Union with Life
This is the difference between religious or spiritual experience and artistic inspiration; both are analogous, but the latter is particularized. The artist or musician has a special type of creative genius; he creates pictures or music, for his genius is a specialized gift. But the spiritual genius is not a specialist, for he does not just paint or compose creatively: he lives creatively, and his tools are not confined to brush, pen, or instrument; they are all things touched by his hand. This is not to say that when he takes up a brush he can paint like Leonardo or that when he takes hammer and chisel he can work like a master mason. Spiritual experience involves neither technical proficiency nor factual knowledge; it is no shortcut to things that must ordinarily be mastered by pains and practice. Nor is spiritual experience necessarily expressed in any particular mode of life; its presence in any given individual cannot be judged by measurement in accordance with certain standards. It can only be felt intuitively, for creative living is not always outwardly distinguishable from any other kind of living; in fact, spiritual people are often at pains to appear as normal as possible. At the same time, although spiritual people may do exactly the same things as others, one feels that their actions are in some way different. There is a story of a Buddhist sage who was about to speak to his disciples when he found that he wanted more light. He pointed to a curtain covering one of the windows and instantly two of the disciples went and rolled it up, whereat the sage remarked, “One of them is right, but the other is wrong.”4
In itself, spirituality is purely an inner experience; it has no necessary effect whatsoever on one’s outward behavior judged from the standards of efficiency and worldly wisdom. This is not to say, however, that it is something absolutely private and personal, finding no expression that others can see. For spirituality is a deep sense of inner freedom based on the realization that one’s self is in complete union and harmony with life, with God, with the Self of the universe or whatever that principle may be called. It is the realization that that union has existed from all time, even though one did not know it, and that nothing in all the world nor anything that oneself can do is able to destroy it. It is thus the sense that the whole might of the universe is at work in one’s every thought and action, however trivial and small. In fact this is true of all men and all things, but only the spiritual man really knows it and his realization gives a subtly different quality to his life; all that he does becomes strangely alive, for though its outward appearance is perhaps the same as before it acquires a new meaning. It is this which other people notice, but if he has the gift for teaching they will see it in other ways as well. By his words as well as his deeds and his personal “atmosphere” they will understand that this realization has awakened in him a tremendous love for life in all its aspects.
Prose and the logic of philosophy cannot explain this love; one might as well try to describe a beautiful face by a mathematical account of its measurements and proportions. It is a mixture of the joy of freedom, a childlike sense of wonder, and the inner sensation of absolute harmony with life as in the rhythm of an eternal dance such as the Hindus portray in the interlocked figures of Shiva and his bride.5 In one sense you feel that your life is not lived by you at all; the power of the universe, fate and destiny, God Himself, are directing all your motions and all your responsibilities are blown to the winds. In another sense you feel free to move as you wish; you seem to be moving life with the same vast power with which life moves you, and your littlest acts become filled with gigantic possibilities. Indeed, physicists tell us that the stars are affected when we lift a single finger. The result of these two feelings is that you no longer distinguish between what you do to life and what life does to you; it is as if two dancers moved in such perfect accord that the distinction between lead and response vanished, as if the two became one and the same motion. By the whirling, ever-changing movement of this dance you are carried along without pause, but not like a drunken man in a torrent, for you as much as life are the source of the movement. And this is real freedom; it includes both freedom to move and to be moved; action and passivity are merged, and in spirituality as well as in marriage this is the fulfillment of love.
The Spirituality of Everyday Life
All this, however, does not take place in the ecstasy of trance, in some abstract state of consciousness where all shapes and substances have become merged into a single infinite essence. The spiritual man does not perform his ordinary activities as one in a dream, letting his surface thoughts and deeds run on mechanically. He can become just as much absorbed in the usual affairs of the world as anyone else, but in a certain way he sanctifies them for under his hands sharpening a pencil becomes as much a religious act as prayer or meditation. Indeed, he can afford to become absorbed in everyday affairs almost more than others, and he can do so with a certain zest and abandon for to him ordinary human thoughts and activities are as much included in the dance of the spirit as is anything else. This, indeed, is much of his secret, for he knows that spirituality does not consist in thinking always about the spiritual as such. His world is not divided into “watertight compartments” and his religion is not a special form of thought and activity, for the spiritual and the material are not separated.
But because a man does not occupy himself with the ordinary pursuits of mankind, this is no indication that he lacks spiritual understanding. He is free to follow whatever occupation he pleases—monk, philosopher, lawyer, clerk, or tradesman, but from the spiritual point of view a priest is not necessarily more holy than a truck driver. Furthermore, to obtain spiritual experience it is not essential to “vex your mournful minds with pious pains,” to spend years in the study of theology, to retire from the world, to become a vegetarian and teetotaler, to practice mental acrobatics and seek out “higher realms” of consciousness, to abstain from sexuality, or to develop such peculiar gifts as “fourth-dimensional vision.” Certainly these things are necessary for the professional philosopher or for that particular type of scientist whose field of research is the psychic world. If we are going to find out how our present senses may be developed, how we can tap sources of nervous energy as yet unused, how we can understand time in terms of space and see past and future at once, how we can transfer thought, or how we can acquire the faculty of immovable concentration, then indeed we have to go in training even more rigorously than the professional athlete. To acquire psychic faculties you must practice just as much as if you wanted to hold the world’s record for sprinting or to be able to walk on hot coals without being burned.
The Nonessentials of Religion
Religion as we understand it includes many things which do not strictly belong to it, because in olden times it had to fulfill functions which have now been taken over by scientists, doctors, and lawyers. At one time the major preoccupation of so-called religion was the study and manipulation of the unknown and the unseen; as these things became known and seen they passed out of the hands of priests. But when priests were considered the wisest of all men they were expected to have answers to all the problems which others did not understand. They were expected to know the causes of disease, the behavior and influence of the stars, the origin of such natural phenomena as thunder, storms, and famines, not to mention the more remote questions of what happens after death and whether there are gods and angels.
Many of these problems have now been taken over by science, though we are still ignorant of the life after death and still have no objective evidence of the existence of “supernatural” beings. Therefore the priests are still the authorities on such matters even though they remain legitimate objects of scientific inquiry and have no essential connection with religion. The day may come when science, physical or psychic, will be able to answer these questions, and some scientists imagine that there will then be no further need for religion, having no clear idea of what religion is. This is not exactly their fault, for religious people seldom understand the true function of religion and still waste thought and energy in a war with science based on wholly false premises.