LIFE IS SPIRITUAL

We all have had experiences that point us to another reality beyond this reality that we live in. 

It could be the wonders of nature, the sheer beauty and order of it all, speaking to us about a Grand Designer. 

Or our con-science – Latin for inner knowledge – that quiet voice within, tugging at us either to affirm or to condemn our very thoughts and actions. 

Or the accounts of those who have had an esoteric revelation and passed it down through the ages as traditions or religions, including the occult etc. 

Or even theophany, those very personal God-moments, when you know that you know, that there is this higher being, even if you cannot explain it.

What is certain is that we all have this uncanny feeling about this other ‘world’, which we can hardly explain, but which keeps tugging at us on the inside.

Then there is this life which throws stuff at us all. Stuff that make life wearisome; sometimes for us all, most times for some of us and all the time for a few. It all makes you wonder, what is life all about?

Not knowing for certain about the end, or the beginning, of life, leaves man in a seemingly meaningless cycle of birth, toil and death. And all of it in a state of continual fears; especially the fear of death. 

Or rather, of the ‘judgment’ after death. For we all have this sense of ‘guilt’ within, reinforced unwittingly by religious laws and traditions. 

So, life for most remains filled with pain, want, ‘shame’/insecurity and anxiety; and the perpetual pursuit of an enduring happiness. 

And then, after it all, the physical death; for one and for all.

Life, indeed, can seem meaningless. And “nasty, brutish and short”, in the words of Thomas Hobbes.

Where is God, if He does exist, in all of these?

Some, the atheists, out of cynicism or despair, have concluded that there is no God. Some others, the agnostics, out of sheer apathy, say they are not sure. So, they neither acknowledge Him nor deny Him.

(Yet, many among these two groups flock to spiritualists; fortune tellers, necromancers, marabouts, shamans and merchant ‘pastors’ etc., for supernatural answers to life’s many questions. They may deny God but they obviously acknowledge spirituality.)

Then there are those who believe there is a God, or gods, out there in control of the universe. But since there is no commonality between them, Truth, they have given us over 4000 religions and nearly as many ‘gods’!

Even for those who believe in One God, there is no agreement as to who He really is or what He is about. 

Some say He is in complete control of the universe, including our every choice and action. Life to them is a matter of determinism. Which makes you wonder, if God is in control of it all – and He is good and all powerful – why is life and His world in such a mess? And why must we bother with His laws, if He made us the way we are?

Well, some others believe differently. They say that God is all-knowing but not all-controlling. God obviously has His role in our lives but so do we. They are the choice proponents. I belong here.

Unfortunately, not knowing for certain, Truth, about this unseen reality has left man with his guilt and fears unresolved; with discontent to boot.

We all want a better world and we want it now! But we’ve been wanting that for ages! So, some are walking away from any ‘God idea’ and seeking meaning in anything and everything else, especially ‘nature’ and the occult. Or simply looking to man and trusting in his ‘inherent goodness’ for the answers. They are the humanists.

They cannot understand why God would permit pervasive suffering in life, for the guilty and innocent alike; even babies. Or why ‘good’ people would suffer and the ‘wicked’ thrive! So, they are out to change the world and everyone. 

Everyone else but themselves, that is. They never quarrel with the evil in their own hearts and lives, or the unbridled greed that mars most of their ‘liberation’ efforts.

No, we do not understand it all. But need we run from God? Not if we know the truth. About God, our true nature and our world. The question is, where and how do we get this Truth? 

Some now tell us that we can create our own truth! Obviously, our own ‘truths’ can only be subjective at best. ‘Your truth’ or ‘my truth’ may be meaningless to the rest of us. We need objective truth.

For, “there are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.” C. S. Lewis

Truth must be one; for one and for all!!

If there is a God out there, then He, and only He, can reveal Himself, and His purpose, to us. For no one can know another except through observation and study, or more accurately, through their self-revelation.

