As we move our consciousness into consideration of the New Age, we are faced with a need to reevaluate our understanding of spirit and of matter. This has already been brought to our attention within this century by research done in the field of physics, indicating that what we used to call “matter” is in itself a variation of energy, and these seemingly so solid objects upon which we base our physical life are actually patterns of energy moving in relationship to each other across vast microcosmic distances.
As we approach the building of a new age and confront the idea of our own inner divinity, we need to take stock of the values of the world in which we live, and the values of the spiritual world which have for centuries been held before man as being of very great importance.
Historically, man has been asked to see his world as something akin to a staging ground, a place in which he prepares himself for entry into some kind of spiritual manifestation. This is true whether we are dealing with western culture or eastern culture. In the east there is the concept of continued involvement with Earth experience until such time as you learn the secrets of balance and the right use of energy that will break for you the wheel of rebirth, and allow you to enter into a timeless, spaceless, dimensionless state of bliss consciousness, absorption into the all.
In the west our Christian culture is more form oriented than that and we see this life as being preparation for an eternal life which is lived out in some realm or other, about which very little is known and not a great deal is said in orthodox religious traditions, except that there is a place for those who have prepared well, and there is a place for those who have not prepared very well. As a consequence many people at the last moment cram very hard to make sure that they get into the right level.
In both east and west there has been a tendency to view our physical, material life as being at best a training ground for something greater, and at worst an absolute obstacle to revelation and the manifestation of our divinity. In fact not just an obstacle, but an arena of temptation created by an energy of opposition to the divine will, and if we turn our attention too much to the world, then our soul stands in peril. As this consciousness enters into new age thought, it manifests itself within the phenomenon of viewing the New Age as being also a state which we must attain to, often at the expense of a practical and relevant physical life, or material life.
As a counsellor, I often had occasion to be visited by generally wives but occasionally husbands, who would inform me that they could no longer continue their marriage because they were growing spiritually whereas their partners were remaining too materialistic. Time and time again one would hear this concept of a person who is materialistic. I want to focus your attention on a new understanding of materialism.
What is matter? Is matter truly separate from spirit? Is the Earth and its physical environment something that is a realm unto itself, and then we have a gap of some nature, a gulf on the other side of which lies a different realm? Occult teachings throughout the ages say that the universe is one, one immense and practically unimaginable life-form, one sphere of manifestation, one integral and undivided self, one energy, that everything which one sees manifest is still contained within that oneness.
In short the mysteries have proclaimed that there is no gulf. Everything is a manifestation of a single quality, a single energy. Well, that is fair enough. But even within that concept, there is still a certain evaluation that physical matter is energy in its most dense, hence its most restrictive state of being, and as one moves into higher frequencies, one becomes increasingly free and henceforth increasingly approximate to one’s own inner divinity. Again this leads to a certain scale of values in which what I try to do through my spiritual quest is to free myself from the bondages of matter.
The most unlimited being we can conceive of is God, and the Divinity has manifested itself within this dense form that we call the physical Earth. From all that one can see, deity is not particularly limited by functioning through such density. The marvels that exist throughout the world, throughout the microcosmic world, the atomic structure, would indicate a very dynamic, alive, unlimited consciousness at work. So there must be something else here which is causing us to fail to recognize the inherent non-limitation which is the divine spirit within matter.
That something else is the particular condition of man’s own consciousness and evolutionary quest seeking to understand the secrets, the mechanics of creativity. Man takes on a separated consciousness and learns to relate directly to other forms and to establish relationships with these other forms, and thereby learn in a more direct and often dramatic fashion the principles behind creativity (which are without exception principles of relationship and of blending and of moving different units together to create a wholeness) than he could learn if all that he experienced was undifferentiated wholeness.
Within man’s need, therefore, there has been a requirement that he recognize that the separated state which matter suggests is not the only state, but that through matter, inherent within it, is operating a force of dynamic synthesis, a force of synergy, a force that can take individual units and combine them in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and yet the parts retain their individual identity.
In the consciousness of matter itself deity is operating without limitation. Deity is not saying to itself, “I am trapped in matter, therefore I am limited!” The principles which man is attempting to grasp, in order to liberate himself, are already at work within physical existence: principles of attraction, of love, of balance, of wisdom, of giving, of receiving, of synthesis, various principles which under other names we know as physical laws, laws which harness the energies of the universe and cause them to manifest according to distinct and intelligent patterns, patterns which can, in turn, give rise to greater patterns, and still greater patterns, and still greater ones beyond, from the atomic nucleus and its rather intricate community of atomic expressions, all the way to human society and beyond.
So the concept of materialism, of matter as being a dense, dead state, is essentially man-created. It has served man in the past to the extent that he has had created for him a differentiated scale of values. He has had to recognize that there exists in nature these two forces: the qualities of matter and the inertia of matter, and the qualities of spirit and the dynamics of energy, to be able to recognize the fact of these two existences and then to know how to blend them together.
That is what Godhood is all about: blending motion and rest, inertia and energy, matter and spirit together so that the third force of illumination, of creativity, of consciousness, is liberated.
