The Thoughts of God ✨
A Practical Exploration of How Our Inner Lives Shape the Outer World
What is Spirituality?
Spirituality is the simple understanding that everything around us (nature aside, for now), before it was matter, was a thought. Thoughts then go through a process of materialization, or not, through further faculties of the personality such as feeling, willing, acting and technique.
If my faculty of thought is impaired, it would be like trying to grow a garden without seeds; nothing can take root.
If I cannot feel, it would be like watering only once a week, even when the plants are clearly withering in the heat. Without feeling, I follow rules, not life. I act based on outdated thoughts, not the living needs of the moment.
If my will is weak, it is like having the seeds but never watering or caring for them; nothing will grow, no matter how fertile the soil is.
And if I lack technique, it is like plucking the flowers instead of the weeds; I may work hard, but I harm the very thing I meant to nurture.
Without harmony between those faculties, creation becomes difficult.
Take the very device you are using to read this post. Long before you could ever use it, someone had to imagine it, then tend to that imagination long enough to nurture it, and eventually utilize various skills to bring it to life.
If the people involved in its creation had not thought of it first, they could not have created it later. It would not have existed.
In the beginning was the Thought.
So spirituality is looking at life through this shift in perspective, and allowing all the consequences of that shift to unfold. It is about putting back in the right order the relationship between our inner life and the outer world.
That is what I refer to as Spirituality and Spirit in the rest of this post.
We Create In Our Image
Given what have just uncovered, that the act of creation is a process of materialization of spirit. Of making visible, our inner life according to our faculties.
It follows that if I do not have any sensitivity to aesthetics, it is highly unlikely that I will create anything aesthetically pleasing, just as a mango seed will not grow into an apple tree.
If I have experience building software and no experience with engines nor a will power or passion strong enough to learn, it is highly unlikely that I will create a car company.
However, clear thinking and a strong will power can make up for the lack of knowledge if I am passionate and/or willing to learn.
To create harmony in the outer world, we have to have harmony in our inner lives. To live in peace outwardly, we have to live in peace inwardly.
I do not know if you relate to this, but almost every time I sit on a chair, I think-feel: “It is obvious that no one involved in the creation of this chair spends any time sitting on it”. And then I wonder, if they do not sit on the very chair they are creating… what do you think they are creating it for 🫢🙃?
Evolution
From here, we can say that not only: “In the beginning was the Thought”, but also that:
Thought was an image of the Creator.
It often happens that we don’t see our own image until we create. So we create in our own image, and then through the act of externalization, through our separation from what we have created, we get to live it. We live in it as something outside of ourselves. Our inner world, becomes the outer world. We experience its shortcomings not theoretically, but experientially by being on the receiving end of our own thoughts. This invites us to iterate and evolve, first in our inner lives through our new found experiential understanding and then again in the outer world, as we re-create in our new image.
Our creations reflecting our nature, end up shaping us as much as we shape them. This is evolution.
To put it all together:
In the beginning was the Thought.
And the Thought was an image of the Creator, yet with its unique essence and potential.
And the Thought was also the Creator.
The Limitations of Materialistic Sight
Imagine the following scenario. A university professor, coming from another planet to study Earth. They stand at the side of one of our roads, fascinated by all those different metallic creatures, we call cars, of all colors, kinds, shapes and making different sounds. They are eager to understand them, to explain them. They start studying what they see, they note the color, sound and the routes those fascinating creatures take.
After careful study, they start finding that they can observe a pattern, they can guess reliably, how certain cars with certain attributes will end up at certain places. They figure out that cars with the symbol “ambulance”, always end up at places with the symbol “hospital”. Cars with the symbol “police”, always end up at places with the symbol “police station”, and so on.
They start drawing up all sorts of fantastic conclusions, of course backed by the rigorous scientific methods they learned on their planet.
This professor, now content, having finally explained the riddle of those metallic creatures, returns to their home planet to teach those laws to the students aspiring to visit Earth. They teach that in earthly physical laws, there is an invisible force of attraction between places and cars. A place always pulls cars. They teach formulas to calculate with extreme precision, what kind of cars any place would attract.
