Now here's a question. What is reality? Of course, reality is what we see and feel and touch, taste and hear. Reality is the physical world we live in.
We live our lives day to day doing mostly physical things. By definition we are animals, bilaterally symmetrical, segmented, triploblastic, coelomates. I learnt that years ago at school.
But we consider ourselves to be more than animals because we are more than just a physical being on a treadmill requiring us to find food, shelter, procreate and protect our territory.
As well as being this physical person firmly anchored in reality we also have two others, the emotional person and the spiritual person. All three are ourselves but they are individuals that are part of us yet they are also linked together. Upset one of them and the other two will suffer in one way or another. We are three people in one.
If we are emotionally upset, our physical health is affected. Many illnesses are the direct result of the person being damaged emotionally.
Sometimes it is difficult to understand why a person is emotionally upset. It can be caused by either of the other two bodies, or both.
It makes us complicated creatures, but with these three persons we have been able to overcome the disadvantages caused by having nothing of natural animal protection, no protective scales or fur, no great physical strength nor strong teeth or talons.
Human beings overcame these deficiencies. By being able to set traps, control and domesticate animals and build shelters as well as devise weapons to defend them.
The emotional person within us is reactive, responding to notions of our own and responding to other people - and animals, and nature. We can be very unsure of ourselves, easily stung, easily rebuked, easily made to feel unworthy. We can do to ourselves what people outside might also do to us. We can beat ourselves up emotionally without anyone else's help.
If we can control our emotions, physical existence can be fine. Our emotional person is positively aroused by beauty. Beauty can affect us deeply, whether it be by nature, or poetry, painting, music, words, situations. Emotion is also triggered by situations, the sight of suffering, sharing the experience of joy.
It is quite a thing, this emotional person that we are trying to hide within our physical persona, it is volatile, active.
Yet we can often read one another’s emotional personas. How easy sometimes to know when a person is unhappy or distressed or troubled. You don’t have to ask.
We can communicate or signal an emotional state and we can receive the signals from others. You would think we would all be able to help one another, share in joys and sorrows.
But it is not always the case.
And it is connected too to the spiritual person. But what is that for? Some will say that it contains the personality or character, that actually it is the life force itself, but somehow it seems more than that, if that at all.
We make our connection to our God, our religion, our understanding of divinity through the spiritual person that we are. And it can be alive or it can be dormant. There do seem to be people who have no interest at all in anything spiritual.
Yet they can have a ‘religious experience’ where they sense that something in them has been woken up. It might trigger an emotional experience but it is not itself an emotional experience.
When our spiritual person is alive and active, we do have that sense of awe and wonder, do feel that religious connection to something greater than ourselves.
And when it is active, how often do we read of people having a totally different viewpoint about life? Almost as if they see the physical world differently, they treat other people differently. Reality is different. They can be emotionally more stable.
The spiritual person within is on a higher level, perhaps a higher level of consciousness. Is able to stand above some of the the mundane worries of the emotional and physical world.
It is said they are connected directly to something greater that is not altogether of this world - as if connected to other worlds entirely - that are all spiritual.
Through the study of religions and through experience the spiritual person develops.
We know too that Religion has its pitfalls because it is so easily manipulated. Religion can be spirituality misunderstood, or it can be simply used to hold power over other people.
Religion has the awful history of having mistreated many people, even cruelly in its name, but I can't help thinking such awful things were done not by those who had the spiritual person within themselves open and active. Rather cruelty is a sign of being spiritually blind, or of that spiritual person being asleep
To be a killer or a terrorist claiming to follow a religion suggests they are deluded and out of touch with their spiritual persona.
St Paul wrote of two spiritual experiences. The first on the road to Damascus when he was stopped and challenged in the light. And secondly which he records as a visit to the fourth heaven. A spiritual place or experience which could not be described in words. St Paul talked of being possessed of grace. We could say that is spiritual enlightenment. Grace is the spiritual person waking up and connecting to that higher something, receiving an inflow of something positive that is often described as a feeling of intense love.
Many people try to describe this experience of spiritual connection but find it difficult to express in words. The writers of the mystical tradition wrote in metaphors - the interior castle, the dark night of the soul. It always seems to have been a unique experience.
The spiritual person makes reality feel different. Reality becomes the physical world plus something else.
There was a branch of early Christianity known as Gnosticism. Many of the Gnostics believed that Jesus was more a spiritual person than a physical teacher.
They said that he exemplified what it was to be a pure spiritual being - the outpouring of love which was able to heal the sick and cast out demons, the teaching about love towards fellow beings, no matter who they were or where they came from.
As if he was the mystical role model on how to live life as a strong spiritual person. Many of the stories of the apostles are about them falling short of that perfection. Peter and his denial, Thomas and his doubting. It was a high ideal for his followers to aspire to.
It made me think that the purpose of belonging to a church, or any religion, is to build up that spiritual person which is within ourselves.
In our worship we can be more aware of ourselves as spiritual people before anything else. Our prayers and our hymns connects us more closely to those ideals of what we want to be. It is about the spiritual person becoming stronger and therefore more connected with that otherness, that spiritual dimension which we feel is God.
Worship has a purpose for the spiritual person that is us. It seems very simple but while as a spiritual person we are seeking the higher levels of consciousness and a connection to the divine, opening ourselves to grace which is love, the emotional and physical can be going their own way, as if all the problems of the world still exist in spite of going to church and attending worship.
However, as the spiritual person becomes dominant within us, the more settled the emotional body can become, less extreme, less excitable, and that in turn makes for a calmer physical body.
Many things in life occur in threes. St Paul wrote about faith, hope and charity, (charity meaning love for others) and said he greatest of these as love.
Si it can be with our three personas, physical, emotional and spiritual. The greatest of these is spiritual. The spiritual person within us knows how to love the world and all that it is, is connected to a higher level of understanding and receives an inflow of love called grace.
What becomes reality becomes something greater and wider than all else. When the spiritual is dominant, you become a singular person!
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