Posted by Tiggy on March 26, 2000 at 17:41:33:
Explain it better than anyone else has? That's a bit of a tall order, but I'll do my
best.
The Spiritual reality which exists in the universe is not the same as soul or mind,
but it is part of us. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we are part
of it.
We have bodies and personalities, and behind both of those lies spirit. This spirit
is eternal and exists everywhere in all people. It also exists in other living
creatures and in matter even at a cellular level, but in these it exists in an
unconscious way. They are created things which act unconsciously. Man
however has the capacity to be conscious of this spiritual part of him/herself and
generally has been until the modern age where we have little recourse to ideas of
the transcendent or the sacred.
Religions of course are evolutionary, yet they all and always stress this
transcendent aspect of man, and provide ways in which s/he can come to know
that part of themselves, the still centre, which is spirit. All religions identify and
attest to the existence in man of such a spirit which is also identified with God or
the Divine Essence. It is stressed in religious philosopy that this spirit is Real, ie.
that it has Being and autonomous existence, in a way that man living solely by his
own personality cannot have being. This is not to say that our personalities are
bad things, they can aid us in coming to the spirit, but we need to be centred in
the spirit in order for our personalities to be harmonious and for us to be happy
and have 'the peace that passes understanding'. Cut off from spirit, our
personalities are full of strife and discontent, but centred in spirit, they become
redeemed or transformed and become as they should be, part of an undivided
whole. They are reunited with the source of their existence and made real.
Religious thinkers have found and suggested a variety of ways that we can work
towards this uniting with spirit, but have also stressed that it is the work of grace,
ie. that spirit is all the time trying to fill us with its presence, but that we can
co-operate more or less with that as we feel inclined. No religion has clarified the
ways to unite with spirit more than Hinduism which has posited an number of
different ways or forms of yoga. These are, the way of meditation, the way of
action, and the way of love. Hindu writers have also made very clear the
identification of our individual spirit (Atman) and the transcendent, omnipresent
spirit, (Brahman). You may be wondering if this Spirit is personal or impersonal,
but the spirit transcends such categories. It contains all things and all things come
from it, so that of course the personal as we understand it is contained in it, yet it
also totally transcends the personal as we understand it. In the same way it is
Good and Loving, yet transcends goodness and love as we are able to
understand it. We can never fully comprehend that Spirit, yet we can know it,
not by seeing it as an object would be seen and known about, but by realising it
in ourselves - a knowing through experience. We all recognise spirit in things that
are beautiful and good and true and have the capacity to respond to those things
and focus on them and this can help us to get a sense of that spirit which in itself
is much harder to convey than to experience.