We human beings like to think we are such amazing animals. And we are. We carry forward with us the successes of eons of creative trial and error, a spectacular inheritance that enables us to act with deep wisdom and freedom in our ever more complex environment. But being human, becoming truly human, is also the greatest challenge of our existence. Because we are not at ease in these evolved animal-selves, this amazing body-self we have inherited. Why not? You’d think it would be the most natural thing in the world to feel at home in our bodies—not even to feel at home, but just be at home in our bodies in that wonderfully unconscious or innocent way most children have and some graced athletes retain as they mature.
But most of us don’t experience this natural grace. It’s not even that we’re not at home in our bodies. We seem to be ill at ease in our bodies, or even at war with our bodies. Why?
Answers abound—sin, Platonism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Greek Christianity, Christianity, Calvinism, Roman Catholicism, dualism of all kinds, spiritualism of all kinds, gender stereotypes, the media, the Freudians, our mothers, our fathers, those who have abused us physically or sexually. Whatever truth there may be in these answers, I want to look beneath them for a moment.
Look at how we’re built. Lumps of clay animated by some kind of breath who then go on to some kind of restless existence. Whatever you think of creation stories, all those observations, from so many different times and cultures, point to a deep truth about our existence here on earth. Whatever you make those stories or our interpretations of them, it’s hard to deny that we’re an unstable union of two different ways of being, matter and spirit, body and mind, and instinct and consciousness. The terms don’t matter; it’s the relationship between them that’s what trips us up. We want to resolve that instability once and for all, so we deny the part of it that we understand least and live with what is more comfortable for us. For some of us, that means landing in our bodies, tending to them, following their lead always, and ignoring anything beyond the realm of the physical because it is beyond our reach or comprehension. For others of us it means living the life of the mind or the ethereal life of the spirit and just plain ignoring the body, giving it its due, but treating it as a second-class citizen at best.
So we live as if one side of this difficult and de-stabilizing experience we call human be-ing doesn’t exist or doesn’t really matter. That’s one way to live out the challenge of what I like to call, using the language of physicists, “the “coexistence of incommensurates.”
But what if we took this unstable and difficult two-at-onceness of our being seriously? What if matter is coming to consciousness through us, the human creature, as many scientists, philosophers, and mystics have argued? What would our task as human beings look like then? The Sufi Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan puts it this way: “the reconciliation of irreconciliables.” Our job here on earth is not to give ourselves over to the needs and limitations and desires of our bodies and the physical universe, to just sink into it, whether by addictive behaviors or ordinary habits. Nor is our task here on earth to transcend matter by leaping into the spiritual realm, escaping the limitations of the material world by getting “high” through prayer or meditation or other spiritual disciplines. Our task is much more challenging: it is to live in such a way that these two irreconcilable ways of being are reconciled in our every feeling, thought, and action.
Why are we here? For this, says Pir Vilayat Khan: “the materialization of spirit and the spiritualization of matter.” It’s not enough to stay low or get high. We have to bring that animating force of the universe to our limited, cloddish, friable existence here on earth, to make it a thing of true beauty. And we have to incarnate that animating force, bring it to new beauty, a beauty never before seen on earth until this moment, now, in our lives, here on earth.
Forget alchemy. Forget fairy tales of dwarves spinning straw into gold. That is all child’s play compared to this task we have each been given: incarnating spirit and breathing life into our bodies and the world around us.
Our bodies are not our enemy. They are not the “prison-house of the soul” or second-class citizens. They are not simply the vehicle for higher purposes.
Our bodies, their jumble of needs and limits, desires and pleasures and pain, are not the whole of human existence.
Our bodies are the meeting ground where spirit is materialized and matter is spiritualized—a moveable tabernacle we carry and that carries us as we wander through the wilderness.
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