u/Cultural_Rip187

Part of the motivation of empiricists over the decades has been to undermine the dubious assertions of certain religions which have dominated human culture for centuries. This has been a noble service to humanity. Where empiricism falls short is in the blatant denial of the Spirit realm, simply because it cannot presently be proven empirically. Evidence in the form of life experience by spiritual practitioners is lazily dismissed as delusional, ironically discrediting the established apparatus of science. Sophisticated testing of the spiritually ripe is possible should science ever care to investigate this, at least establishing as credible certain baseline practices of those who are actively spiritual. This might be too threatening, however, for I have never heard of it actually being attempted.

The idea that evolution occurred without the assistance of some built-in and active intelligence seems naive to the spiritually experienced. From a holistic perspective, the evolution of life all seems wonderfully inevitable, even planned. An embryo becomes a fetus because of the assertions of its own DNA, not because of random processes. What we need is a credible melding of science and spirituality. But this won't happen so long as science denies spirituality, and so long as spirituality denies science.

The empiricists use many of the same techniques to establish and maintain dominance which religions have used for millennia. It all makes the idea of serious communication between the two seem futile, when really it is not.

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People tend to avoid spirituality because it so often seems foreign to everyday experience, where the concept of God can easily appear contrived. Harsh realities can make the idea of any beneficent entity watching over us seem naive and even ridiculous. Then something will come along and launch us at least temporarily to another place, hinting that we may be part of something far greater than we know. Becomming entranced by the splendor of a summer afternoon, rescued from the doldrums of existence, we are fed hope for a future we may only barely understand. But it is enough to get us from today beyond tonight, and then even beyond tomorrow.

There are ants crawling on me underneath my shirt as I write this, for I am sitting against a tree in some woods. It is something of nature's tickle protocol, and is generally somewhat pleasing, until one gets lost in my underwear or decides to bite me. Henry David Thoreau lived alone in the woods for two years in the 1840s, and his book Walden had a decisive impact on me in my twenties. One morning, while sweeping out wasps from his hut which were numbed by the cold, he exclaimed "one would think twice before accepting heaven on such terms."

Nature is instructive, and I mention this to bring attention to a very familiar biological phenomenon which takes place within our cells. It is the chemical messaging which happens there, instructing the cells on what types of activity may need to occur, in order to keep us functioning effectively. It is wondrous that such a thing even takes place, and I am rendered grateful for it, amazed at what is required to keep me alive.

Anyone who is experienced spiritually will recognize the guidance which is available there, guidance which, upon reflection, can seem strongly analogous to the chemical messaging taking place within our cells. So, what might this suggest? It may suggest that the Holy Spirit itself is something of a biological function, manufactured by the universe to keep itself moving forward. But this would mean that the universe is alive! Funny how it all works out, if we have an open mind. This would mean that something similar to our own DNA is at work engineering the universe, something not yet validated by science, admittedly. If there be Spirit among the quarks, however, science isn't there yet. Those of us intimate with the Holy Spirit don't need science to validate our experience, though it would be nice if science and spirituality were one day credibly melded together.

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People tend to avoid spirituality because it so often seems foreign to everyday experience, where the concept of God can easily appear contrived. Harsh realities can make the idea of any beneficent entity watching over us seem naive and even ridiculous. Then something will come along and launch us at least temporarily to another place, hinting that we may be part of something far greater than we know. Becomming entranced by the splendor of a summer afternoon, rescued from the doldrums of existence, we are fed hope for a future we may only barely understand. But it is enough to get us from today beyond tonight, and then even beyond tomorrow.

There are ants crawling on me underneath my shirt as I write this, for I am sitting against a tree in some woods. It is something of nature's tickle protocol, and is generally somewhat pleasing, until one gets lost in my underwear or decides to bite me. Henry David Thoreau lived alone in the woods for two years in the 1840s, and his book Walden had a decisive impact on me in my twenties. One morning, while sweeping out wasps from his hut which were numbed by the cold, he exclaimed "one would think twice before accepting heaven on such terms."

