The Unity of Polarity

The psychologists, the scientists, they want to describe everything in purely natural terms and in the mystics I have seen a tendency to describe everything in purely spiritual terms, at times teetering on the brink of falling over into rigid and dogmatic theology. They take their transcendent experience and frame it or rather force it into the box of religion. As the scientists insist on strictly natural explanations for everything that is, the mystics insist on purely spiritual explanations, something I have come to classify in my mind as ‘scientific’ religiosity or spirituality.

But the two they are one. The awakening of spiritual awareness can only happen, can only be explained in terms that completely and unabashedly integrate the two concepts together into one whole. The separation of the two aspects into natural vs. spiritual is, I think how the understanding and acceptance of the reality and process of awakening of spiritual awareness as an inherent aspect of humanness to the average person becomes confused, hard to fathom, hard to integrate into their daily life, into their normal intellectual and emotional sphere of comprehension. We think that life must be one or the other when in fact it must be both of them together, when in fact it is both of them together.

The religious, the spiritual literature would have us believe that this, whatever ‘this’ is, is not our true home. I am perplexed by this notion. Is God-awareness a severing and casting off of all aspects of our natural senses, those senses by which we experience the physical world, i.e. touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing? Does that sixth sense, the intuition by which we recognize God come only, always and completely at the expense of our five physical senses? I find this hard to believe and harder yet to accept. That we have existed in the physical world via the exercise of our five natural senses at the expense of our sixth intuitive sense is without question for most. But to suggest that we then turn the tables and develop that sixth sense at the expense of the other five seems just as questionable to me.

If we do that what then becomes of our appreciation of physical beauty? Did not God create the physical world as an expression of His existence? Does not the Word of God encompass not only that which is unseen but also that which is right before our eyes and ears and noses? Who has ever stood at the end of the earth at sunrise gazing out over the ocean? The scene that presents itself in the moments just before the sun peeks into view over the horizon is nothing short of majestic. The colors of the sky, hues for which we have no representation in a box of crayons, purples, pinks, grays and blues, all at once and yet separate.  Glimpses of Eternity... all at once and yet separate.  Is this not the very definition of sublime? Do I dismiss this phenomenon as purely natural and therefore unnecessary to my quest for God? Not relevant to my spiritual awareness and growth?

Must it always be natural vs. spiritual, rational vs. irrational. This AGAINST that. Two forces in direct opposition to each other? Always two ends of the spectrum pitted against one another, in competition for the rights to claim the human soul? We speak of unity when we speak of God and yet we divide and separate in our struggle to explain how it ‘must’ work.

Can we comprehend the true splendor and brilliance of the Light unless we have first descended into the depths of the Darkness?