Mercifully, we do have such self-revelations from God. In particular, the Torah, as revealed to Moses, and the Gospel, good news in Greek, as revealed by Jesus Christ.

(By the way, we use Torah and Gospel in a very wide sense here. The Torah, attributed to Moses, is actually the first five books of the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh. But Torah is used here to refer to the entire Tanakh, which essentially is the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. By Gospel, we mean the entire New Testament of the Bible, which the Koran calls the Injeel.)

The Torah claims that God spoke to Moses ‘face to face’; and once in the hearing of all the people, which they could not bear!

“The Lord gave me the two tablets of stone written by the finger of God; and on them were all the words which the Lord had spoken with you …”  Moses/Torah

Jesus Christ, who claimed that He came ‘from above… not to do my own will but the will of Him who sent me’, affirmed the Torah. He taught and quoted freely from it. Indeed, the Torah was the reference book for all the prophets after Moses until Christ came.

And more than any other religion, Islam affirms the teachings of the Torah, which it refers to as ‘The Book, and the power of command’; and of Jesus Christ, the ‘Injeel, in which is light’, as below:

“And We did certainly give Moses the Torah and followed up after him with messengers. And We gave Jesus, the son of Mary, clear proofs and supported/confirmed him with the Holy/Pure Spirit.” Surah Al Baqara, Koran

The six major religions of the world, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism – and a minor religion, but one of the oldest, Zoroastrianism- all give accounts that embed some of the truths shared by both Jesus Christ in the Gospel and Moses in the Torah. 

A common thread through them all is the reality of this invisible other ‘world’. And the teaching on cause and effect – the basis of choice – with emphasis on the need to do good in this ‘life’, so as to reap good, both here and in the hereafter. 

Most of them claim there is a Higher Being behind it all: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism and Sikhism. Buddhism, however, has no ‘particular’ god. Everything continually evolves from something into something else, and that into something else, ad infinitum; the concept of impermanence.

For Buddhism and Hinduism, and some other less known religions, and traditions, life is a continual cycle of death and rebirth; reincarnation. Until the attainment of perfection, nirvana, for Hindus and Buddhists. 

Thereafter, Buddhists enter into ’emptiness’; the cessation of care, suffering and the rebirth cycle. Only one person is acknowledged by devotees to have entered into it: Buddha. 

The Hindus on the other hand, have no known exemplar of nirvana, and with no end in sight, they keep on keeping on with the cycle.

Notably, none but three of these religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam, claim any revelation from any other source than the teachings of their founders.  

While Islam claims that the founder received his message through angelic agency, the Torah and the Gospel claim a direct self-revelation from this “One True God”, in the words of Jesus Christ. 

So, to these two sources in particular, the Torah and the Gospel, shall be our main recourse.

“To the law (Torah) and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” Torah

The Torah, which means instructions in the Hebrew language, reveals very clearly the duality of reality as both “heaven and earth”; the one invisible and the other, visible. 

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth… “

It also clearly reveals the duality of roles in both realms.

“The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord’s: but the earth has he given to the children of men.”

While we believe that there is a realm called heaven where God ‘resides’, the question is, where was God before heaven was created? For the Torah and Jesus Christ both claim that heaven is God’s throne and the earth, His footstool. 

“Thus says LORD JEHOVAH: ‘Heaven is my throne and Earth the footstool of my feet.'”  

God is clearly bigger than the heavens!!

And where would this heaven be in any case? We all point upwards in describing heaven, the place, but that would be the exact opposite direction for a man on the other side of the globe, what geographers call the antipodes.

Heaven obviously must mean more than just a place of abode. Is heaven perhaps also a name for this other reality, beside the material reality that we are familiar with?       

Science, quantum physics in particular, would seem to affirm that thought. In the ‘wave particle’ theory, we are told that matter, the visible and tangible, actually has an invisible and intangible component! 

Matter has a dual nature.