Nature is instructive, and I mention this to bring attention to a very familiar biological phenomenon which takes place within our cells. It is the chemical messaging which happens there, instructing the cells on what types of activity may need to occur, in order to keep us functioning effectively. It is wondrous that such a thing even takes place, and I am rendered grateful for it, amazed at what is required to keep me alive.

Anyone who is experienced spiritually will recognize the guidance which is available there, guidance which, upon reflection, can seem strongly analogous to the chemical messaging taking place within our cells. So, what might this suggest? It may suggest that the Holy Spirit itself is something of a biological function, manufactured by the universe to keep itself moving forward. But this would mean that the universe is alive! Funny how it all works out, if we have an open mind. This would mean that something similar to our own DNA is at work engineering the universe, something not yet validated by science, admittedly. If there be Spirit among the quarks, however, science isn't there yet. Those of us intimate with the Holy Spirit don't need science to validate our experience, though it would be nice if science and spirituality were one day credibly melded together.

For our purposes, and from our limited place, it becomes possible to see the universe as God, so long as we can see the universe as being alive. Here is why it must be alive: the chemical messaging which takes place in our cells is strongly analogous to the function of the Holy Spirit in our beings, and since the chemical messaging is a biological function then so might also be the Holy Spirit. For this to be so, then something analogous to our own DNA must be at work in the universe, engineering cosmic outcomes, including the life on Earth. Here, then, would be where the Spirit originates. So why hasn't science established this? Well, if there be Spirit among the quarks, for example, then science isn't there yet. There is much that we don't know.

What follows from this is that simply by living our lives we help move the universe along toward its fruition. The more spiritually ripe we are the more we contribute, and this translates for us personally into the development of our soul. If the universe is alive, then surely it has an emotional heart. This heart could be seen as our collective soul, and the individual soul could be seen as a portion of this heart. Whatever portion our soul represents could be seen as our destiny, in that we will tend to realize it as we live out our lives.

If the universe is alive, then how far along is it after fourteen billion years? Probably far enough to have a spiritual life of its own, and apart from us, worshipping its own GOD likely. We are not yet advanced enough, presumably, to be intimate with this GOD ourselves, though this will probably happen at some point. Those who believe that we are immersed in this GOD already are actuallly trying to shortcut our own development, skipping to X Y and Z without first travelling the rest of the alphabet. We must learn to be spiritually independent first, like children leaving home, learning to live on our own. Then will come the next advance.

Maybe the soul is the heart of God, our collective soul. In this scenario, the individual soul represents a portion of this heart, and we each are assigned a different portion. This individual soul, then, contains unique aspects of God's heart to be realized, and this would be our destiny. Everyone's destiny would be somewhat different. To realize this destiny means being in touch with our soul, and this requires some measure of spiritual discipline. Without this discipline, the genome is in charge by default and the soul does not get expressed. So, a guy like Hitler comes along, feasting on the festering resentment of German society arising from Germany's singular humiliation following World War I, where they were essentially blamed for the whole thing in retrospect. Many historians believe that this humiliation was unjust, and so the simmering resentment may have been understandable. Maybe Hitler was destined to be a leader, and maybe his cause was just initially, but somewhere he became "seduced by history" into becomming this madman trying to conquer the world. Somewhere, then, he must have become separated from his soul, and so his spiritual destiny became only partially realized. How, then, is his soul to blame for the deaths of tens of millions? It could not command his behavior. It was his lust for power along with the thirst for vengeance from German society which created the phenomenon of the Third Reich. These are genetic expressions, not the holy ones which may have dwelt in his soul. The genome is powerful, and unless we are disciplined our impulses can rather easily disconnect us from our souls, and this means that our destiny does not get realized, or becomes only partially realized. How, then, is our soul to blame? Why should the soul be punished.? If anything, the soul gets purged of its unfortunate poisonings, and maybe gets trained in the afterlife to make up for the shortcomings of its incarnate existence, and this is how a guy like Hitler gets neutralized. Maybe the soul reincarnates to complete the realization of its destiny in a different body. There are powerful forces flowing through our various cultures and most of these arise from our genes, from our instincts, mainly. The spiritual life tends to channel these instincts into productive pathways, and so the soul becomes developed. Without the spiritual life, however, these same instincts take on lives of their own, and will tend to neglect the cravings of our soul. The soul, therefore, does not get developed. It is not to blame for this. It cannot command our behavior. The soul does not get punished.

