Once a psychic told me that I would be either very spiritual or very material in this life. There would be no middle road for me. Interestingly his words have been very true. My choice in this matter was to turn into spirituality and quite literally leave the material world´s obsessions behind me. This could have been a simple and straight forward story of one man rising in consciousness to meet the spirit. No twists or bends along the way.

Of course that was not what happened. I found that matter cannot be spiritualised through escaping its gravity. Being in the body means that the spirit and matter are together for a purpose and I could not undo that by any stretch of force or effort.

Even if it was not conscious at the time, I did try to escape life. Judgments were part of my inner world´s architecture and they were the cage that I had built for my spirit. So in that sense there was no escape. Not without thoroughly understanding the nature of that self imprisonment and then beginning to change the inner architecture through conscious choice.

It is amazing to experience what power lies inside of us when those building blocks on the inside are changed to something that supports life instead of judging life and eventually destroying it. We are literally creating our experiences from the inside out.

So what is it like for the spirit to be embodied?

I see it being revealed most openly when a child is born or when a person dies. The entering and exiting the physical body. A newborn child is still mostly “somewhere else”. They are integrating into the physical body and it takes a certain amount of time. Their spirit is much more present, but not quite in the material body to really manoeuvre it very effectively. And once the child is acclimatised into this material existence the spirit is already fading more to the background.

When I witnessed my grandmothers passing I experienced her spirit leaving the body and it was breathtaking. Literally for her, but for me as well. In that moment she saw the spirit world and entered into it. What was left behind in the material was the body. When I washed her body with my mother I had a profound revelation that we are not the body. That vehicle was an empty shell without the animating spirit.

All that time that we call life, that moment in time that is between the entering and the exiting, we struggle to find the balance between spirit and matter. The balance would not be so difficult to experience, if we were not so materially oriented.

The beginning part of my journey where I plunged into the spiritual life was both wonderful and very challenging. My own immaturity and strong sense of idealism created those twists and bends on the road. Through them I have come to learn many things and continue doing so everyday. Connecting with the spirit on the inside and meeting the material world not as something separate from that inner world, but integrally part of it, is what makes everyday an adventure.

In the fullness of life we could live with the curiosity and vitality of a child and at the same time with the ability to surrender as we do in death. Spirit can live fully in the material and all true Teachings point to this potential in every human being. In that fullness of Life the inner and the outer world are made of the building blocks of Praise, Gratitude and Love.

Nataraja