Descent and Ascent

The spiritual path is sometimes represented as a movement upward, into higher realms. And if pressed, we might presume the higher realms to be less dense than the world we currently live in, just the air is less dense in the high mountains. Less dense implies less substantial. So we tend to think of higher worlds as being less substantial than our ordinary world.

But spiritually higher does not mean less substantial; it means more substantial. Higher in the atmosphere is a physical direction. Higher in the world of spiritual energies is the direction of greater potential. Higher in the world of will is the direction of greater freedom and unity. Thus, spiritually higher means more substantial experientially.

Take the example of sensing your body. If you are able to sense your whole body, and if you stay with it, perhaps bringing active elements from the air into your body to increase the sensitive energy there, you will feel your body, your being, to be more substantial than before. You incorporate more within your domain. With the conscious energy, our boundaries evaporate, our domain expands, again making us more substantial than before.

With each level upward, we become more substantial. But that upward movement also requires us to become emptier, emptier of ourselves, our egoism, our self-regard. The substantiality is in the domain of energies. The emptying is in the domain of will. Yet that emptying is not a negative, it is a cleansing that allows us to drop our defenses and be more universal in our outlook, more at peace, and serve in another way.

J.G. Bennett writes about the universe being in the process of spiritualization. [1] If it is, then our inner work is very likely part of that process. This involves both energies and will. After all, what is presence, if not an opportunity to open ourselves to allow the Sacred to see through us?

To participate in the process of universal spiritualization must entail, among other things, inwardly stepping aside to make room for the Sacred to be in this world as us. This happens in quiet, simple moments, when we are not preoccupied, we are just here, being. The Higher is already here in all of us. We cooperate with the Sacred to the point where there is neither difference nor separation. There is one action and it cannot be said whether we are doing it or it is being done through us by the higher will. Here our will and the higher will merge back into their original unity.

This may be the truest form of prayer: letting the Real flow through us. How else would the Divine be able to experience the beauty and pathos of this remarkable material world we live in? This descent of the Divine Will is the ascent of human being.

The more substantial our being, the less we seek to fill it from external sources. The more substantial our being, the more at peace we can be. That peace pacifies our egoism, our grasping, releasing us from inner slavery. That peace enables us to let go of our walls and boundaries. It makes room for other people. It makes room for an all-encompassing, universal outlook. It makes room for the Sacred. In that room, we are free, and the higher will is free to live in us.

Each act of inner work, each moment of intentional presence, of letting go our grasping, of kindness, of opening to the higher, contributes, drop by drop, to our being, to our substantiality, to emptying our personal self in favor of the universal self.

In the universal process of spiritualization, as our individual soul develops so does our common human soul, which is within the Earth's soul. The same energies that form our individual human soul, simultaneously form the Earth's soul. As our individual will is purified of ego and thus allows us to participate in a higher will, then the higher will of the nascent soul of humanity, as well as the will of the Earth can continue to coalesce. We are each a piece of this great process, but an essential piece, because the higher will is one — no parts. In that sense, we are each meant to be the Whole.

[1] See J.G. Bennett's The Dramatic Universe, Volume IV, 1966.

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