Depolarising

We seem to be drawn to polarities: either this or that. Either Republican or Democrat, either the government can be trusted to effectively organize society or it can't, either pharmaceutical companies are entirely corrupt or they are models of the value of science for collective health and well-being. We have a hard time reconciling two apparently opposing truths.

And so it is with our inner, subjective experience and outer, objective reality. The strict, decisive laws of objectivity get fuzzy and murky when we enter the inner space of subjectivity. Modern psychology has made a fairly weak attempt to create a bridge, but too often it just collapses onto drugs and brain chemistry, or the unrealistic ideal of the unbiased therapist.

This is even more pronounced when we dig a little deeper beneath the surface of our subjective reality. On the surface we have thoughts and emotions, the mental and vital fields where our consciousness most often plays. But beneath this space is the unconscious, the repository of our traumas and the seeds of karma that we carry from life to life until they are resolved. Chemistry can stifle our unhealed wounds, put our deeper pains and fears into cold storage so they don't produce symptoms or outpicture into our minds and emotions, but this quick fix is always temporary and never permanent. The symptoms can be subdued for a time, but they fester and await resolution, which can only come through contact with our awareness.

And then there are the realms of subjective reality above mind and emotions, the supra-rational states of spiritual wholeness, the inner radiance of the Divine spark of creation that we are. Modern psychology generally doesn't even touch these spaces, retreats from them with a paternalistic smugness that hides its basic incompetence.

We live in between the poles of Spirit and Matter, entangled in paradoxes and compromises, pretending to know what we have avoided and shunned. The false bravado of science and religion, the foot stomping and book burning, tooth gnashing and character assassination that both sides rely on, hide the deeper reality. Neither side has fully understood even the realm that they claim. Science cannot know Matter without Spirit. Religion cannot know Spirit without Matter. Without a reconciliation, a higher synthesis, not a defeat of one side by the other or even a compromise, truth will remain elusive and all the trillions of dollars and life hours that we invest will produce a small portion of the whole.

What prevents us from investing in a reconciliation of these poles that are so fundamental to our existence? Why don't we put all the sharpest minds and ablest explorers on the problem of discovering the single truth that unites science and religion? Instead we pour money into each pursuit individually as they tug against each other, locked in a sustained combat that produces nothing but smoke and ash, illusions and fantasies.

The pure Spirit, the immaterial source and residence of our deepest being, the light that we essentially are, is the manifestation of our absolute freedom. We are free because our Spirit is eternally free, and the freedom that we seek and find and manifest in this world of limitation is always the freedom of the Spirit drawn through our materiality and radiated through our body and life. Our body and life, the stuff that we are made of, the stuff that creates limitations and boundaries, separation and subsequently pain, is the mould and condition of our manifestation. It is the field in which our timeless Spirit has poured itself in order to experience time.

Historically, we have tended to polarize these two aspects of our being - Spirit and Matter. We have tended to separate them and declare that either one or the other of them represents the ultimate reality, the real truth. Religion has championed Spirit, relegating Matter to second-class status, the dirty immoral swamp that we should be constantly trying to escape, while Science has championed Matter, placing Spirit in the realm of fantasy and naive beliefs. But is this divisive polarity the end, the reality, the final truth?

Can we find a truth that is more fundamental than the polarity, that entirely and completely reconciles the antagonists and honours both and their value to our daily lives? Finding this truth would change everything. It would mean that science can embrace and fill itself with the joy and awe of discovering the eternal One that is Love, as many ground-breaking and rebellious scientists have done. And it would mean that religion can set aside its “happily ever after” stories and embrace this world as the body of the Holy One that it adores.

We are used to compromises, to half-truths mashed together and labelled a whole truth. But a whole truth does not compromise, it reconciles. It fully and completely joins two poles into one whole, seamless and unbroken. A compromise is a bargain, a transaction of interests between two conflicting powers; it is not a true reconciliation. True reconciliation means that we have to fully understand and embody both truths, peeling away the faulty exaggerations and falsehoods that cling to them, that form a growing crust around them. We have to clarify and hone in upon the central truths and then discover the intimate oneness that organically joins them. And then we might just discover something of real value to our lives, something that science and religion have tried to purchase at great expense, but failed to grasp.

- Matthew Andrews (AVI USA)

Keywords: Inner reality, Objectivity, Subjectivity, Psychology, Freedom, Unification, Oneness, Spirit-Matter