Lately I see a big part of the spiritual scene is about a kind of ‘radical humanness’. And I’m all about owning and including our embodied nature and not denying it one bit. But this can also be the back door to re-identification and the denial of the miraculous and mystical truth of being.
Yes, the truth is THIS, in all its mundanity. But this mundane, human reality is MADE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, a radical and extraordinary discovery. I think we’ve got to get better at holding two perspectives FULLY at the same time.
To maintain that the truth is ALL ABOUT our spiritual nature, awareness, is to miss our humanity. But to discover that nature and then say, no, it’s only about the embodiment, is also to live a half truth. The way is both/and not either/or.
And so for me it’s a big ‘yes’ to my everyday humanity in all its humdrum ordinariness, including all of its emotional, psychological, physical and social dimensions and challenges. But at the same time I live the reality that it’s ALL made of the primordial divine consciousness and is grounded in the deepest mystery. Can these two realities co-exist in the living moment? Hell yes. They do, they are. And neither need diminish or negate the other. In fact both together constitute a wholeness greater than the sum of these apparent parts.
In light of this dual but unified truth, I find that the only way the human me can authentically relate to it all is humility, gratitude and love. I mean, all the other stuff shows up too – anger, sadness, frustration and the rest. But as my finite human nature reflects on itself as an expression of my infinite boundless nature, I’m just in awe, struck dumb by the miraculous and unfathomable mystery of what is. That it should also be so ordinary and unremarkable ironically only makes it all the more extraordinary.
What a trip is this human life. We’re swimming in mystery, but we take everything for granted, we take it all at face value. We think we know what it all is, where it came from. But when we scratch the surface of our presumed understanding, we find the unknowable infinite smiling back at us.
— Martyn
