A Higher Level of Being, Part 5

A Higher Level of Being, Part 5

“I like to say it’s a Christ-soaked world, a world where matter is inspirited and spirit is embodied. In this world, everything is sacred…”^[1] Fr. Richard Rohr

In past weeks I have attempted to describe how our inner being, our true self – the essential consciousness that is our core and eternal identity – is infinitely larger than we imagine. Our conscious awareness is usually focused on the physical expression of our being, and we learn to overlook or ignore the non-physical evidence that allows us to perceive beyond the limits of our physical senses. Before we can raise the level of our being to a higher, more inclusive, more spiritual level, we must realize that we are not self-contained units of living protoplasm. Rather, we are spiritual beings who sometimes express in physical ways. But no expression is ever separate from the whole. Our mortal lives are largely products of unseen forces and energies that pull invisible strings to animate our physical natures with purpose and meaning. What we do not understand about our behavior (which is most of it) is that it is a product of an intimately present but imperceptible spiritual reality. When we do something we cannot rationalize, we say, “I don’t know why I did that,” or “I made a mistake,” or “The devil made me do it.” Or we may pretend it didn’t happen because it was not purposeful in a way we can identify, justify, or comprehend. Alternately, we sometimes have intuitive hunches about things or people without tangible evidence that we later find to be accurate. We call it serendipity, which is code for, “Heck if I know how I knew that!” Many psychologists believe that as much as 95% of our behavior is unconscious, meaning it is not consciously purposeful or intended. A universal corollary is that many physicists estimate up to 95% of the universe consists of dark matter or dark energy, meaning it cannot be directly perceived, even by the most sophisticated scientific instruments.

Many of the ways our bodies function are governed by hormones produced in the pituitary, pineal, and other endocrine glands. This work is unconscious to us, meaning it, like the beating of our heart, is done without our conscious knowledge or control, which is fortunate since we lack the conscious capacity to order the appropriate functioning of our bodily systems. As we consider the enormous impacts of trace amounts of hormones and other chemicals produced in, regulated by, and distributed from tiny glands throughout our bodies, we should intuit that this is not a self-contained, isolated process. An intelligent something or someone designs and maintains these complexities, and we have no idea how or why. What scientists observe in the functioning of our endocrine system is the physical expression of processes occurring in spiritual – unknown, unseen, and unmeasurable – realms which originate from and answer to our larger being. Our physical organs transform spiritual impulses, received as energy, into bodily actions and behaviors.

We do not have good, descriptive names for this larger being that our physical body is a part of and is controlled by, but energy or spirit body are probably as good as any. As is soul. It is challenging to name something that we know is real but that has no physical characteristics we can see, measure, or compare. Some people doubt that souls are part of reality because souls are spiritual conjectures, yet they readily accept concepts like dark energy and dark matter as scientifically legitimate. Dark energy and matter, however, help explain so much of what otherwise does not make sense in science – unseen forces impacting known reality in measurable ways. In the same way, the concept of the energy or spirit body helps make sense of our everyday lives – an unseen reality impacting our known reality in ways we cannot otherwise explain. Believing ourselves to be integral parts of a larger reality is not spiritual mumbo-jumbo, nor is it unbiblical. But it is not taught in most churches.

Many contemplatives believe that sin is separation, including behaving as if our physical form is separate from our spiritual being. Richard Rohr wrote, “(Our) sense of separation basically causes every stupid, sinful, silly thing we ever do.”[2] He says our physical death solves the problem of separateness (and sin) by reuniting us with the eternal. To live today from a higher level of being, however, we must find ways to stop behaving as individuals. We are interconnected, physically and spiritually, individually and collectively, and that interconnectedness is love – love of self, love of neighbor, love of God.

This is the 11^th in a series titled Crucifying Christianity, Resurrecting the Way. The opinions expressed here are mine. To engage with me or to explore contemplative spiritual direction, my email is ghildenbrand@outlook.com.

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[1] Richard Rohr, Daily Meditations, November 6, 2024, www.cac.org

[2] Richard Rohr, Daily Meditations, November 11, 2024.