We need to be Socratic in our investigative approach, questioning without prejudice, judgment or evaluation.
Ligia Dantes
Perhaps what distinguishes us from animals on this planet is the manifestation of our spiritual path, our compassion, and our unconditional love.
We are ©Spiritupsychophysicalness. If this is a strange word to you, it is because it is my own neologism. You will notice that in this compound word there are no hyphens separating the aspects of spirit, psyche, and physical. Together, these three aspects of our humanness represent our total state of being.
By using one word, I hope to bring to you the truth of our totality, or at least a conceptual understanding, and perhaps open doors to the true experience of our wholeness.
Traditionally, through our beliefs, concepts and our sensorial experience, we have separated our humanness into three parts: spirit, mind (or psyche) and body.
Believing that we are three separate entities has given us the impression that we can control one over the other (i.e., mind over matter). Furthermore, in some religions we have come to believe that Spirit is more important than body and mind. In extreme cases, the body may even be regarded as the cause of carnal sins. Since the body’s needs or desires are believed to be obstacles to the experience of exaltation of Spirit or God, there is an attempt to purify it through punishments. Therefore, mutilation or flagellation may be part of the spiritual practice.
In some religious beliefs, the body/mind’s need for rest is totally ignored and the believers continually stress themselves in the attempt to prove that spirit reigns over physicalness. Indeed, some may believe that spirit is an ethereal something (a soul) within our human form, that at death will leave its cohabitants (body and mind) to exist somewhere else, such as heaven, or the inferno, or that it will reincarnate into an animal or another human body.
Emotions are a further source of the believed division between spirit, mind, and body. As emotional beings we are capable of feeling, joy, unconditional love, and being compassionate as we care for one another. By compassionate I mean that we are aware of the pain and needs of others as if these were part of ourselves. In contrast to this, we are also capable of selfish and hateful emotions, such as greed and violence. Furthermore, we suffer from fear and feelings of hopelessness.
The word ©Spiritupsychophysicalness, in contrast to the traditional ways of viewing ourselves in separation, brings to mind totality, oneness. Instead of parts, it represents three aspects of our natural being-ness. It represents three interrelated processes of human life.
Spiritu, at the beginning of the word, represents source, our true nature, where we come from. We live on a planet in space. Our planet is a creation of space itself; thus, we are products of space. To our senses, space seems to be a mostly empty vastness.
However, this emptiness is very full in potential for all creation comes from the space we experience. Therefore, Spiritu is origin, full-emptiness, the source of everything. You may substitute this word for many others: God, Spirit, Divine Energy, Atman, and so on.
Recently, in the Los Angeles Times newspaper, a very interesting article titled, “Scientists Find a Link to Life in Outer Space” captured my attention. It stated that a recent NASA research project showed that “early chemical steps, considered important for the origin of life, can form in space.”
It seems we are beginning to find evidence of life originating in space, not a foreign idea in the experience of mystics. Since scientific knowledge changes from time to time, the truth of our origin can only be experienced directly by ourselves.
When we experience ourselves undivided, whole, we live spirit as an aspect, not a part. We see ourselves as spirit at the same time we are experiencing our physical body, our thinking process and our emotions, just as they are, as process:©Spiritupsychophysicalness.