“It is love alone that gives worth to all things.”
-St. Teresa of Avila
Whether we like it or not, we are part human and part divine. The human part is easy to see. It is the dark side, the foolish side, the good-intentioned-failure side. Within our humanity, however, is the sacred. This is where the love comes from, the compassion and empathy, the appreciation and gratitude, the purity and peace, the unexpected generosity, goodness and grace.
Each of us has both aspects but our thinking mind is not capable of grasping the divine. Like an allergic response, it will quickly reject this concept. It just doesn’t fit within its architectural programming. Our thinking mind is like a hand puppet who thinks he’s a king because he wears a crown. He cannot see the invisible hand that gives him life, movement, creativity and power.
Our ego can get drunk on this divine essence but will invariably mistake it as the province of itself alone. Some of us believe we are “special” or secretly better than other people because our thinking mind tells us so. Yes, you are special. So am I, if we understand that our true identity is extraordinary, beyond human comprehension and inextricably linked to all life in the universe. The little voice telling you that is true. You are special because of the holy spark of light that illuminates your mind. And if you look carefully, you will see that light in the eyes of others. They are also special. Everyone has it but few get quiet enough to understand it and allow it to be properly expressed, revealed and seen.
Instead, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said 36 years ago, human society is facing “a disaster” due to “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.” As we deny our true, spiritual identity and only see ourselves as small, separate beings, fear and greed make sense. Unconscious, bitter hatred and vengeful violence make sense. Even depression and suicide make sense to the time-bound, egoic mind that is trapped in illusion and delusion and disconnected from its source.
Solzhenitsyn warned us that the lie and tyranny of the spiritless self “has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.
“We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.
“If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.
“Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.
“Even if we are spared destruction by war, life will have to change in order not to perish on its own. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?
“If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.
“The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.”
Doug Craig graduated from college in Ohio with a journalism degree and got married during the Carter administration. He graduated from graduate school with a doctorate in Psychology, got divorced, moved to Redding, re-married and started his private practice during the Reagan administration. He had his kids during the first Bush administration. Since then he has done nothing noteworthy besides write a little poetry, survive a motorcycle crash, buy and sell an electric car, raise his kids, manage to stay married and maintain his practice for almost 25 years. He believes in magic and is a Sacramento Kings fan.
