The Marriage of the Inner and the Outer
While nearly everyone intuitively associates “spirituality” with a positive path of life transformation, the word conceals a trap that can end up creating the opposite of transformation – stagnation. “Spiritual” implies a division of the world into two categories that can strand us in partiality.
The two categories differ depending on context. They could be matter and spirit, they could be spiritual and sensual, they could be spiritual and profane. Typically, a certain category of human experience gets excluded from the realm of the spiritual, which is the realm of the important, the worthy, the significant. Further, there is often an implied judgmentality that regards some people as more spiritual than others.
Stagnation happens when someone, in pursuit of spirituality, diverts her attention from areas of life that are crying out for attention and change. Instead of dealing with material, mundane aspects of life such as relationships, career, and family, she escapes into the world of tarot cards and angels, astrology and channeling. Wait! Before this gets too preachy, let me add that I’m really talking about myself here! It’s all coming from personal experience. Because I have fallen into this trap myself, and more than once.
And I’m not saying that Tarot, astrology and so forth are frivolous or useless. More on that later.
Ultimately, the foundation of this trap lies in the defining myth of our civilization: Separation. The separation of spirit from matter, body from soul, happened in tandem with the separation of human beings from nature as we became technological beings. Every time we say something like, “That disease has a spiritual aspect,” we are actually reinforcing this myth. We are suggesting that the spiritual aspect is separate from some mechanistic, random, non-meaningful physical aspect; as well we are implying that some diseases do and some do not have a spiritual dimension.
But I believe in a unified underlying reality. That means that ALL disease and all components of disease are both spiritual and physical. That doesn’t mean the distinction is useless, just that I recognize it as provisional, an expedient tool. Different perspectives on the same thing.
But let’s make this temporary distinction and follow it for a while. If spirit and matter are indeed one, then when we make that temporary distinction we should see traces of that oneness everywhere we look. We should see connections between what we have chosen to call spiritual, and what we have chosen to call material. An example might be Candace Pert’s “molecules of emotion", or the electromagnetic frequencies of biological systems, or the bioluminescence of DNA. Spirit is enfolded into matter on every level. Each part, in fact, contains all the information of the whole. It is just a matter of figuring out the code, as many pioneers are doing today. Chiropractic, homeopathy, acupuncture, the body electric are just the beginning.
Matter IS spiritual. Every experience that happens in the course of a human life is spiritual in the sense of significant, meaningful, even sacred. Here are two equally valid truths:
1. All is matter. There is nothing to the universe but protons, neutrons, electrons, and so forth. Matter and void, energy and vacuum. There is no extramaterial spirit not contained in these.
2. All is spirit. All is God. God is everywhere, in all things… No, God IS all things and all things are God.
These two are both true. They seem contradictory only because our culture has abstracted spirit out of matter and consigned each to a separate realm.
We do not need to imagine an extramaterial, supernatural spirit in order to imbue the universe with meaning and sacredness. The universe already has these qualities, and not just in certain people, places, and things but in every atom, every molecule, every cell, every rock, every drop of water, every ocean of water, every living being.
I think to separate God out of the world (creating the worldly/holy dichotomy) ultimately generates a terrible anxiety and despair, for it threatens us with the logical possibility of abandonment. As I have written in TAOH, abandonment is the most primal of our fears, hard-wired into every baby mammal. Separation of God from the world, even as a conceptual possibility, implies the possibility as well of being abandoned by God, marooned in a dead and soulless materiality. I have certainly experienced this feeling before. Have you?
Recently I inadvertantly fell into this trap, wherein I shrank away from making certain outward changes in my life, supposing that those changes would happen of their own accord as long as I made the inner changes. I visualized, I journaled, I prayed, but nothing happened. Stagnation. I was fooling myself. Eventually I came to my senses and realized that these are preparatory techniques that draw the opportunities to me and ready me to act on them. The spiritual technologies I wrote about dismissively above are the same. They are means to identify areas for growth, to invite opportunities for change, to ready ourselves to act on those opportunities, or to integrate and stabilize the change after it happens. But if the opportunity comes and fear still prevails, it won’t happen.
Let me give you an example. Suppose you decided to use “prosperity programming” to manifest abundance. Well, that doesn’t mean money is going to drop out of the sky in front of you. What will come is an opportunity to bring money in. Even if the money does literally drop out of the sky, you still have to reach out and take it. External action is always required at some point.
This internal/external distinction is another temporary distinction that too may become a trap. Actually the internal and external are not fundamentally separate either. It is not always useful to put the priority on the internal. In the context of Taoism, Thomas Cleary calls it “quietism", an aloof non-participation in the world.
Here’s a good way to circumvent the damage of the internal/external illusion without dispensing with these categories altogether. Rather than putting priority on the internal, see the external as your tool to work on the internal. See every situation that comes up in life as an opportunity, of divine provenance, to accomplish the inner work. To the extent that we fall short of full immediate realization of our identity with God, we need the outer to enable the transformation of the inner. We must rely on grace, a perfect gift from outside ourselves. The same is true of the need for an outside healer in the disease healing process. Yes, it is true that the inner state, the readiness for healing or for grace, is what draws it to us. But we experience it as external, even though you could say (because we draw it in or create it) that it isn’t really external after all. It is and it isn’t. The distinction is illusory.