As we watch children develop, we can see that they each become many beings while they go through various stages of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual development.
That is true of all of us of course, and hopefully, we will continue to develop as long as we live.
It is clearly apparent that we are physical beings, for we can see, feel, touch, hear, smell sometimes, and even taste those bodies. It takes a physical body to know one.
So too, with our mental and emotional bodies. We all know about our minds and emotions, and we hear about them a lot; especially in books, movies and on TV. In fact, our minds and emotions tend to get intertwined and become undifferentiated, which is very bad for both, because they really don’t go together very well at all; together they form a bad melting pot which mixes and combines Thomas Jeffersons and Martin Luther Kings and comes out with Archie Bunkers and Phil Donohues.
And then, there is the spiritual body. We know we have one of those too, it’s just harder to pin the spirit down. Especially in our world today. Churches really don’t do it very well. Mostly they generally either aim for the mind or the emotions, or worse yet, both. Spirit needs spirit food to grow, and spirit practices to perform, and when your spirit is a “child of God”, caught in the cage of the church, it can’t grow up. You may have to “become as a child” to contact your spirit, but any true spiritual organization will be one which develops spiritual adults.
Back to the bodies for a moment, each body seems to resemble a world within itself. It has many organs and chemical components and many other constituent parts: heart and brain, liver and lungs, skin, and then blood and bones, even hair and nails. The organs of our body, we are told, are each a virtual continent in itself, afloat in a great sea of germs and bacteria and plasma and breath. From this point of view, our our bodies then might seem to be resemble a planet.
What then about the mind? Might it not seem to be more reminiscent of a solar system? A mind, resembling our sun with its own captured planets: Reason, Memory, Imagination, Will, Desire, Intellect and others, and each planet pulls and is pulled by its own moons, each in themselves planets, or mind-things that never fully developed: Call them Fantasy, Nightmare, Pleasure, Ennui, Logic, Yugan, Fancy, Pity, Ego, Whimsy, Caprice, Impulse and perhaps others.
And the emotions roll across these planets and moons like great seas: Pacific, of course, and Anger, Passion, Indifference, Forsaken, Envy, and they swell and race through many Gulfs of Fear and Isthmus of Intimidation, washing into great basins of Patience, Happiness, Confusion, and so swirl in and withdraw across the face of each planet and even some of the moons.
But then, what about spirit? Child of God, or child of the church? Well, first of all, the spirit is free. It is beholden to no mind, no body, no emotion; not a part of any universe, not associated with any thing or event, not a part of any church, temple synagogue or mosque. Not a resident of any heaven, not aware of any hell, Spirit is life, it is love, it is what we might call God. And it is our own true nature, as it is also the true nature of the mountain or sunrise, but still more than that, it is the true nature of the mountain and the sunrise at the same time, also our awareness of the mountain and the sunrise, and the awareness that the mountain and sunrise has of us - of our spirit, that is. Because “our” spirit can only be our awareness of spirit, not spirit itself. In the same way in which archeologists can be aware of bones, shards, and ancient weapons, and from that can be “aware” of the life that they represent, without “seeing” that ancient civilization in its entirety. So too with us, we are “aware” of spirit as it manifests in physical, mental and emotional things and events, but not in itself. Spirit often comes before us as kindness and gentleness, but that is because spirit is aware of what it is aproaching. Spirit is wild, wild like weeds and storms, wild like things you don’t expect; spirit is energy.
© John Womack, 2006. All rights reserved.