I was walking past an elementary school several years ago, just as school was letting out for the day. This school used student crossing guards, and there was a female guard who was distinctively more physically mature than the girls around her. It was an interesting and memorable juxtaposition. Immediately, I sensed a depth of spiritual potential in the more developed girl than there was in the others, and the insight came with such clarity that I took it quite seriously. A girl's heart is fascinating...I was constantly lovesick as a child...but a woman's heart can be spectacular. Sure, the hormones come, and suddenly she might become the center of the universe for a lot of guys, but this surprising glimpse into spiritual potential seemed to hint possibly at the nature of the Spirit itself. Why sexual maturity? Why not always? The practical answer might be that a sexually mature young woman needs better decision making skills than her younger self, and the Spirit can certainly help her there. One might even conclude that this is enough. Maybe it is not, however. It would seem, based on this experience, that the higher level of Spirit is not available until adolescence: might it be doing more than just helping the young person? Could there be a parallel process emergent in the soul during human puberty and adolescence, an analogous ripening which may, in fact, reveal that the nature of the soul's relationship with humans is a symbiotic one? In this relationship, the soul through the Spirit gives us guidance and insight leading to our fulfillment, while we in turn help to ripen the soul. Adolescence is the dawn of the procreative energies, so perhaps the Spirit itself can be considered as being procreative. What is it generating, then, besides socially responsible and effective humans? This is one of the mysteries of existence, but I would bet that it has much to do with helping to develop the universe itself, revealing finally that the Spirit needs us as fundamentally as we might need the Spirit.

Isaac Asimov once asserted that if it hadn’t been for the presence of the moon, human civilization would never have developed as quickly as it did. Early humans, he argued, were fascinated by the moon, and were stimulated to decipher the mystery of its existence. What were the phases of the moon, and why were they there? How far away is the moon? Nothing else in the heavens seemed quite so intriguing, for impressive as the sun was it was perceived as unchanging, the stars never changed except that they progressed with the seasons, and the planets moved but quite slowly. People learned that they could predict the seasons by counting the lunar cycles, and the passage of time could be catalogued in this way. The moon, therefore, seems to have catalyzed the early development of humanity: intellectually, culturally, and creatively. The Christian tradition of Easter is still celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon of spring. Without the inspiration of the moon feeding our fascination through its dynamic presence in the sky, we surely may have developed more slowly.

There is a documentary video of Apollo 15, and in a portion of this video the astronauts on the moon are riding a lunar rover, toward one destination or another. They are passing a landscape which is dappled with hills, in combination with the characteristic texture of the surface, the lunar dust among craters, with shadows being formed by the sun upon the undulating surface of the hills, when one of the astronauts passionately exclaims that this is the most beautiful thing that he has ever seen! The exuberance in his voice is validation enough regarding the authenticity of his statement, and one is left to wonder how such a thing could be possible. Here is a barren landscape, desolate in the deepest sense of the word, devoid of dynamic energies promising any fruitful future changes, and yet here is the most beautiful thing a mature human being has ever seen. Such is the mystery of beauty. The images of Neptune’s moon Triton collected by one of the Voyager spacecraft during its flyby are themselves replete with an inexplicable and subtle beauty. Here is a landscape whose temperature is hundreds of degrees below zero, where water ice has the hardness of steel because of the cold, and where a human would die almost instantly if exposed to these conditions, and yet it can be perceived by our sense of sight as beautiful.

Beauty seems to be the inevitable result of natural forces at work over extended periods of time, as if beauty were implicit in the natural laws which govern the universe, including ourselves. The examples of beauty just mentioned require light in order to be perceived by us, yet other kinds of beauty do not. We might recognize a certain piece of music as beautiful, or even a smell…an idea or a hope. We evolved from beauty, to become capable of recognizing beauty, that we might embellish and enshrine the beauty of the present and future through the living of our lives. Here is the poetry of our existence.