67: The Purpose of the Spiritual Life
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I am greatly indebted to Father Mark Hall for his contributions to this article. My conversations with him over the past weeks have greatly benefited me and clarified my understanding of these matters.
The purpose of the Church and the purpose of the spiritual life is to connect people with the Real. This notion has several dimensions. First, in more conventional terms, the purpose of the Church is to connect people with God. I have always been intrigued by the many names that Muslims have for God. One of the more fascinating names for God is the Real. God is clearly understood here as the ultimate reality. The Divine is that upon which all else depends – namely, the Real. Again, in the conventional sense, the purpose of the spiritual life is to connect us with God.
A second dimension, implicit in the first, is that the purpose of the spiritual life is to connect us with our deepest self – the incarnation of the Real. This is the self that we intuitively sense; that deeper self we ‘feel’ but can never quite put words to.
This is the self that God created. The self we are before we start constructing the ego. The self before all the rules got put into place. We get a sense about this beautiful being within us every time we see a newborn. There we see a purity of being, and the promise of what each of us might become. I notice, for example, that every time I see a newborn child something opens up inside of me – inside of my heart. It’s like there is a perceptible resonance between this innocent baby and a very deep part of myself. A part that is buried under all of the demands of the ego.
“Do this, do that. And on your way home, don’t forget to get a loaf of bread and the milk for breakfast tomorrow.” This is the part we are most aware of – the constant stream of self-talk that runs through our minds. This is the socially constructed ego that is necessary for successful functioning in the world.
We begin constructing this ego-self the moment we begin interacting with the world around us. Our parents let us know that certain of our behaviors are acceptable and others are not. As a result, we learned to curtail those things they didn’t find acceptable. This means that we had to cut off parts of our self – parts of the self that God created. So, the arc of our life, while beginning with this marvelous awareness created by God, quickly moves to performative commands.
This means that we leave the Real – the real self, created by the Divine – and move into that which is not real. To complete the arc of the spiritual life, we need to find our way back to the Real.
Jesus expressed this in a number of different ways. He constantly talked about the Truth, which is simply another way of talking about what is real. He used the image of the Prodigal Son to describe this. The Prodigal, by asking for his inheritance and then squandering it, simply left the Real and explored that which was unreal. He tried to buy friendship and community with his money but found that didn’t work. When he returned home, his father did not excoriate him for wasting his inheritance. After the son acknowledged his mistake, the father simply embraced his son and welcomed him back home.
In another example, Jesus used the image of a vine, saying “I am the vine and you are the branches.” If you have ever examined a vine, you will know that it’s impossible to distinguish where the vine stops and the branches begin. To our perception, one flows into the other and we cannot distinguish the place where this happens. Jesus used this very concrete example to illustrate the essential unity between human beings and the Divine. By this means, he invites us to explore our essential unity – both with each other and with the Real.
Let me give you an example from our contemporary life. We have all seen ads on TV that show children with terrible deformities and crippling illnesses. When we see this, our hearts go out to them. We’ve seen ads showing abused and terrified dogs and it breaks our hearts to see this. Have you ever asked yourself, “Why?”
Why does it hurt when we see these terrible images? You will ever meet these children. You will never see these abused animals. They will never affect your life, so why are these images so painful? They are painful precisely because we are all connected to one another at very deep levels. In essence, we are all one.
This is the truth. Until we find our way back to this truth, there will always be a certain emptiness in our hearts. A loneliness that nothing seems to assuage.
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Let’s look at this Truth a little more deeply to see how it might impact our present situation. In the United States today, there are profound political divisions. Not only are there the traditional conservatives and liberals, now there are the MAGA adherents and the Progressives. Each of these groups subdivides still further, and they all seem to be shouting at one another. The one thing that is missing is any semblance of unity.
So what does the Real say about this?
If you stand back just a little, you realize that every person has come to their political decision based on their life experiences and their best judgment. (We know this because we know that nobody votes for the candidate that they think is the worst!) A Trump supporter bases his support on real experiences he’s had in the past. A New Yorker who supports Mamdani bases his support on very different experiences that are no less real than those of the Trump supporter. We can look at these very different experiences and affirm both. They are both real.
