The World Is The Body

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me,” said Meister Eckhart. The falling away of separation and the psychological resistance this creates is not a departure from the world, it is the clear seeing that there was never anything but wholeness, appearing as the world. When the sense of separation dissolves, the world is no longer a threat or a distraction, it is the living, breathing face of the divine. Spirit and matter were never two. Form is emptiness. Silent beingness moves. Engagement with the world is not about fulfilling a spiritual ideal or ethical obligation, it is simply the natural movement of life when resistance has ceased. When the imaginary boundary between self and world fades, all that remains is the intimacy of beingness.

In the midst of this, one quiet discernment often appears. Is this arising from the belief that consciousness is personal and incomplete, seeking to gain something from the world, or is it the natural expression of wholeness already known? This is not a moral judgement or a strategy for the correction of people who do things. It is a gentle recognition of motive, as a felt resonance in being by being. Just as breath happens without a breather, discernment happens without a discerner. It is not you evaluating your actions, it is the effortless clarity of awareness noticing itself. Even when the ego appears, the noticing of that is already a return. The mind may ask, am I acting from ego or from presence, but even the question is awareness inquiring within itself. There is no real self behind the question, only clarity unfolding. All arises spontaneously in the field of what is. Life will show us the impersonal way, repeatedly, through a myriad of signals, if the heart of being is open to their reading and the mind is not too busy strategising, resisting, desiring, attaching or controlling, and there is the veiling of being with personhood.

This understanding appears in every tradition. Mahāyāna Buddhism revealed the bodhisattva path, in which the realised one sees that nirvāṇa and saṃsāra are not two, and returns to the world not out of duty, but because there is no separation left. In the Bhagavad Gītā, Krishna tells Arjuna that selfless action is the way. Do your duty, not for gain, but as an offering. Act without ownership. Do what arises, but let go of results. This is doing without doership, being engaged but untouched. Advaita Vedānta echoes the same. The Self is never bound, never acting, yet the body and mind may move, serve, speak. Action continues, but the actor is absent. There is no contradiction, only appearance. In Sufism, the world is not something to escape, but the mirror of the One. Every face, every form, is the Friend in disguise. “He who knows himself knows his Lord,” said Ibn 'Arabi. The lover does not withdraw from the world, the lover walks it barefoot, awake, unguarded, for God is everywhere. In mystical Christianity, Christ is not an abstraction, but the unity of divinity and form. The mystic finds God in the breaking of bread, in blood, in birth and in death. “God is at home, it is we who have gone out for a walk,” Meister Eckhart reminds us. Love descends. It inhabits the ordinary. It is the Word made flesh, again and again. Maurice S. Friedman writes, “For Hasidism, the demand of the historical situation prevents that familiar dualism that abandons one part of creation to ‘strict justice’ while trying to raise the other to a purely spiritual plane of love.” Here, the sacred is not split between high and low, pure and impure, spirit and body. It is everywhere and in everything. The world in all its forms, even those that provoke or disturb us, is God (a.k.a. the one reality) in disguise, asking to be met with openness.

This impersonal way between minds finds a deep echo in the principles of Nonviolent Communication, developed by Marshall Rosenberg. He observed that love is too important to be left as a feeling. It is not simply an emotion, but a mutual need, one that must be clearly expressed and consciously honoured and respected. Love is respect. Much of the damage in human relationships arises from our inability to respect and to hear the needs of minds, which are their fundamental unifying basis of survival, without defensiveness or blame of personalisation. The impersonal way is the way of peace.

Complaining about life is the echo of the belief in separation. It arises when the mind imagines itself as a fragment, cast apart from the whole, and objects to what is. But when challenging circumstances are met with presence rather than resistance, they become the furnace in which the mind is slowly forged of that impurity. The fire of truth burns brighter, not dimmer, when it is fed with hardship. As Nichiren wrote, “Strong winds make the gura swell and the boughs of the long-lived pine are bent and twisted.” The trials of life do not oppose awakening, they reveal its depth and strength. The universe has a tendency to present challenges until they are met. This is the quiet experiment of oneness we gift ourselves through the unfolding of being.

Our true nature is indestructible, and from this flows the wisdom to meet all situations as they are. The invitation is not to overcome life or purify it of pain, but to turn fully toward it, to allow every moment, however rough or radiant, to be the ground of being. This turning to the world is the true completion. When the sense of separation dissolves, it becomes evident that the natural order flows in harmony with love, understanding and beauty. As Nisargadatta Maharaj said, “The world has only as much power over you as you give it. Rebel against your enslavement to the mind, see your bondage to the world as imaginary. Then the world becomes your own, a source of joy and beauty.”

With love,

Freyja