The following idea came up during a discussion this week. We were reading a quote that said “at the hour of the soul’s separation from the body”, and someone asked how could the soul separate from the if it’s not really in the body, but only associated with it. Why would the Writings use the term separation?
It occurred to me that in some ways, the process of thinking is a lot like spiritual life.
For example, a potent thought usually begins with a moment of inspiration. In that moment we feel an intuition that there is much to discover in the idea, though the majority of its content is hidden, and potential. We may not have words to describe it at first, but it doesn’t stop us from feeling a sense of this potential, stirring inside. This is not unlike the dawning of spiritual life in an individual, who senses there are things unseeen but who can’t put words to any of them. It’s a feeling of being “pregnant with possibility” – an intuition of an unseen door, waiting to be found and opened.
The next step to developing a thought is to clarify it, distill it, and distinguish what is true and universal about the idea from what is fanciful and strictly personal. At this stage, the idea is very much colored by the attitudes of the thinker; it is enmeshed in his personality, so to speak. Some never pass beyond this point. They pursue the idea for gain only, and so it gets caught up in the thinker’s desires and agenda. If the thought carries on too far like this, it may actually perish, because its inner truth is never discovered.
Take Einsten’s theory of relativity, for example. I know that many scientists around the same time had similar ideas, but let’s assume Einstein came up with the core idea that the passage of time relates to acceleration. For many years, this idea would have been seen as “Einstein’s fantasy”. Sure, time is variable; right… But what Einstein did is to keep working on the idea, purifying it, clarifying it, extracting from it certain core essentials that had nothing to do with Einstein, but strictly to do with space and time. The result was a set of ideas that were independently provable, and once proven, Einstein’s idea truly began a life of its own.
One could say that at this stage, when the idea was proven and the equations were justified, it “separated” from the mind of Einstein. The pregnant intuition he had received as a patent clerk was laboriously purified until it became something universal and completely apart to his private dreams and wishes.
I think this might be part of what spiritual life is about. Our soul is given to us like an “in-spir-ation”, a breath of Life breathed into a physical form. Initially, it’s wholly bound up in our private hopes and goals. But there are eternal truths to this spirit as well, properties that have nothing to do with the individual. Trustworthiness, for example, is the same no matter who displays it. I don’t know if the reader has had a direct experience of trustworthiness, but I find it other-worldly. The same is true of honor, honesty, and compassion. In their purest form they seem to shine of their own light, and while that light may be colored by the act and actor, its essence is universal.
As with an idea, I think our task is to purify and rarify the spiritual reality within us, until it takes on its universal aspects. And just as when an idea leaves the confines of the mind who imagined it, I think that when our spirit becomes universal, it likewise leaves the confines of the personality who engendered it.
Which is not to say that a thought leaving destroys the mind, or that our personality must disappear. In fact, when a mind has birthed a great thought, it too enjoys the fruit of it, and even moreso participation in its development. And I think that our individuality – the carrier of spirituality – continues to have a “relationship” with the pure spirit we’re capable of manifesting.
To put it another way: if you burnish a mirror, the light becomes clearer and brighter. At first the light illimunes the dross on the mirror, but as the mirror becomes purified, the same light “leaves” the mirror and now enters the eye, causing its original form to be seen by the viewer. Otherwise, the dross in a way holds the light, interrupting its reflective journey onward.
So I may not be strictly “thinking” when I pursue a spiritual life, but perhaps the act has a similar form. In this way, I am the crucible and the flame, reducing to its finest product an infinitely rich ore. We were reading a quote that said “at the hour of the soul’s separation from the body”, and someone asked how could the soul separate from the if it’s not really in the body, but only associated with it.
…I know that many scientists around the same time had similar ideas, but let’s assume Einstein came up with the core idea that the passage of time relates to acceleration. … Sure, time is variable; right… But what Einstein did is to keep working on the idea, purifying it, clarifying it, extracting from it certain core essentials that had nothing to do with Einstein, but strictly to do with space and time.
…At first the light illimunes the dross on the mirror, but as the mirror becomes purified, the same light “leaves” the mirror and now enters the eye, causing its original form to be seen by the viewer.