The spiritual life
It's also called as the interior life. It's our life of thoughts, intentions, desires, judgments, reasoning, etc., all spiritual operations that enable us to transcend the merely physical and material dimension of our life.
It's our life that is engaged with the pursuit of the truth and the exercise of love, enabling us to know the essences of things, their relations, their causes and effects, and not just to get stuck with the appearances and the sensible aspects of reality. It leads us to play whatever part we feel is incumbent on us in any given situation.
In short, it is the life of our soul, the very principle of our life that is meant to be immortal. Being spiritual, it will not die, since it is not subject to the wear and tear of material things.
It however has a certain kind of death which will require a little bit of explanation. The death of our spiritual life is when our spiritual life fails or refuses to get engaged with its proper source of life, who is God our Creator. But it does not revert to nothingness.
Let's remind ourselves that our spiritual life is not something that has come to be or to exist spontaneously. It does not generate its own life. It is also something created whose life is governed by a certain law, nature and character given to it by its creator.
It's precisely our spiritual life, more than anything else in our life, that connects us with God, and, in fact, with everyone and everything else. It's what undergirds the life of all the other aspects of our life, physical, emotional, family, social, professional, etc. Everything else in our life depends on our spiritual life.
Thus, for it to remain healthy and vibrant, it has to continually link itself to its creator. It's important that we realize the existence of our spiritual life, and, more important, we are aware of our duties and responsibilities towards it. We cannot and should not be negligent of our duties towards it, since it plays a very vital, strategic role in our life.
Unfortunately, we still have a large sector of people who view the spiritual life as an optional element in our life. They fail to realize that whether we like it or not, aware of it or not, the spiritual life, which can be lived and developed in all possible ways, good and bad, is unavoidable in our life.
What usually happens is that people allow their spiritual life, perhaps unwittingly, to be dominated and guided simply by their feelings, passions, personal interests, social trends, ideological principles and other conditionings. They fail to realize the objective, ultimate and constant basis on which the spiritual life has to live and develop.
Because of that, many of us simply rely on worldly, often material and highly transitory values that fail to consider the ultimate dimensions that rule our lives. This is where we can have all kinds of anomalies and problems that are often masked with brilliant self-serving rationalizations.
We have to do something about this. As early as possible, everyone should be made aware of the spiritual life-its existence, its nature, its needs, etc. And in a gradual way, as in an inclined plane, everyone has to be taught on how to develop it properly.
Everyone has to realize the existence of God as our Creator, the designer and lawgiver of everything. He is supposed to be the foundation of our spiritual life. He is, in fact, its creator, lawgiver and the very life of our spiritual life. Our spiritual life would not a life proper to it if it is not vitally linked to God.
Nowadays, of course, we have to contend with powerful factors that tend to undermine the importance of the spiritual life. There is a strong bias against it that is embedded in the culture that it is anymore articulated.
The bias is made stronger when the interior life is associated with religion which in the end is what is involved in the spiritual life. The spiritual life makes us opt the most fundamental choice-whether we believe in a God who is supernatural or just in ourselves, making ourselves our own god.
To overcome these biases is indeed a big challenge, but we need to tackle it. We cannot and should not ignore it, especially now when the world is getting more complicated and the need for an authentic and vibrant spiritual life becoming more urgent.
Let's do something about it!
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