For, the smallest unit of matter, we are now told, is not the atom or even subatomic particles, but invisible and intangible electromagnetic energy waves; light units called photons. 

In essence, matter is ultimately immaterial. 

What we ‘see’ is an illusion!! The invisible realm is the ‘real’ thing!! Science calls this invisible and intangible realm, energy. That is familiar territory, and of some succor, to those who are into eastern religions which describe our human essence as ‘energy’.

Interestingly, quantum science also talks about this ubiquitous – ‘omnipresent’ – ‘Higgs Field’ that surrounds every photon and apparently is the source of all photons. What could ‘Higgs Field’ be?

In the Torah, we have a clear pointer to what, or rather who, science calls ‘Higgs Field’.

“In the beginning, God created…”

In this most definitive first verse of the Torah, we have a revelation of the origin of our universe. It all started with God! He is the ultimate Source, the Father if you will, of creation. 

And He spoke everything -the ‘light photons’- into being.

“And God said, light be and light was.”

We know from the Psalms, or Zabur, of David that:

“The entrance of (God’s) words gives light.” 

And the Gospel tells us that:

“God is Light“! 

Is it any wonder then, that light was first in creation? And that light, by the way, was not the physical light of the sun. For the sun was created on Day (Yom) 4 in the Torah account! This light was spiritual illumination; the manifestation of divine presence as most religions infer!

Is ‘Higgs Field’ perhaps science’s unwitting and unwilling name for the Creator? And, are ‘photons’, the emanations from Him, His creations?

For the Gospel calls God:

‘The Father of lights’ and ‘the Father of spirits’!

And invisible words, the ‘light giving’ words of this ‘One True God’, created the universe and everything in it, according to the Torah and the Gospel. The universe did not just happen from ‘nothing’! No.

“By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
And all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.” Torah

“The universe was formed at God’s command (words), so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. ” Gospel 

(The Koran is in agreement with this revelation. Zoroastrianism has a similar account while Sikhism believes in the one omnipresent creator from whom all things emanate, but it has no definite creation account. The Hindus attribute creation to Brahma, but his creation started with a lotus flower. As pointed out earlier, Buddhism has no ‘creator’ god.)

No, life did not just happen from nothing, or what some scientists ascribe to a Big Bang. And if indeed there was a Big Bang, then it certainly wasn’t from nothing. 

The Big Bang must have been the entrance of God’s powerful and creative but invisible Word, into the void that became the universe. For nothing comes out of nothing. Science admits that much.

The invisible realm, what science calls energy, is what the Torah calls heaven. Or the spirit realm. And the visible realm, what science calls matter, the Torah calls earth. Or flesh, alternatively.

Furthermore, the Torah reveals that man was created “in the image and after (the) likeness” of this Creator God. Man, we are told, was made from matter, earth, but only became a “living soul” (some Jewish rabbis say, ‘a speaking spirit’) after God breathe His breath into him. 

(The word translated as breath, Rhuach in Hebrew or rhuhu in Arabic, could mean breath, wind, air or spirit)  

Since “God is a Spirit”, an invisible being, according to Jesus Christ, then man must be an invisible spirit too. But since man has a body, with all its attributes, he must have a dual nature. Indeed so.  

‘And the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for that he also is flesh...”’ Torah

So, man is both spirit and flesh; or energy and matter!        

That probably explains our longing for immortality, because we ‘know’ intuitively that we, as spirits or souls, don’t die.

God “…has set eternity in the hearts of men.” 

It would also explain our fear of death, especially of the ‘judgement’ after death. For we even pray for the dead. The fear of death would be meaningless, if death was just the cessation of life. 

Unfortunately, we seek immortality after the wrong order, and in the wrong places. We build material ’empires’, even monuments in our likeness, in the hope that we would live forever in the hearts and minds of people. In the end, it all proves futile; ‘vanity upon vanity’, the Torah calls it. We hardly know or remember, or even care about our great grandparents, much less those before them!

