I found myself reflecting this morning on the mysterious and paradoxical way that Spirit—the timeless, radiant essence of what is—expresses itself in just the right forms to invite us, as human beings, to recognize and fall in love with it—that is, to fall in love with our Self. Somehow, through some divine good fortune, we find ourselves surrounded by objects and experiences that appeal precisely to our primal need for certain colors, sounds, shapes, and smells. The variegated reds and pinks of roses and bougainvilla, the echoing coo of the doves, the constantly changing blues of the sky and the sea fulfill in us a deep, inchoate longing. It’s as if our senses were made to see precisely these stones and these trees, the ones that are in front of us right now, to hear precisely this music and these words, to feel precisely this surface, this breeze.
At the same time our lives are somehow miraculously filled with people who take the part of our friends, our lovers, our sisters and brothers, our parents and children. Even when we realize at the deepest level that there is really no one here, no abiding self to which this name applies, we still respond in the most tender, personal, human ways to certain people in ways we do not respond to others, and feel moved by certain words and voices while others do not have a similar resonance.
This deep, mysterious interrelatedness—at once completely impersonal and beyond our comprehension and at the same time intimately personal and filled with love and meaning—shapes the arc and direction of this particular human life: your life, my life, our life. This is the mystery of spirit made flesh, the way it perfectly expresses itself in every moment and form. Any spirituality that devalues the intimate interrelatedness of life on this human plane is fundamentally dualistic because it rejects our embodiment; preferences certain experiences over others; and denies our wise and tender human heart.