Of course, this professor has not really explained anything, they merely observed. Because they failed to notice the simple fact that these cars are not being pulled, so to speak, by any place, but that each of one these cars is being “driven” by a human. One who has to provide for their family, so they go to work. One who has a loved one, so they go to visit them. One who feels curiosity, so they travel to see new places. And of course, endless other motives, noble and otherwise, that I do not have to detail here.
So we see that in the outer world we have observations, reasons have to be sought somewhere else.
This example might seem absurd, but it is a very common perspective today.
Just Google, “How did the universe emerge?”
Of course, I understand now, it makes a lot of sense…
Spiritual Sight
Spiritual sight is training ourselves to not only see cars, but to see the very human behind the steering wheel. To pierce beyond the visible form and see the very living processes that move those cars around: thoughts, feelings, intentions, emotions, motives and passions.
As we said earlier, through creation, our inner world, becomes the outer world. So spiritual sight is to see the inner world, behind the immediately apparent outer world.
What would the world look like if we could look at it with spiritual sight? And keep in mind, as we agreed in the beginning of the post, we are setting nature aside for now.
When we use a product, we would see it as the living interaction with the spirit of those who created it. Instead of seeing arbitrary features in those products, we would see thoughts, discussions, choices, intentions, emotions, a living interaction with the spirit of the creators made manifest.
I would look at the world, and I would not just see buildings, roads, cars, clothes, smartphones or computers. I would rather tell myself, I would think-feel, everything I see around me now, is past thoughts, feelings, willing and actions of other beings. What I see around me now, is not lifeless inert matter, it is not random, but it is the result of those spiritual processes. I am not just surrounded by matter, I am surrounded by the spirit, the manifestation of the inner lives of countless beings. I would say, I am grateful for all those beings who made my life so convenient. I am grateful for all the time they spent learning and creating, for now my life is better for it. (For the most part, except for those uncomfortable chairs).
I would perhaps begin to see that behind those chairs are intentions and emotions.
I would no longer see artificial flavors and colors just as mere ingredients, but I would begin to see-feel behind those into the spirit and the drive for mass appeal, the desire to sell in vast quantities, to make profit even if it comes at the expense of the well-being of the very people being served.
We would see that while a back pain can be relieved by going to the doctor, it also has to be accompanied by an understanding of what caused the back pain in the first place? What do we need to change in our posture, in the way we walk, in the way we sit, to make sure that the pain doesn’t arise again? What kind of habits inform those very postures that hurt us? What kind of circumstances led us to those habits? What thoughts and feelings? And most importantly, do we have enough will power to be able to correct such a habitual posture?
So if everything we see around us now, in the material world, is the past spiritual processes of ourselves and others:
Where or what is the present? And what is the future?
Spiritual Development
So having understood that the inner and outer worlds are deeply linked, that certain mental, emotional and volitional postures always carry material consequences, as surely as an object left in space is pulled by 🙃 gravity towards the earth.
We start, perhaps, to wonder: what are those mental, emotional and volitional postures that are conducive to our well-being and the collective well-being? What other postures are detrimental?
And perhaps we begin to wonder further: how can we develop those faculties, in the same way we understand the importance of training our bodies for our physical well-being?
We come to realize that moral development is not just a question of faith, or perhaps a way to secure a good spot in an after-life, but that it is as essential to our well-being now as it is in eternity; just as the quality of the food we eat determines, to a large extent, the quality of our lives.
We understand that untruthfulness is not to be avoided. simply because some religious authority said so, or because we fear consequences in some realm beyond this life. Untruthfulness, as my experience confirms 🫢, can make us live hell on Earth. We end up in painful circumstances surrounded by deceitful relationships. But we may not immediately relate the cause to the effect, if we have not yet adopted the habit of looking for causes beyond material life.
But the more we start integrating everything we talked about so far into our lives, the more those patterns begin to reveal themselves. With that clarity, we choose truthfulness not out of fear, but out of an understanding, out of care for ourselves and the kind of life we are creating.
And understanding is the seed of freedom 🌱.
Let us come back to an important question we have set aside for now. If in everything that surrounds us in the human-made world, are past spiritual processes of other humans.
What about Nature?
Thank you for reading,
🟣✨🟡
Written in Auroville, India 🇮🇳