We would give up, if the niggling feeling would let us. But no, it wont because this reality may be invisible but it is real.

Science, including medical science, has lent its weight to this intangible reality and its power of influence over the tangible realm. We know that the mind, an intangible essence, is way more powerful than the tangible body. 

The mind can, and does cause bodily dysfunction, what is known as psychosomatic disorders. But it can also prevent illness, or fast track healing too!

Indeed, medical science now tells us that diseases are caused more by stress, a state of the intangible mind, than by any other agency.

And man’s most potent weapon in life, we are told by psychologists and neuroscientists, is not material but immaterial:

The human will. 

The Torah gave us these clues and many more, some four millennia ago!!!

The invisible world is as real, if not more so, than the material world that we live in. And words, in particular, are of infinite more weight than we give them. 

Words, ‘mere’ words, are powerful, because words are not mere. 

Words are spiritual realities with infinite capabilities beyond what our finite minds can fathom at this time. How do you explain the impact or longevity of words well beyond the speaker’s existence? How do you explain eternity or the universe in its vastness?

Yet, words created the universe!

Words have the power to recreate your ‘world’ too. 

We do not understand how, but psychologists now acknowledge the power of the spoken word, especially of positive words, for confidence and success in life. They call it self-talk, or self-affirmations. 

And the motivational speaking industry is a multi-billion-dollar business, and growing. Why?

Because words, somehow, move hearts and hearts move men; to great heights of achievements or to despicable depths of depravity. 

We even know that words affect plants, animals and inanimate things too. Numerous studies have proven that and Jesus demonstrated it. He spoke to a tree and it died forthwith. He spoke to storms and diseases and they responded to His commands. He even called the dead back to life! Yes, and He did all those by the spoken word!!

For words, though invisible and intangible, have inherent ‘power’ in them. 

We give inordinate attention to our bodies and the material. But the unseen, the spirit, is way more important.

‘”The spirit gives life, the flesh profits nothing. 

The words that I speak… they are spirit and they are life.”  

Jesus Christ said that.

Words are spirit. And the spirit-word gives life. Or death.

For, “death and life are in the power of the tongue.” Torah

Words can give life and words can give death. Words can build up and words can tear down. 

Because words are the agency of spiritual life or death. 

The Torah gives us this piercing insight into the meaning of ‘life’ in the account of the first man, Adam:

Adam ‘died’ the day he disobeyed God’s command: “for in the day that you eat of it (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) you will surely die.” Yet, Adam lived in the body, thereafter, for close to a millennium! 

Life and death in the spirit, mean different things than life and death in the material.

Spiritual life is being at one with God, our Source of life. For He is the eternal Life; Zoe aionios, in Greek. 

And spiritual death is being separate from God, the eternal Life; like fish out of water.

These three truths are the bedrock of a meaningful and fulfilled life:

Life is spiritual. 

Life is words. 

And life is a war! 

A war between two existential spiritual realities: Life and death. 

And words represent, and convey, the essential values of this spiritual duality; invisible and intangible but powerful realities:

Love and lust

Light and darkness

Good and evil

Blessing and cursing etc.

For Life and death speak of two kings and their kingdoms:

God and His invisible ‘Kingdom of heaven’, Life, light and good!

And satan, and his evil ‘kingdoms of this world’, death, darkness and evil.

These two realities, and these two alone, are before us all, as it is written in the Torah:

“Behold, I have set before thee this day life and death, good and evil.” 

Unfortunately, the prevalent reality of ‘this age’ is evil. Ours is a world in darkness and under the curse of death. This is an age ruled by lies which hold mankind in the bondage of fear. 

This ‘life’, as we know it, cannot be of, or from a ‘good God’. 

For, “the… Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  Torah

“You shall know (this) truth; and the truth shall make you free.”  Jesus Christ

But what is Truth?