Late Night Chat with Jeff: E&G - Spiritualizing our lives, Jan 7, 2024, live on Baba Zoom

We have some informal chat after every arti, the "post-arti party"! But once a week, Jeff Wolverton joins us for some serious mining of the spiritual depths. Join us for conversation, more readings, songs, quotes - you never know what treasures will be uncovered!

Topic: Spiritualizing Our Lives

Dear folks of Baba,

I hope you have survived the holidays and still have your wits about you as we delve into the second to the last chapter of Darwin Shaw’s Effort and Grace, Spiritualizing Our Lives, on page 111. Here he is talking about moving permanently into the level of the spirit and living from there, which requires the shutting down of what he calls the “wanting machine.” In this state, it is about expressing love in the world around us rather than wanting anything from it. This love can flow out unseen; it does not always have to be expressed outwardly. At the level of the spirit, we experience Baba as the loving doer and we are merely “conduits” as Darwin would often say. Eventually life just unfolds; we experience it as being orchestrated by Baba’s love. He has written, "The goal is to achieve perfect inaction, which does not mean merely inactivity. When the self is absent, one achieves inaction in one’s every action.” The ego is effaced when we realize our self (our identity) as spirit. This is equivalent to “bringing the kingdom of heaven down on earth.” Or as Kitty Davy often used to say, our work is to “spiritualize matter.” This is a very gradual evolution.

The first intimation of my need to redirect my focus from the ego to the realm of the spirit came during one of the meetings at the Shaws. After reading one of Baba’s discourses, those of us gathered were enjoying cookies and apple juice which Jeanne would always provide. I was standing near Darwin, and very casually he looked at me and said, “You are not the personality self.” The truth of his words must have sunk very deeply because I found myself thinking, “I thought the whole purpose of life was to get to know myself more and more deeply and go on improving myself until I reached the goal!” Here Darwin was essentially saying that I was barking up the wrong tree. Even though his remark was completely over my head at the time, I filed it away within my consciousness with the idea that one day I would evolve into the truth of it. From time to time, Darwin would say that "the personality self is just a storefront for the soul.” We make such efforts to arrange the window displays with the changing seasons when we could go through the door and enjoy the priceless merchandise inside. The realm of the spirit is, so to speak, behind the personality self, which I feel is where Baba is leading us. We come to know we are different from our personality; ideally it is merely a vehicle for the spirit just as the flute is a vehicle for the music of the musician.

When we are raised to the level of the spirit, everything is spiritualized. All that happens is seen as a spiritual unfoldment leading toward Baba and our own divinity. As Teilhard de Chardin, the French mystic and theologian, once said, “We are not human beings have a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

In His love, Jeff

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