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As many of my regular readers know, I’m a mystic, a Christian mystic, I’m not an orthodox believer, I’ve never been one for the crowd or the mob.
I’ve always been an outsider, estranged from the mainstream, a watcher, not a participant, the lonely old man in the mountains, the hermit away from the town, the saint from Thus Spake Zarathustra and not the overman, fiercely independent and rejecting of dogma wherever I find it, treading my own path away from mundanity to spirituality.
“With singing, weeping, laughing, and muttering I praise the God who is my God. But what do you bring us as a gift?”
When Zarathustra heard these words, he saluted the saint and said: “What should I have to give you! But let me go quickly, that I may take nothing from you!” And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing as two boys laugh.
But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart: “Could it be possible! This old saint has not yet heard in his forest that God is dead!”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
I can’t be like Nietzsche I can’t describe people who believe in the spiritual essence of human beings as ‘despisers of the body,’ although to be fair to him, he makes some pretty good points when it comes to religiosity and dogmatic people in general, and that’s because at the very pit of my being there is an inner knowing that can’t be shifted.
“TO THE despisers of the body will I speak my word. I wish them neither to learn afresh, nor teach anew, but only to bid farewell to their own bodies,- and thus be dumb.
“Body am I, and soul”- so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children?
But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: “Body am
I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
God is not dead, God is alive and well and within! Like the child I say that we are both body and soul, Nietzsche for this I refute!
God wants a personal relationship with you, not just you but me too, indeed all of us.
God wants a one-to-one meeting of our minds, his big psyche wants to know our smaller psyche, he wants us to dissolve like small drops into his boundless ocean of soul, only to re-emerge once again, refreshed, cleansed and ready to further individualise. That’s spiritual growth!
The small drop returns to the ocean of psyche and comes out again when the next wave laps the shore immersing spirit in matter once again, as long as the sand is wet, we’re separate but connected.
Living things are just spirit and matter, joined together for a short while until the time is right to do it all again.
The land can change but the nature of the ocean remains eternal because we’re spirits immersed in matter and not a little corpse carrying a soul as described by Marcus Aurelius but a soul with limitless bodies each of which is a new incarnation of something divine, separate yet joined, individual, finite yet part of the group, boundless and eternal.
That’s what it is to be alive.
