to overlook the relative reality of human life, perhaps even denigrating our humanity and the human needs of the body, mind, and affairs.  To do so is to confuse illusion with unreality.  While it is true that at our essence, we are spiritual beings, the relative reality of humanness in a physical world is our experience.

Many spiritual traditions include the notion that the world, as it is typically perceived, is illusory or unreal.  Taken as a fundamental tenet a follower of this premise can fall into a form of nihilism and discount matters of human life as insignificant or even nonexistent. Perhaps you’ve heard an expression of this notion, “so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.” While this is not to bash spiritual practice and deepening it is a call to contextualize spiritual understanding in our day-to-day human experience.

It may be helpful to distinguish between illusion and unreality.  Many spiritual traditions maintain that the world and the body are illusions, or they are not real.  Understood rightly, the world and the body are illusions, which means they are not what they appear to be, not that they are unreal.  Our experience of the body and the world is real.  We can’t deny our experience. How can one have an “unreal” experience? That isn’t to say that our experience is an accurate interpretation.  When one observes an image of a mountainous landscape on a display screen, one is not actually seeing the landscape. One can tap on the appearance and realize it really is a screen. The landscape is illusory, But there is a reality to the experience; the reality is the screen.

Similarly, when one observes a lake in the desert, the lake is illusory. The reality of the appearance is not water, it is made of light.  The water is the illusion but there is a reality. The reality is light.

You may have heard of the oft-told parable of somebody seeing a snake on the ground in dim light.  Believing they are seeing a snake the person reacts with trepidation, When the light increases, they see that what they thought was a snake is actually a rope coiled on the ground.   Again, the snake was an illusion, but the appearance was not unreal. The reality of the experience was a rope.

This distinction demonstrates the importance of recognizing the true from the false but also eschews denial of appearances by way of spiritual absolutisms.  While we are on this human/divine journey we will vacillate in our ability to perceive the deep truth in every situation.  Having a balanced perspective permits us to being fully in the world, present to our physicality, and human needs, honoring our embodiment, people, circumstances, and conditions, while always seeking to realize, experience, and express the Greater I am, that we are. I believe this is what Jesus meant by, “Be in the world, but not of it.”

“In God We Trust” does not mean that dollars will fall from heaven like the manna reportedly did for the Israelites.  While we are in this human experience there are causes and effects and it neither honors God nor aggrandizes our spiritual prowess, nor suggests that we simply pray without “moving our feet.”  Yes, Love God!  And, tie up your camel!

Namaste,

Rev. Larry