How can I be on a spiritual path in this material world?

Spiritual consciousness is your essence — it exists at the deepest core of your being. Whether you acknowledge it or not, your essence is within you, quietly awaiting your discovery. Why does this essential fact of spiritual reality seem so challenging for most people?

To understand the difficulty, consider that you have a choice in how you see the world around you:

1. Can you acknowledge the spiritual essence within you, and will you use that to recognize the spiritual essence living within the people and situations in this world?

2. Or, will you be fooled by your perceptions of the material world? Perhaps you will see around you only a world of material surfaces and appearances. And you might conclude that you are living in a world of purely material substance.

It is easy to see only the material substance of people and situations. However, this is only the surface appearance. Underneath the surface, there is the rich depth of spiritual consciousness that lives, often silently, within everything. When you recognize the deeper essence of things, you get a hint about how you can be on a spiritual path, while living in this material world.

Your spiritual awareness is not in conflict with this world.

Spiritual awareness lets you perceive more deeply into the essence of everything. And everything in this world has a spiritual center within it, no matter what it looks like on the surface. For example, a person who is outwardly negative still has a spiritually alive core. However, that person has not yet made conscious contact with their core — but that doesn’t mean that their divine essence is absent.

How can you maintain your spiritual awareness on this planet, amidst many people and situations that may have forgotten their divine essence? Being on a spiritual path means that you seek to notice the spiritual essence within yourself, and within others. Not that this is always easy, but it is a spiritual practice that you have a choice about. You can choose how you look at people and situations — deeply or superficially.

You can learn to detect the deeper essence within things. You can discover that essence within yourself, within people, and within any situation in your life. And, you can do this without denying what is actually happening on the material plane.

This is because spiritual consciousness is a deeper knowing, rather than a naive avoidance of the world. A deeper spiritual understanding lets you clearly see a problem as it is, while also sensing the underlying patterns affecting the situation. And at the deepest level, your spiritual understanding lets you sense the divine essence at the core of that situation, no matter how distorted it may be on the material level of reality.

Why is it so tempting to see the world, and everything in it, as only material substance, with no deeper qualities? The truth is that this tendency reflects our own habit of seeing ourselves as purely material. You may intellectually know that you have a soul, but your general way of understanding yourself may be limited to a mostly material definition of reality. What is the remedy for this habit?

When you practice deeply sensing your spiritual essence living within your own body, it becomes easier to also recognize this spiritual essence in the world around you. Of course, it is always easier to blame the world for being a dense, material place. This limited material perspective, however, blocks your awareness of the living divine essence that vibrates within everything in this world.

This awareness shift is easier said than done, because the moment you see something you regard as negative in the world, you are apt to forget the deeper spiritual essence living within that situation. It is convenient to see someone behaving badly, and to name them as bad. It is convenient to see limiting situations on the earth plane as being characteristic of this bad old material world. But wait…

The problems of this world, and the problems within any person, reflect distortions. But distortions of what? If something is out of balance, that suggests that it was once in balance. When you see something that is distorted, that error is the result of being out of alignment with the deeper spiritual reality. But does that mean that people who act out negatively are separate from the universe, or somehow outside of the universe? No, it doesn’t.

Actually, the spiritual essence still exists within the person that is expressing the distortion. This is what you are learning to sense about reality when you examine it more deeply. Learn to see the spark of divinity, even within those who seem to be negative. They are disconnected from their own inner divine spark — and that spark is always living within them.

This doesn’t mean that your recognition of everyone’s essential spiritual divinity allows you to be naive about certain negative situations. If a situation is dangerous, behave appropriately and protect yourself. But whenever you can, tune into the spiritual spark within people and situations. This keeps you from getting stuck in a judgmental reaction to the material plane.

And, when you sense the divine spark within someone, or within a situation, you actually help people access that spiritual energy. It may seem like a rather subtle shift, but adjusting your consciousness in this way gently helps move the world into positive alignment. And this is an important element of your spiritual path.

Your expanded spiritual awareness that you practice every day helps you make the critical shift. You readjust your consciousness, so that you no longer describe yourself and everything in the world as merely material. You come to recognize that the material appearance is only the surface — a shell that overlays an infinitely deeper and richer divine essence that radiates forth from everyone and everything.

And when you begin to sense this, you realize that your consciousness has touched the deeper essence of this world. You come to recognize the cosmic aliveness that glows within everything. It is a living consciousness that radiates forth from everything in this universe.

This vibrant interconnected universe is a cosmic place that most people still refer to as the material world.

Welcome to this moment of deep perception. You can choose to touch the interconnecting web of cosmic consciousness that unites all things. And you can own this experience. When you do, you will be free from the illusion that you are living in a limited material world. You will have touched the infinite world of grace.

Many Blessings,

Joel Bruce Wallach

Founder, Cosmic Living for spiritual empowerment – tele-classes and home-study mp3’s

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