In this drama that man has been moving through, his challenge has been one of how to evaluate his world. Where does he place the emphasis in his life? There is the saying, “Money is the root of all evil.” There are many who accept that. There are others who say, “No, money by itself is not the root of anything. It is how it is used that determines whether good or evil result.” Money is a neutral pattern. Well, matter is a neutral force, a neutral quality, and it is how we use the energy and characteristics of matter that determines whether it is deadening to us or enlivening to us.
Generally when we say someone is materialistic we mean their consciousness is oriented to the greatest extent toward form, toward things, toward objects, and these things or objects are given the greatest value in that individual’s value system. A materialist is someone, in normal usage of the word, who seeks to possess or to relate totally to matter and could not care less concerning things which are not objects.
In the consciousness of the planet, the subjective consciousness, the spiritual consciousness, has been the most manifested in the east where the tremendous thrust of culture has been fundamentally towards understanding and mastering the realms of the spirit, subjective realms, psychic realms. In the west the outbreath, the materializing consciousness, has had predominance. In the western culture we have learned, through technology, through science, through our whole approach in politics and religion, to place the greatest emphasis on form.
This is true in religion. We see it quite evidently in the Christian faith in which great value is placed on the resurrection of the body, which is simply another way of saying the preservation of a form, a bit of matter. Christianity, in that sense, is a tremendously materialistic religion.
These two qualities achieve different things. The east has long been the fabled realm, the mystic home of the adepts, of the supermen, the masters. The west has been the land where man learns to conquer nature, to bend the earth to his will through his science. Both of these consciousnesses are necessary in the New Age and they must be blended in each individual, so that we learn to act in a materialistic way within our life, but act from a spiritual center and awareness and guidance that we have contacted through our inner attunements and meditations.
Interestingly enough, one of the prime exponents of the meditative technique of the New Age happens to be the stereotype of the capitalist business tycoon. It requires an incredible awareness and ability to understand and manipulate different levels of energy, finance, raw material, labor, and management, in order to create and harness and run an industry. The businessman is in some ways a prototype of the New Age consciousness.
What we are asked to do in the New Age is spiritualize the Earth, to bring heaven down on Earth, not to lift Earth into heaven but literally to bring heaven down on Earth, to inject into the realm of matter the dynamic force already present within the realm of spirit.
But here is a paradox. The image that this creates is that of man going within, becoming attuned and learning how to pull through his body the energies which can then pass out through his hands, through his mind, through his voice, through his auric field, into his material life so that whatever he does, whether he is a craftsman and makes things, or he is an artist, or he is a person who works in a garden, or works in an office, whatever he touches, these things are enhanced in their energy.
But that is presupposing that the material realm does not have that energy, that in some way we have to inject it with a bit of divinity. It is, in a sense, viewing man as some great hypodermic needle prepared to inoculate the Earth with five hundred cosmic c.c.’s of divine serum! I wish to suggest a different point of view about this because the ideal is quite correct. Man throughout the centuries has either pursued spiritual values at the expense of the material world or he has pursued material values at the expense of his inner life. Either way is quite out of balance and does not take into account the reality of our true identity. But if we see ourselves as having to pull something down from a higher level, we are still making a fundamental evaluation that the material level is in some way essentially different than the spiritual level, and that it is our function to bless or be saviors to the Earth.
This is true in one sense. That is our function. It is how we go about it that is the question, because it is our consciousness that is the key to this. If I see that in some way I must make contact with my highest level before I can serve the planet and spiritualize the Earth, then the chances are I’m going to enter into a pattern in which my attention becomes focused on a subjective higher level before I feel ready or capable of revealing the divinity within matter. If on the other hand I can realize that God is right now living most dynamically, most limitlessly, within the so-called confines of matter, and that the confines of matter themselves are simply held within the consciousness of God, then I become not only an invoker but an evoker. I become an educator, which classically means a force that leads out from within something or someone that which is inherently there. It is recognition we are asked to make.
We enter into the New Age with simple steps, and yet they seem difficult because we are looking for the wrong kind of steps. We are looking for techniques to bring about the New Age, but the initial steps we have to make are simply changes in attitude. If I see, for example, that this physical world is a body of God, all the realms are part of his body, but this is one of them, and that there is an intelligence, a life, a love at work in the mysteries of physical manifestation that is quite beyond the capacity of my finite mind to grasp, then I suddenly have the sense that I am right now surrounded and enfolded in a divine realm. Instead of attempting to bless the Earth, I find that the Earth is calling divinity out of me. It becomes a reciprocal relationship. The more I can recognize the presence of the Beloved, of the Divine, acting within matter, the more matter begins to recognize that presence acting in me.
There is a fundamental tension that we must reduce — the tension between spirit and matter, of perceiving them as in some fashion incompatible with each other, so that we have to get rid of one in order to move into the other. There is a necessity to blend them, to synthesize them, because too many matter characteristics give to the consciousness inertia, too much spirit gives to it an inability to relate to the world of form, to create.
