A Few Notes on History and the Spirit

To be human is to be a mess. Our constitutive bits rarely operate in concert, and this means life is often a decades long experiment in dissonance.

Not only are the parts that make up our being often out of synch, we also experience conflict because we exist simultaneously across at least two dimensions. We live in the mundane dimension, the one of bodies and politics and of everything generally considered material.

Everything in this dimension is subject to a sequential process of events. One thing leads to another. This process is easy to observe with regard to physical things. Butter melts, the seasons change, faces wear and grow old.

Many social and relational processes are also subject to this process though it is harder to observe with these phenomena. Just as physical objects move through time according to a predictable pattern of consequence, so do psychological and emotional events reproduce themselves in the lives of those who experience them.

The most obvious example is the way the trauma we experience leads us to traumatize others or unconsciously compels us to repeat our traumatic experiences in ways that damage us further. These invisible processes are often as predictable and inexorable as any process of physical entropy.

This dimension of cause and effect, of predictable and inevitable consequence, I call history. By “history” I do not mean simply “things that have happened” but the entire dimension that contains everything both visible and invisible that is subject to a sequential order of more or less knowable cause and effect.

The dimension of history is a tragic dimension. We know this because given a long enough segment of the historical arc, everybody dies. And yet, we know that not every aspect of reality is tragic. We know there is more than death.

If we as human beings live inside this dimension of inexorable consequence and predictable processes of decay, if we live in the dimension of death, how is this possible? Why do some people who have experienced trauma, for example, change and cease to pass that trauma on?

The answer is that we also dwell in the dimension of Spirit. This dimension empowers us to alter the invisible emotional and psychological processes implanted into us by our adverse experiences.

Escaping the historical processes of compulsive trauma repetition, for example, requires the development and exercise of our spiritual capacities.

Chief among these is awareness. When we consciously seek to bring our negative unconscious patterns and impulses into our conscious minds, we are exercising one aspect of our spiritual capacity.

As awareness grows, so grows our equally spiritual capacity for choice. Through our spiritual capacities we create new patterns, events, and institutions within the realm of history.

By doing so, we cease merely to become the subjects of historical forces, but makers of them. We become creators capable of bringing previously unknown realities into being within the historical realm and, in doing so, express the meaning of our humanity in its fullness.