There are three parts to human identity. We have a divine nature, an animal nature, and of course, a human nature. In our daily lives we are constantly navigating like a boat on a river between the animal and divine shores of our nature. The rudder we use to steer the boat is our ego, or the part of our nature that is the most particularly human. Sexual attraction is a universal human trait and so is divine inspiration, although not every person recognizes the spark of divine energy that animates and inspires his soul. What is not universal is the particularity of an individual’s sexual attractions and the particular form in which his or her divine inspiration is expressed, such as through painting, writing, playing a musical instrument, solving equations or counseling and healing others. These particularities, along with the ego that guides them, are our essentially human attributes.
But as we steer our boats down a powerful current between the bank of an animal kingdom to one side and the shoreline of the Kingdom of God on the other, what is our real purpose? Is it to disembark on one bank or the other? Is it to reconcile our animal nature with our divine spark; to join the two banks of the river in a delta of union? Or is it deliberately to navigate an essentially “human” course down the center of the river, avoiding both banks but recognizing their existence? Many people become so entangled in the thicket of their desires that it could be said they have snagged themselves on the shore, where they will henceforth live in ignorance among the animals. Others, when they conceive a child with a beloved partner, temporarily achieve a union between the animal and the divine as they experience the ecstasy of God’s spark passing through their bodies into the waiting egg of a new fetus. Meanwhile, the most holy of us, the saints and the true swamis and yogis, consciously forsake the world to cast their lots entirely with the divine pole of our nature.
Most of us, though, are aware of and equally attracted to both banks of the river without being willing or able to choose one over the other. We are either floating, steering randomly and adrift, or charging deliberately full-speed ahead into white-water rapids with no clear destination in view. In some vague way, this majority of us is affirming our belief that a life predicated on forsaking the world is a life that is not fully lived, because our physical nature is as much a divine gift as our more ethereal divine nature. I do not believe that God intended us to live lives that do not acknowledge, accept and embrace the needs and desires of our bodies and minds. What He does want us to remember, though, is that our bodies are every bit as much a divine gift as our souls. It is just that they are a gift with a limited shelf life, whereas our souls bestow upon us the ultimate gift of immortality. Arriving at the Kingdom of Heaven may be the goal of every virtuously led life, but navigating the river of life is the greatest challenge for our human nature. Only a very few of us know when and where it is right to put in to shore for the last time.
In one of his readings, the famous psychic Edgar Cayce said that we are ancient immortal spirits who were so intrigued by the sights, sounds and smells of God’s Creation that we begged God to let us be born in physical form. When God granted us this wish, we embodied direct consciousness of the divine power that animates the world, but over time we abandoned and forgot the divine source of our creation. That is why now we struggle always to steer our boats away from the wildlife preserve on one side of the river, back toward the divine shore from which we first embarked.
Bird of Spirit 