What is unreal is the violence – both the outward physical violence and the inner self-talk that never leaves the person’s lips. This violence moves us away from affirming one another. More profoundly, it moves us away from the Real and into the realm of distortion, distance, and destruction.
So while we can acknowledge that others’ experiences are different from our own, why do we feel the need to shout at each other? It doesn’t seem to add much to the conversation. While we can affirm that the people who have these different experiences are both real and really different, what keeps us from looking for a way forward that embraces both our own views and those views that are different from our own? In the long run, and probably in the short run too, all sides need to be heard, and the needs that are expressed must to be addressed by all.
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One way of framing this issue is to see it as the task of finding common symbols – symbols we all understand and can use – that can reflect the underlying unitive Reality that we participate in. Another way of stating this – can we leave behind the forms that separate us to find our common Truth?
Notice the implication of this last sentence. The truth we are looking for must include everyone – it is our common truth. Not the truth for you or the truth for me. That’s just hogwash! A partial truth – my truth or yours – is simply not the truth. Until we find a way to identify our common truth, we will constantly be at odds. Our common truth has to include everyone or it’s not complete.
This brings to mind the old story about five blind men and their experience of an elephant. They each felt a different part – the trunk, the tail, the tusk, the leg, the belly – but each thought their partial reality described the whole. Until these blind men are able to affirm one another’s experience and integrate them, they can never find the real truth of the elephant.
Each one of us has had different experiences, and each of these experiences reflects an aspect of Reality. None of them, however, constitute Reality. None of them reflect the whole Truth. And this brings us back to the ego.
The ego is this very delicate instrument that needs to be right all of the time. We all learned at a very young age what we needed to do to survive and to optimize our experiences. As a result of this, the ego is always looking for conflicts and not for our underlying connections. It looks for conflicts so that it can figure out what is right, but sadly, its view stops short of the whole truth. It only looks at what it needs for survival for me right now.
What the ego constantly overlooks is that we are each a child of God. This is the shining Reality that underlies all our apparent divisions. When you see this, then you see the Church. When you see the common ‘substance’ that flows through each of us and connects us, one with the rest, then you see God.
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The nature of the ultimate Reality – God – is non-dual. From this perspective, there is no difference between the vine and its branches; between you and me and everything that is. Anything less than this perspective is simply a mistake – a partial truth. This has amazing and profound consequences for us.
It means that sin doesn’t exist! Sin is just a mistake, not some dreadful deformity of your being. We identify sin so that we can see ourselves as we really are. Once we see what is really there, that changes everything!
You’ve seen an example of this in my recent newsletters. Once we subtract the retrospective birth narratives that were added to the story of Jesus, we see Jesus as he is – as a real human being just like you and me. And when we see this and hear his message, delivered over and over again and in many different ways, that he is the vine and we are the branches, that helps us see ourselves. To see ourselves in the context of the whole of creation. To see ourselves as already intimately connected with the Divine. We are, in fact, part of the Real.
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I think I will stop here. My head is beginning to hurt from thinking about all of this. I am constantly amazed at the many ways our ego-driven minds have taken that which is so clear and so simple and complicated it beyond belief. Ahh well… enough of this for now!
Remember to spend time in quiet reflection this week. Not to do anything. Not to accomplish anything. Just to sit and fully BE. It is in these quiet moments that we begin to discern the underlying Being, the loving and unseen Presence that is always with us.
I hope you have a splendid week and I look forward to continuing our time together in the next newsletter.
May God make his face to shine upon you, this day, and always!
What Invisible Offers
After reading Invisible for a short while, you will begin to notice:
A quiet groundedness beneath the noise of daily life
Greater calm, clarity, and inner freedom arising from within
A growing awareness of God in ordinary moments
Language for truths you have long sensed but never named
A gentle opening of the heart – free from dogma or pressure
Invisible will not give you new beliefs.
It will help you see with new eyes.
P.S. These newsletters were written in a particular order, but due to the limitations of our email delivery system, we cannot send them in the order in which they were written. We can send out the first five in order, but then the system sends out the next one, whatever that happens to be.
So, if you are suddenly moving from issue #5 to issue #whatever, it might be a little jarring. If this sounds like you, I would encourage you to go back into our archives and do your best to read them in order.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
