This week I’d like to share with you a passage from my book Spirit Matters:

Everything that has ever happened in the history of the universe is the prelude to each of our lives. Everything that has happened from the beginning of time has become the platform from which we launch our lives.

We are the heirs of the long evolution of Spirit. Each of us is the latest unfolding of the event of Creation. Our bodies are composed of the material that was shaped in the Big Bang. And so, too, our spirits. The loving goodness of the universe breathes us and breathes through us, giving us life and consciousness, and the capacity to recognize and love others.

Each stage in the development of the universe incorporates and transcends that which went before. It has been so from the earliest stages in the formation of galaxies, to the emergence of solar time for our particular planet, through the geological development of the Earth and the emergence of biological reality, until we ultimately emerge into human time, or history. Each stage of history, in turn, makes further developments possible which finally bring us to the present moment.

That evolving reality has been understood through much of recorded history as an integrated and mutually interacting web of body, mind, soul and spirit. When we faced problems in our human reality, we often understood those problems to be dysfunctions in the way these different levels of reality interacted with each other.

Recognizing One’s Place in the Unity of All Being

Jewish tradition relates the story of a rabbi who sought to understand his place in the universe. To keep a balance between too much grandiosity and too much self-diminution, he had two notes, one for each of his two pants pockets. One note read: “For me the world was created.” The other note read: “I am nothing more than dust and ashes.” The task of the rabbi is our task: to integrate these two messages and keep them in appropriate balance.

“For me the world was created.” The grandeur of creation comes to full expression in the creation of human beings. Complexly magnificent, able to be conscious of ourselves, able to transcend that which is and to move towards what ought to be, human beings were “created in the image of God” and reflect the universe’s greatest outpouring of love and generosity.

But also, “nothing more than dust and ashes.” We are part of the totality of all that is, and we are ever arrogant when we see ourselves as somehow better than everything else, as having the right to use everything else for our own ends. We are here on the planet for a brief moment, and for much of that time we are deeply enmeshed in foolish schemes to perpetuate ourselves for eternity, imagining that if we amass enough power or control we can somehow live forever.

Emancipatory Spirituality offers a different kind of immortality, not a promise that our own individual personalities with their specific sets of memories and experiences will last forever, but the immortality of being part and parcel of the totality of all being. To appreciate this second kind of immortality, we need to reach a fuller awareness of our place in the universe and our identity as manifestations of the totality of all that is.