Jeremy Rose

"I'm not a very spiritual person," someone said to me in a conversation recently. It seemed like a legitimate thing to say, and I didn't argue at the time. People often place themselves somewhere on a spiritual continuum, and we often think of ourselves as being "more spiritual" or "less spiritual" than someone else.
But the more I thought about the phrase "I'm not a very spiritual person," the more it bothered me. I don't usually tell people flat out that they are wrong during a discussion, but if this person were to make that statement again, I think I would this time. Because the plain truth is, we are 100% spiritual people. That's who we are - we are spirits placed temporarily on earth. A human being saying they are not spiritual is a little like a fish saying they are not very "aquatic" - picture a fish saying: "I don't go in the water much; I don't like it; it's just not me."

Some of this peculiarity comes from our definitions of the word "spiritual" - certainly a word that means very different things to different people. To some, it means they like burning incense and chanting. To others, it may mean they always say the blessing before every meal and can quote you chapter and verse of the Bible. To still others, it just means there are a certain set of emotional states that they enjoy being in.

If you think of "spiritual" in these terms, it makes sense to say that you are "not very spiritual." But if you think in terms of "spirit" being what your essence is, it doesn't make any sense to say that someone can be more or less spiritual, or to say that someone is not very spiritual because of things they do or don't do.

The flip side of it would be to say, "I'm not a very physical person." That can mean things that you habitually do (i.e. exercise) or enjoy (i.e. sensory pleasures) are not really you. In a sense, you can be "not very physical," but in another sense, it's just not a legitimate thing to say.

To return to the fish analogy, human beings are curious creatures because we are really amphibious. Amphibious is not even an accurate term, because it means able to live in both worlds (water and land), and able to go back and forth between these environments without difficulty. Human beings are a little different; we are both physical and spiritual at the same time, and there's no physical analogy for it: you can't be simultaneously underwater and on dry land. But that's not the most peculiar thing about our state of being - the most peculiar thing is that we are not necessarily aware of what kind of creatures we are. We can say, and honestly believe, that we are "not spiritual" because human beings are capable of being oblivious to what we really are, and the nature of the world we really live in.

One of the things about Swedenborg that is most challenging for some people to believe is his claim that he lived in both the spiritual and the natural worlds simultaneously, and did it for years. This is such a radical concept that it causes some to dismiss Swedenborg as a madman. The funny thing is, we all do that, every day of our natural lives. The biggest difference is that Swedenborg was fully conscious of the spiritual world, or in his words, his "spiritual eyes were opened." We, on the other hand, live in the spiritual world with our eyes closed for the time being.

People who study different cultures have a saying: "We don't know who discovered water, but we're pretty sure it wasn't the fish." In a sense, fish can't tell you very much about water, because they have nothing to compare it to - if fish had language, for instance, they wouldn't have a word for "wet" because they wouldn't have a word for "dry." So it's actually not so peculiar as it first sounds for beings to not be aware of the nature of their being. Then again, amphibious creatures like frogs would have words for "wet" and "dry," because going back and forth between those two states is a big part of their life.

But here we are, living in two worlds at once, and capable of being completely fooled into thinking we only live in one. The physical world is so obvious, so tangible, so distracting, so "real" that it's sometimes hard to believe that there is a world even more "real" than this.

Sure, we can occasionally spend a little time in church thinking about some ethereal concepts and pray to an invisible God, but when we're done, we go outside into the "real" world of trees and sky and rocks and traffic and smog. Nobody argues that rocks don't exist the way the existence of God is debated. And there's nothing like hunger pangs or a bad back or a loud noise to make it impossible for us to think about anything spiritual. The spiritual world can't compete - the physical world is just plain, obviously, visibly, provably more real.

We are physical beings, consisting of a few dollars worth of chemicals plus a lot of water. All those emotions we get hung up on are just chemical reactions; thoughts are nothing more than electrical impulses. People who see visions of spiritual realms are just suffering from neurological abnormalities. Science seems more and more eager all the time to tell us that every aspect of our being is genetically determined. Newsweek, for instance, recently declared that nothing we do as parents really matters in how our children turn out, it's just DNA.

Feel sad in the wintertime? Probably just Seasonal Affect Disorder, brought about by deficiencies in ultraviolet rays. Falling in love with someone? Probably just pheromones.

Of course, it's understandable that science denies one side of our amphibious nature, because science is only capable of looking at the other side. If you're like me, you rebel against the thought that everything is genetically determined before birth because you know, from your own spiritual life, that it's not true. We know, for instance, that we are still "close" to someone even though they are 3,000 miles away, and we know that, despite the accuracy of atomic clocks, time does not progress at a constant rate. We know, perhaps not on a conscious level, that we are spiritual beings, and no amount of scientific study will ever pin that down.

When we start to look at what our lives actually revolve around, it is clear that our lives have very little to do with physical reality. Sure, rocks and trees and food and the weather may be undeniably real, but for most of us they are not the core of our lives. Our lives center on things "unreal."

For instance, when I teach, I can't help noticing how grade-obsessed students can be. Their whole lives can be turned upside down by a grade. But what, exactly, is a grade? Certainly, it is not something with any physical reality to it. I mean, dogs know physical reality when they see it, but you could never explain to a dog what a "grade" is. Once they get out of school, many people live their lives around money - but again, what is money? Well, it's smudgy paper with weird symbols on it. Actually, most of the time it's not even that; it's numbers on a computer printout. If you play the stock market, what "really" happens? Nothing at all. Numbers go up, numbers go down. "Money is power," they say, but "power" isn't usually something physically real either. Then there's "honour," a very meaningful concept to a lot of people, even though it's really something that exists only in people's minds.

In my job, working on legal cases, I can't help noticing that justice is something that most people care very deeply about, even though that too has very little to do with physical reality. In Minnesota, we just finished a statewide tobacco trial, and the tobacco companies lost a great deal of honor, power, and money. Try explaining any of that to a dog.

The most meaningful thing in most people's lives is relationships, of course. Apart from physical displays of affection, a relationship is a purely spiritual thing. There are good ones and bad ones, deep ones and shallow ones, loving ones and loveless ones, functional ones and dysfunctional ones, but all relationships are spiritual. They are based around thoughts and feelings and commitments and understandings, and this is what the spiritual world consists of. These are the things that are, to us, more real than "reality." These are the things that tell us, if we're paying attention, that we are 100% spiritual beings. The physical world may be awfully nice, but we don't really live here. And we could all stand to pay a little more attention to the world we really do live in.

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