We have all encountered people who are called “airy-fairy.” Sometimes we think, “Golly, that fellow is really far-out.” But it may simply be that he has not learned how to ground himself sufficiently so that the tremendous potentials that he may definitely be attuning to can be released, can find their way into form and build and create on the physical level.
In the spiritual life, and I have encountered this within the New Age movement, there is again this tendency to classify people as either being spiritual or materialistic, and to fail to recognize the values inherent in both consciousnesses and the need for them both to become one. A number of people who used to work closely with me in groups in California could not be considered spiritual, if by that we mean their consciousness was oriented towards focusing on life beyond form. They certainly were not yogis. Yet these people had the capacity to harness energies coming from higher levels, because in more important ways they were very spiritual people in their relationships and in their understanding of human nature, and translated this energy into building businesses, research in scientific laboratories, and so on.
For many of these people seeking money was a primary goal, and they would turn the creative power of their consciousness to the art of making money — something that many spiritual people look down upon. Yet one of the very dynamic spiritual leaders in America, who has founded a national movement with centers around the country, regularly trains people in how, through serving the country spiritually, they can at the same time manifest abundance. He says that any spiritual teacher who makes less than a thousand dollars a month is not a spiritual teacher. He says this largely in order to shock people, but actually he does manifest that amount of money. He does it quite honestly by saying that he is out to manifest that as energy, and he translates that back in some form of relevant service.
There are many people whose function is to tap the sources of abundance on a material level, to create in form that which will free man from drudgery, liberate man into greater forms of social life. Are these people materialistic? Yes, in one way they definitely are. But it is the kind of materialism which is much needed.
The tendency in the New Age movement is to assume that someone else is going to do it, that someone else being God, or other beings, or masters, or cataclysms, or something — anything other than oneself and one’s own creative work.
God is the greatest materialist of all. He had to be to create the world, to create you and me. These forms had to come from some great creative source. Though we think of the Earth as being dense and therefore in some way limiting to our spirit, yet within this density life still dances most freely.
Why is it so dense? Why do we feel so limited? Can we recognize that we are intrinsically spiritual beings, that we have a kinship to the Divine? Can we step out of consciousnesses of guilt and shame and not allow traditional cultural barriers to create a wall between ourselves and our Beloved? Can we take ourselves into the silence, into meditation, and relax and feel that we are sitting in that silence in the presence of love, of light, of wisdom, of the divine, and that we are one with that presence?
In other words, can we affirm our divinity, not as a theological concept but as an actual living reality, and then from that affirmation approach our world of form and release that reality through our actions, and allow ourselves, open ourselves to be guided by it? All the great religions offer some facet of this: the wisdom and balance of Buddhism; the love and the identification with God and the brotherhood of man which is Christianity’s great gift; the concept of surrender, of complete openness and trust to God, which is the great teaching of the Islamic faith — Islam means, “I surrender.”
If we conceive divinity only within spiritual terms, then what we look for may be something which in our present state of development we cannot perceive. Of course people can experience light. Of course people can experience flows of energy through their body. You become part of the whole, an oceanic unfoldment of consciousness. But many people are not in a state physically, emotionally, mentally, where they can meditate with sufficient intensity to achieve that kind of contact, to make it a living part of themselves.
If that kind of experience is what we mean by divinity, then we have to resort to some kind of technique that will bring us that experience. But if we can begin initially to apply the yoga of awareness and of new perspective in viewing our world and in dealing with it, then wherever we are in consciousness we can still open the portal to the entrance of the Divine. He will come in whatever form is most suited to where we are at that time.
In a previous book I discussed the New Age vision which demands now that we take on ourselves the collective task of redeeming the world. Redeeming the world means learning how to conceptualize the world in a different fashion so as to establish a different relationship of energy with our world: a love relationship, an acceptance relationship, a wisdom, light relationship, not one of fear or repellence. It is a consciousness of how to be a divine materialist, how to be a spiritual materialist, or material spiritualist. This is incredibly important and you will forgive me for re-emphasizing it but it is to me the key to the processes that we are undergoing. We have physical bodies, not to limit our spirit but to give us entry into a vast realm of life and of consciousness.
We are questing for our identity. That same identity is questing for us and if we can relax into it, we may feel insecure and vulnerable but out of that we can begin to develop a sense of trust in what we are and open to that divinity. It requires inner work. Work must be done through meditation, through attunement, through awareness of what our inner being is. But this does not have to be frantic work, seeking work, insecure work, work which is done at the expense of the world. We can do it but at the same time know that the divinity is there. We can be secure it is there and will reveal itself in progressive stages. We will become one with it. No question about it.
With that sense of peace and sense of security we can re-focus onto our world, and release the energies of the inner consciousness into creative life, practical life, into doing the tasks that are before us, whatever they may be: family, ironing, cooking the meals, cleaning the house, gardening, working in a factory, working in an office. Whatever form we have we can spiritualize if we do not fight the form but learn to see that within it, too, God struggles to be revealed and calls out for those who will reveal him.
© Copyright David Spangler
Thanks to David Spangler for permission to reprint this essay from his book Reflections on the Christ (Findhorn Lecture Series).
